On Fanfiction I

To those who celebrate Christmas: merry Christmas!
To those who celebrate another holiday: hope you get whatever you want to get out of your observance!
To those who celebrate nothing: want to come to the movies with me?

So what is fanfiction, anyway? No, I’m not asking this question in the way that can be answered by plugging it into Google or Wikipedia. I know the technical definition: fanfiction is a story or poem or song or character sketch written about a universe or characters that do not belong to you. If I write a story about Luke Skywalker, that’s fanfiction. If I write a story about Luke Skywalker and the Berenstein Bears saving Prydain from Count Dracula, that’s also fanfiction. Strangely, if I write a story about Green Day and George Clooney helping Luke and Brother stake that vampire, some people would count that as fanfiction, too.

But, if I put on a play written by William Shakespeare and decide to completely rewrite Hamlet as a drug-addled transsexual martian, that’s not fanfiction. If I’m hired to adapt The Chronicles of Narnia into a movie or novelize Independence Day, that’s also not fanfiction. And, if I write an angtsy, free-verse poem about Green Day and George and Luke and Brother, heck, that’s probably postmodern enough to be Art.

Anyway, I’ve been clicking around the Internet, which is what I do all day instead of reading my textbooks and writing my papers, and I’m kind of interested in the way people regard fanfiction. Some professional authors get outraged when people use their characters; others think it’s all very nice, but it’s not real writing. One author compared it to other people cutting relatives’ faces from family snapshots and gluing them on pornographic pictures. I think that’s a little much.

True, some fanfiction is horrible dreck written by fourteen-year-olds who were never taught how to spell and/or speak their own mother tongue. (Case in point: just visit the Babb Chronicles.) But there’s other stuff that’s really good – stuff where the authors have taken the time to ship their work off for critique and revise it several times and go over it for plot and meaning. In the Harry Potter fandom alone, look at Louisa’s “What If?” on the HPN forums; Mrs. Hyde’s “The Old Block” on the HMS STFU LJ comm; or alena_hu’s “Silver and Green: a Quartet” on the LJ comm snape_after_dh (ETA: As I have recently learned that posting direct links to fanfic without permission can be considered rude, I’ve taken them down and put up the bibliographic information instead). (NB: all work-safe, no warnings of any sort)(Except that your MIND is about to be BLOWN!!!!!) (… or not).

At first, it seems like the criteria that distinguishes fanfiction from “real” writing, then, is a question of originality. Neil Gaiman compares fanfic to “training wheels”: someone else’s world is holding up your balance, so you can learn to pedal properly without falling over. The implication being, the ultimate goal of writing is to write original fiction.

I find this quite interesting, mostly because one of my favourite Gaiman stories is “A Study in Emerald” (I’ve only linked to it maybe once… or twice… a week…), which, if it were posted on fanfiction.net and not published in Fragile Things, could easily be a crossover fic between Sherlock Holmes and Chthulu.

I’m not trying to single out Neil Gaiman (he’s one of my favourite authors, and it’s not his fault he happened to be the one with the most well reasoned and quotable attitude toward fanfiction… well, maybe it is, because he’s a good author – but I digress), but it seems in general that the criteria defining fanfiction are not about art but about the business of publishing. Financial concerns – copyright, being in print – outweigh artistic merit or even skill. After all, yes, coming up with one’s own world requires certain, admirable skills, but skills are surely required to manipulate someone else’s world, too? Not everyone can write good fanfic. And what about published fiction? Is someone who writes general fiction somehow less worthy than someone who writes fantasy, because they had less to make up? (Note that, if you want to argue that the general author had to “make up” her own version of “the real world”, it then becomes possible to argue that the fanfic author has to make up his own version of a fictional world.)

Many widely known works could easily be fanfiction – Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, based on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz; Edward Eager’s Knight’s Castle, in which the main characters end up messing around with the story of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; for goodness’ sake, look at the dozens of popular authors who’ve somehow remade Sherlock Holmes. The list is practically endless: Michael Dibdin, Laurie R. King, Nicholas Meyer, Edward D. Hoch, Ellery Queen… and there’s still more.

So the definition of fanfic is partially a legal issue. Is it out of copyright? Then you can write a story about it. If it isn’t, you can write a fanfic.

In any case, my point is, designating one story as fanfic and another as legitimate literature has less to do with any intrinsic properties of the works themselves and more to do with the cultural context. It’s like “The Prince and the Pauper”: take two identical stories, put one on the Internet and the other between a fancy set of covers, and, hey presto! Suddenly, no one can tell the difference between the low-born wretch and the gentleman of noble blood.

Now, the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that sneaky “partially” up there. Why? Because, though I think that the designation of a particular work as fanfic has a lot to do with copyright, I think the interpretation of fanfic can’t depend on legalities alone.

Confused yet? Because I am.

Anyhow, the reason I’m not willing to completely define the normal use of “fanfic” based on legalities is because I think people hold fanfic to different criteria than published works. Like, a published work that was a 3000-word character sketch might draw critics’ wrath. Contrariwise, a 3000-word character sketch in fanfic could be praised as an exceptional piece of writing. Possibly, the difference lies in the way a fanfic character sketch is more akin to an essay than a story; that’s a topic for another blog entry, I guess. Maybe it’s most apt to think of fanfic as a different genre of writing rather than a different type, per se*. Attributes of this genre include infringement of copyright laws, the possibility of lack of plot, etc. You wouldn’t judge a science fiction story by the same criteria you’d use to judge literary fiction**.

You know, it’s arrogant to think that I’ll ever write anything popular enough to spawn fanfiction, but, if I do, I sure hope I’ll be able to read it. It’s like, what’s the point of having toys if you never allow anyone else to share them? Clearly, there are legal reasons – suppose someone says you copied aspects of their game? But, if I send anything new into the world out there, heck, I don’t want to be that kid who brought her new Game Boy to school just so everyone else could see it and admire it. I want to bring it to share.

* There’s also probably something to be said for the fact that fanfic is primarily distributed through a completely different medium than non-fanfic writing. ie, The Internet is different from books and magazines (!!!) Ssssh! It’s a secret! Anyway, yet another thing to be discussed further, later.

** Okay, maybe you might, depending on what you believe to be the purpose of writing and/or the universal attributes of a story, but let’s not get into that right now.