hopefulY'know what? Sometimes you just gotta stop waiting.
It's no secret around here that I love fanfic, although it's one of the three Big Truths that I feel the need to reveal for the first time every six months or so, as new people wander in and are totally shocked to discover that...
1. I have OCD.
2. I am Mira Grant.
3. I love fanfic.
These things are sometimes equal in their shocking nature. "Wait, you can be a best-selling author without being neurotypical?" Yes! "Wait, Mira Grant isn't a real person?" She's real, she's just, you know, me. "Authors can love fanfic?!" Yes.
Yes we can.
If I had the power, I would ask all the authors in the world to do Yuletide or something like it every year. Sign up for a fic exchange and write some porn for a stranger; tailor your stories to an audience of one, let go of the long-form plots and the careful wide-spectrum appeal, embrace the joy of spending a hundred words on Carlos's perfect hair or Buffy's perfect shoes or Jo's perfect knives. Remember the joy of waiting for one person to open a story and see what it contains.
Because fanfic is joy. Fanfic is fixing the things you see as broken, and patching the seams between what's written and what is not, and giving characters who got cheated out of their happy endings another chance. There was a time, not that long ago as we measure things, where all fiction was what we would now call "fan fiction." Shakespeare didn't come up with most of his own plots. He wrote plays about the stories people already loved. We didn't get a thousand versions of "Snow White" accidentally: people changed that story to suit themselves, and no one said they weren't storytellers, or looked down on them for loving that core of red and black and white, of apples and glass and snow.
Originality wasn't the god of fiction until the last few centuries, and even then, we didn't fixate on it until we reached the era of modern copyright. Mickey looks a lot like Oswald, if you know what I mean. Wanting to work with characters you already know and love is not a new urge. Hell, all television and non-creator-owned comics can be viewed as fanfic, if you squint and cock your head, because much of it is being written about characters and situations created by other people. It's just fanfic with contracts behind it.
I recently accomplished the fanfic writer's dream: I was paid to write a story about a character created by Charlaine Harris, Amelia Broadway, which was published in the anthology Dead But Not Forgotten. I admit, I kissed that check, because it was the fulfillment of a life-long dream. I didn't make canon, necessarily, but I made fanfic for the world.
I encourage and celebrate fanfic of my work, even if I can't read it right now. Because fanfic is amazing, and it's important. It allows us to interface with the things we love in a way that is otherwise virtually impossible.
That's amazing.
June 15 2014, 08:16:51 UTC 3 years ago
I have been very annoyed that for so many years, fanfiction has been derided by authors. I understand the legal concerns, especially with the limited information that was available until relatively recently (and really, most people are not going to doubt the author), but I really have been bothered by some of the negative attitudes. The first writer's group I was part of called it a waste of time and that anybody who wrote it obviously didn't care about their career, because they were spending time on writing something that could never be sold. To them, if it wasn't publishable, it wasn't worthy of being written. Granted, it wasn't just fanfiction; there were people that felt the same way about poetry, because poetry didn't sell. But fanfiction got the most derision, nasty comments, and in some cases passive aggressive personal attacks.
Which always struck me as WTF because why not write something for fun? Why does it all have to be work? Why is something less worthy if it can only be shared with others for free? Hell, what's wrong with sharing your work for free? I mean, hell, posting a book for free as a loss leader is a valid business tactic for self-publishers. I've read fanfic that has made me think, made me cry, made me smile, made me laugh. I've read fanfic that was every bit as good as original fiction. I've read some brilliant fanfics that captured the voice and tone of the author, and explored a different avenue very deeply, addressing the sociopolitical consequences of the characters' actions in the fic. Stuff that just blew me away because it was so good.
But to this day, I feel guilty when I decide to take a break and write fanfiction, like I'm doing something wrong. It didn't help that wasn't the only group that had that attitude, although it was the most extreme. I find it sad that it's something I've internalized, even though I deeply disagree with it.
June 24 2014, 15:28:29 UTC 3 years ago
You are amazing.