I assume you’ve transitioned (so to speak) from fan-fic to creating your own scenarios and original characters. Was this gradual or a drastic change? How would you rate your stories and character developments in terms of other works of fiction you’ve pulled from? I’m not a writer, but still find it interesting that fan-fic writers find it necessary to use the overall format(s) others have worked hard to develop. I guess it’s no different than what Bob Dylan did early in his career by mimicking the style of Woody Guthrie, then moving on to his own stylizations.

I would say that if they are writing fanfic then by definition they are writers. He probably means people that get paid to write, but still.

The confusing thing about this disagreement is that neither side is wrong. The contradiction lies in our culture, which supports both positions at the same time and hasn’t sorted out a good way to mediate between them.

Time prints something intelligent and rational about copyright issues? It is truly the end times.

It didn’t come. This article restored my faith in the news media.

I write my original stories because they’re things that I’ve thought up or dreamt or are any number of things that I care about and want to get out. As a writer, I’ll have ideas and characters throttling themselves around my brain and writing it all out is /fun/ and infinitely rewarding.

Most often when I write or read fanfiction it’s because I want something that wasn’t touched on by the canon explored. Grossman’s article does an excellent job of describing this use case. As a concrete example, I’m an avid fan of a current television series and wrote a story several months ago with the “what if” premise of “what if the protagonist’s partner and the antagonist were actually multiple personalities of the protagonist?” It was great fun and allowed me to play with the setting I had been handed in a new (and for me, exciting) way; and it isn’t as though the series was ever going to provide me with its own version of the story.

It’s because of all of this that I don’t wholly agree with the idea that fanfiction is a stepping stone that writers use before going on to write their own original works. I’ve done both and continue to do both simultaneously, and I’ve used things that I’ve learnt with both in writing both. This isn’t to say that some people definitely don’t use fanfiction as their proving ground, where they work out their preferred style/etc., but it’s a lot more complicated than “when Katy was 12 she wrote fanfiction for Harry Potter and Gundam Wing because she couldn’t come up with her own ideas” or “when Katy was 23 she started writing a young adult novel and abandoned writing fic for Sherlock”.

In light of that saying “If anything, anecdotal evidence suggests that most fan fiction is written by women” is frustrating to read

Henry Jenkins and Rebecca Tushnet have covered the role of women authors in fan fiction pretty extensively, also Sonya Katyal, Anupam Chander & Madhavi Sunder, a fun book by Camille Bacon-Smith (seriously that’s her name!)

I publish my fanfic online because, sure, I like feedback. I like being a member of the fandom community, finding people who squeal delightedly over the same things (which may or may not involve porn.) The self-publishing nature of Internet fanfic means that there’s an awful lot of really bad stuff out there, sure, and probably an even greater volume of simply mediocre stuff. But there are stories I’ve read in fandom that are amazingly good: well-crafted, powerful, funny, and better than a lot of the published fiction I’ve read. And they’re mostly written by other people who are librarians or lawyers or architects or full-time moms who do it for fun.

I’ve read the Iliad and the Odyssey twice each (I’m not a classicist, but the second read was part of a course) and quite frankly, they’re not very good. They’re prototypes of the great stories, and the basis of a huge amount of culture, thus worth studying, but as stories go… not so much. You wouldv’e pretty much had to live in the culture and listen to it many times (it wasn’t written down until centuries after the peak of ancient greek civilization) to understand the story, since so much is left out or not explained. I mean, think about the scroll of the Iliad that’s just a roll call of all the ships. It’s pretty clearly wish-fulfillment fanfiction- each bard adding in his own hometown to the story to engage the audience- details that have no real bearing on the rest of the story.

I don’t even get why anyone thinks fanfiction is odd. If you’re a fan it seems reasonable that you’re engaged with the world and the characters. You think about the questions established storylines raise. Don’t you wonder what if? What if that character had made a different decision. Or what if the coin had landed the other side up? What happened after the cameras turned off or the show was cancelled? Sure, most people don’t go so far as to actually draft and publish their thoughts, but is it such a stretch?

1. Lev Grossman claims that nobody is making money of fan-fic, yet examples in his own article of works that are or nearly are fan-fic contradict this. I would even classify Grossman’s “The Magicians” as a sort of fan-fic/mashup. I wonder if the fact that his follow-up comes out in a month has anything to do with this article and the timing of it.

2. I really enjoy Orson Scott Card’s fiction, but sometimes I think he takes very strange positions. I wonder what Joseph Smith would think of the Alvin Maker series, which is an alternate universe retelling of the founding of the Mormon church. Or what would Mormon himself think of the Homecoming series, in which Mr. Card retells the story told in The Book of Mormon? He didn’t even change the names. “Nephi” the protagonist in the early part of The Book of Mormon is “Nefi” in the homecoming series. Note that Mr. Card served his mission in Brazil and in the Portuguese Book of Mormon the name is spelled Nefi.

Card has posted a lengthy defense of the Homecoming series at:
http://www.hatrack.com/osc/articles/openletter.shtml

I wonder if he thinks any of his own arguments apply to fan fiction?

She sent me a lovely letter back, telling me that she couldn’t read unsolicited material due to legal blablabla, and that a young writer should invent their own world and get out of hers. (it is not lost on cynical adult me that about 20 years later her son would write his own Pern fanfic — I mean — canonical novels)

Despite what seemed, at age ten or so, to be a chastisement, she also thanked me for my effusive praise and included her stock “advice for young writers” sheet. I wish that I still had that. The points that I remember were to read every day and write every day.

Or there was a longing – the wold the author created was one that caught their imagination, and wouldn’t let them go. Writing the fanfic is a way of both remaining in that world for a moment longer, not being kicked out (an interesting way of looking at the Fillory subtext in The Magicians) and of exorcising a thought that won’t get out of your head. It can be a self-referential death spiral, or it can be a moment of relief, pulling out a splinter that got stuck in your mind.

Either way, the distinction between fanfic and published fic is simple: the author never bothered to change the names, and the author never bothered to sell the work. Every work is, in some respect, derivative; all the way down the line, we don’t learn to tell stories except by reading and hearing other stories, so we include the hows and whys of the stories we’ve read in the stories we write. The best writers take than and make it their own, and eventually figure out a way to use those tools to translate something onto the page that’s never been there in quite that way before. But it’s still a thing they learned from those who went before, and a thing they built on.

Fanfic just sticks closer to those who went before, is all. It lives in the shadows and never steps out to become itself. It’s a world overshadowed by the thing that sponsored and spawned it, content to build off something else, like market stalls springing up around a fair.

Hi, I think that is a summation of a very (interesting to me) underlying suspicion of our culture. On the one hand, nearly all works of literature are heavily peopled, and yet, only one person, the Dictator, wielder of the sceptre of copyright, is allowed say!
I hope we are in the final days of the ways in which we are disconnected from one another by our exploration and development of our knowledge of infinity. On the one side, we have all the common realm of the subconscious, the archetypes, the passive telepathy of symbolism. A funny, common thread, my own voice here being unique, is Star Wars. You see, I was born in 1968 and ripe for the pickin’ of the Lucas franchise… I wasn’t however, allowed to see it!, due to my parents holy roller anti-demonism, and yet, being a furiously passionate devourer of books, THAT was the one checkpoint no-one could control. A funny thing happened, you see, I was sure George Lucas was right about what was out there, and the sum total of his cinematic vision for me was contained in one glimpse of a VHS release being played at Kmart,
right around the escape off Tatooine. Totally burned in my head, as in, check the sky for xwings burned in. Thoughts about Princess Leia I need not mention ever…yet the megahyped toys which the neighbor kids were swamped with limited the sum total of my childhood franchise purchases to one storm trooper and the original movie book release. All I had to do was go across the street and validate their reality by playing with them. Star Wars turned all us little kids into a community, and you bet your life I am not regretting that!
Well, I don’t care about Star Wars at all, anymore, aside from feeling that its turn to the worse is a demonstration of how fan fiction is the only possible salvation of massive chi investment. The Return of the Jedi, the only theater release I caught, released me totally from Lucas’s devolving contraption. But considering the total expenditure of Chi itself that got enmeshed with the original visionary surface (A Huxley-term), if it wasn’t a franchise, someone who could salvage the germ plasm of that original, interdimensional doorway, would have my utter sanction.
F’rinstance.

There are also organizers who don’t write. There are fanfic fans who mod communities and archives and mailing lists, people who edit and compile and write for newsletters, people who organize contests and awards, run fic fests and other writing events; some of them also write fic but not all. The community as a whole is much larger, richer and more diversely active because of its non-writers who find other ways to contribute.

Angie

If you want to start reading fanfiction, try Elizier Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – HP meets the scientific method. It’s professionally written, smart and often very funny.

The strangest fic of quality I’ve read recently is a mashup of Fallout and… My Little Pony:FiM. Somehow, it works.
http://www.equestriadaily.com/2011/04/story-fallout-equestria.html

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to send Quentin Coldwater to Equestria.

On a more general note, I don’t think the efforts to ‘legitimize’ fanfic by claiming that almost any historic or current form of writing that has influences or is a homage or sequel is ‘fanfic’ hold much water. ‘Fanfic’ is fiction that emerges in the specific context of fandom, which is very much a recent phenomenon.

I also don’t think fanfic needs legitimation. It is what it is. It doesn’t generally aspire to being literature nor does it need to. No doubt there will be occasional examples that transcend their origins, be published and read outside of fandom, but then they will get judged as literature in the normal way, no special pleading required.

I’ve been an SF/F fan all my life. I like to write. One thing you’ll find as an amateur writer in any genre is that nobody wants to read your work. Nobody cares. The only goal is to get published because then a few people will actually read it. You have to pay to get someone to edit your work, and you have to join a writing group and read everyone else’s stories that YOU don’t care about in exchange for getting feedback on your own work.

Fanfiction is different because people do actually care. As long as you’re a pretty good writer, a few people will like your work enough to come back for more, and even offer criticism, writing advice, and editing. Professional writing is officially a monetary economy, but I doubt most writers actually do it for the money. The fanfic community is an affective economy where writers’ true motivations (self-expression and positive feedback) take center stage. That’s why I do it. I can write a short story, have it edited in real time over Google docs by a couple of my friends in the community while I watch, post it that night, and have three comments in my email inbox in the morning telling me that people enjoyed my story.

Writing is often described as a lonely, solitary pursuit, the writer yelling into an empty room with no one to hear. Fanfiction is a community activity, both in the social nature of distribution and the way it can directly comment on the source (or on other fanfic). That’s why I love it.