Defining fanfiction.

[icarus]

Teresa writes about fanfiction:

Storytelling is basic to our species. It’s one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories. It might surprise you to find out how many writers have works of personal erotica tucked away in their unpublished-or-unpublishable manuscript trunks. There’s no good way to get those published, but they write them anyway, because they’re writers, and eroticism is an important part of our lives.
Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it’s a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing—unnatural, even—for writers to not engage with that experience. They always have. I could show you stuff centuries old—heck, some of it’s millennia old—that’s fanfic by any modern definition.

Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.

Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

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I consider it intra-textual writing, playing within the boundaries of a story. Interestingly, most fanfic loses its meaning, you can't capture the play of what the writer is saying, unless you know the source material. The plot survives but the subtleties are lost. Like reading "Call me Ishmael..." and not knowing who Ishmael was in the bible. It becomes just a name. Fanfiction is as fragile as a soap bubble.

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

My own writing professor thinks that fanfiction solves a young writer's primary problem: finding an audience. Writing groups look at fiction in a completely different light than real readers.

We used to have this in the pulps, but that option to publish has disappeared. My impression of the magazine industry is that it's fragmented and difficult to find what you want as a reader (let alone a writer), so that's become a very tight competitive market.

Fanfiction is where writers develop experience, create a rapport with an audience, and learn what makes a good story (not just how to write). I'm constantly surprised by what people love and read. Very often it's not my most honed and polished "cool" work. You can't learn that in a writer's group. You have to have an audience.

Icarus