I just had a really compelling conversation on twitter about fanfic. It all started when I found this tumblr post by the lovely Cecilia Ryan.
For some reason, this part of the post enraged me:
I do NOT like fanfic. Leave the story writing to the professionals on the shows. As someone who writes for a living, I find it insulting that fans think they are better at what I do than I am. There’s a reason I’m paid and you… are not.
It pissed me off in about a hundred different ways. I won’t enumerate all of them, but here’s a few:
- How did those professionals GET to be professionals. Were they born that way?
- Does she even know that those ‘professionals’ on television shows base their episodes on a ‘story bible’ that they didn’t write. In effect, most episodic tv writers ARE writing fanfic.
- She’s insulted that her fans want to write? That her writing inspires them to write? That her characters or her storyworld fires their imaginations? Wow. I guess people can get offended at anything these days.
- What an arrogant and unpleasant bitch.
As far as I know, this sort of authorial-privilege shit went out with Roland Barthes in the late 60s. We’ve been telling the same 25 stories for the last ten thousand years. We’ve been writing the same archetypal characters for just as long.
I’m not saying there is no originality. I’m saying that no one pulls their stories or characters out of thin air. We are all cultural inheritors. The myths, the folktales, the oral stories… every rags to riches romance you ever read has its feet firmly rooted in Cinderella. Every star-crossed-lovers story owes a debt of gratitude to Shakespeare.
And was Shakespeare’s King Lear devalued because Akira Kurosawa made ‘Ran‘?
And did Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Seven Samurai‘ lose anything when John Sturges made ‘The Magnificent Seven‘?
Did Buffy the Vampire Slayer become a less valuable product once someone wrote a piece of smutty fanfic about her doing Angel, or better yet, a bondage scene with Spike? Frankly, if you hadn’t imagined that in your own head, already, you weren’t enough of a fan. Do you really think Joss Whedon lost a penny of advertising or video sales because of the fanfic that’s been written about his creation?
Will we forever think of ‘Harry Potter’ as a deviant slut because someone wrote fanfic about him getting it from behind courtesy of Severus Snape?
Is anyone going to hesitate to buy another ‘Twilight‘ novel because E.L. James changed her name and stuck her in ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?
If you really think that ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies‘ wouldn’t have put a huge smile on Jane Austen’s face, then you aren’t a very big fan of Austen. That woman had a wicked sense of humour. She would have loved it.
I just don’t get writers who hate fanfic. Why are they so ungracious? So ungenerous? Why do they think they can release their work into the pubic sphere and continue to control the meaning of it in the minds of the readers?
At best, fanfic immortalizes their work. People who read and love fanfic will ALWAYS go back to the source. Fanfic is, for the most part, an act of genuine love by fans who paid enough attention and cherished the original enough to be able to produce the fanfic.
At worst, fanfic may dilute and erode the original version of the stories or characters. And if it does, so what? Personally, I think any author who feels that fanfic has made them feel they’ve lost control of their characters had very little understanding of how the reader appropriates and internalizes text to begin with.
Beyond that, if you’re that brilliant an author, stop whoring your own literary product over and over again. Move on and write something new.
I’d like to leave you with a brilliant piece by Cory Doctorow on the subject. He addresses a lot of the issues much better than I have.
And, for my part, the moment someone writes fanfic based on one of my works is the moment I know I’ve arrived as a writer. So please, go ahead.
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