making the rounds...

[kaigou]

A plethora of commentary, thanks to some writer named Hobbs of whom I'd never heard until she decided to blather at a level of superiority only rivalled by A. Rice's declaration that she perfects every sentence completely before going to the next, and this is why she doesn't require an editor. Uh. Whatever.

achiasa observed:

Anyone who read fan fiction about Harry Potter, for instance, would have an entirely different idea of what those stories are about than if he had simply read J.K. Rowling’s books. Right. Because the number of people who are going to be reading HP fic without having laid hands on the books or movies is so tremendously huge. It's possible, but considering that the series is so ubiquitous that people have to work to avoid it, it's not really all that likely. HP is really not the right example to use here, just because it is so very huge. JK Rowling's income does not depend on attracting new fans, either; the woman is set up for life. That's essentially why I don't have a problem with HP fic.

Okay, there's something to the fact that Rowling is covered, between merchandising, book sales, movies, and the like -- but she's an anomaly. For me, to say, "if you have earned or will earn over X amount, you can gleefully lose Y amount of readership, and never miss it," is rather arbitrary. So in that sense, I tend to say, I can't draw that line. If you're going to respect one author's work and not infringe so as to prevent waylaying readers, then have that respect for all. At least, I try.

Fanfiction is not original writing. I know that. Any halfway decent fic writer knows that. But does that make it invalid? Consider the number of musicians who have composed variations on someone else's theme, for goodness' sake. Is all that beautiful music immoral, inferior, and a pretention to greatness? It's possible, although rare, for a cover version to be better than the original song, musically speaking. Or is that what you're afraid of?

Chiya crossed out that final line in her post, but I think it's a valid fear, for some writers. In a few cases, like L. Hamilton, A. Rice, and what's her face that did the dragon series... yeah, well, in their shoes I'd be slamming down fanfiction, too. They fangirl their own stories so badly, and write so flatly, that it wouldn't be a big jump for the fandom to find its Mikkes, its Ravenwoods, its Krackens, its Maldorors -- and suddenly, readers want more of the fanfiction take because, frankly, the original stuff is just so formulaic.

I'll face that one straight up: it's a real fear for me. I just don't put myself down as Mr. Kickass Epic Author yet to be able to brush off the fear of being out-written, thanks.

Plus, I've written non-publishable stuff that's most definitely explicit; in what I want to have published... hell, in Sunrise everything's mostly oblique. The most implication you get of things are phrased like the bit where "Tetsu makes no attempt to cover the fact that he's adjusting himself in his jeans". Yeah. That's as explicit as I got, and in revising I kept the rest of the story at that level. But I know many of you folks reading snippets now are pervs, and I know you'd prefer me get into the nitty-gritty of just what Tetsu and Keegan did in that park, or what Mark and Ayumi were getting up to when they broke through the shoji screen and never even noticed. Will all readers? I doubt it. (And I think a few will just have enough trouble reading about Tetsu and Keegan in the first place, but whatever.) But those pervy readers out there? Yeah, if they found fanfic that went into what happened between scene A and scene B, I think they'd devour it.

Would I end up with fans who'd never read my stuff -- stating clearly, "Why should I? What I want is in the fanfic, not the original story" -- I think there's a chance. The real question, I suppose, is: "Are there enough pervy fans that losing them will cut into my sales significantly?" I don't know. Hard to answer that without ever having made a sale.

But I have been in enough fandoms now, for long enough, to have seen the comment made a number of times: "Oh, I was going to buy the DVD/movie/book, but I don't want to bother/waste the money after I found out it's not like A, B, or C." If I saw that as a writer, yes, I would be furious/hurt and pissed. Hello, get the fuck out of my fandom if you're not willing to help pay my goddamn rent, because that's the only way I can keep providing these characters the rest of you want to write having sex. Grrrrr.

pellaz:

The problem to me is that [Hobbs] seems to be missing the entire point of storytelling and myth-making. Stories speak to people as individuals, and individuals all have different viewpoints and experiences that make them look at the same thing differently.

Mythmaking is a huge part of the storytelling process. Does anyone still believe Shakespeare came up with Romeo and Juliet, or Beatrice and Benedict? He was writing fanfic of other people's stories, and they in turn of other's, and so on. West Side Story? One big frickin', Academy-award winning AU. With great dance routines. It's like, a songfic AU. For each retelling, the themes and metaphors only become more and more powerful, not less. Beowulf, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Romeo and Juliet, blah blah blah.

However, I do think it's a collaborative process, and when it comes to corporations owning copyrights, I'll be first in line to demand we take the stories back. A corporation exerting its muscle and saying, "we own ALL stories in which a blonde girl kicks the demon's ass" -- no, sorry, you DON'T. We the people own that goddamn story, thanks. We'll be taking that back, now.

Going back to my first significant fandom, BtVS, you could see the collaborative action in every episode. When Fury wrote an episode, Spike's character shifted, however subtly; when it was back in Joss' hands, Spike reverted. And above the writer's control, the director tells the actor to try these three ways, and the actor puts his/her own spin on it, and then the editor takes a whack and knocks a few scenes out, while the music director tells we-the-audience to be scared now, happy then, sad over here. We-the-audience are one in a long line of interpreters. But in a one-person creation, it's a two-way street, between me, and you. And that means the originator has the right (in my admittedly bizarre way of seeing it) to say, it ends between us, please. In other words: an author can say, this is a private conversation between us, please don't repeat what I've said in confidentiality to you, in a sense. But a corporation -- a faceless group of people with no relation to the originators, the body of people among whom no one person did enough significantly that any one, on his/her own, can claim copyright? No. Not buying it. Not paying for it, either.

But then, I really loathe work-for-hire. That's one reason I prefer the Japanese understanding of copyright and its under-the-radar doujin. In many cases, the mangaka, in Japan, retains copyright, full or partial. That's unheard-of in the West, and inconceivable except in highly unusual circumstances in the US. When you sell a script to Hollywood, they're buying the rights, and the result of their treatment is theirs, not yours, as I understand it. Sayonara to your say in things.

worldserpent:

Hobb objects to fanfic on several grounds. Firstly, she believes that it harms her, because people who read fanfic will have a different opinion of the work. This idea, to me, is simply illogical. My view of a work has rarely been changed by fanfic, because fanfic is, by definition, NOT canon. It's hard to separate in fanfic what is the author's interpretation vs. the new things the author has added on that the author does not think were present in the original.

I have to disagree; fanfic can most definitely change one's opinion of the original work. It can highlight the strengths of the original -- and reveal the weaknesses. One of the biggest reasons, in my observation, for a powerful and invigorated fandom is the original's holes. In the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom, I watched writers struggle with "where do I fit my story?" because every point that looked like a plothole...wasn't. The storyline was too tight. The same goes for Naruto, and BtVS seasons 1-5.

The fanfic writers, then, fall into a second category, of writing what-ifs. If the first type retcons, filling in holes the author missed, the second is far more dangerous in terms of changing a reader's opinion of the original work: it highlights all the twists and turns the author avoided. In any story, there are sometimes almost-hits, where the author stepped back from having to take that really-difficult-path for reason of time, energy, or inclination. A fanfic writer with the boldness to ask what-if can sometimes demonstrate that had the author followed that, the story would've ended up far more powerful, less pendantic, less formulaic. If a writer won't ask the tough questions, and fanfic writers will...yeah. It will change my opinion, and the first blush love of the story fades as I see the flaws.

I'm not so sure about the "what readers think the author missed" -- because the first two types (fill in the holes, go after unasked questions) either cleave close to canon, or take that as a jumping-point and move away systematically as the story progresses. Reading Hobb's original post, I'm not sure whether that's what she had in mind, or whether she meant the fanfic writers who basically rewrite the story, with a few added details. The Inuyasha fandom is particularly guilty of this, from what I've seen; the vast majority consist of retellings of episodes and general plotlines, rehashed, with sex. I suppose readers are expressing their frustration with Takahashi writing three-hundred-plus chapters and we never even get a goddamned kiss between the two leads. Jeebus, tease, much? But those types of stories get old, fast, and soon become the fandom's genre of badfic. IMO.

And from slobbit:

Hobb says:
When I write, I want to tell my story directly to you. I want you to read it exactly as I wrote it. I labor long and hard to pick the exact words I want to use, and to present my story from the angles I choose. I want it to speak to you as an individual. It’s horribly frustrating to see all that work ignored and undone by someone else ‘fixing’ it.

You know, I'm more concerned about nudging the reader along, then describing things exactly. I understand people read things differently. This doesn't get my nose out of joint. You certainly see Yamamoto differently than I do; to you, Yoshi doesn't quite look the same. I mean, I could describe in extreme detail and control your experience more, but what's the point? The point isn't the setting, the point is the story and what happens. Action.

That, and it seems highly pretentious to say TOUCH NOT THE TEXT. Bloody hell, woman, you wrote a genre fiction, not the flippin' Quran. This is not a text handed down from on high.

Which reminds me of another comment from Worldserpent:

Actually, it doesn't surprise me that Hobb takes this attitude; as I noted before, her writing tends to be very "controlling," reader, carefully delineating what is supposed to be ambiguous and what is supposed to be crystal clear. In other words, her books tend to be "closed," rather than "open."

And I do think Slo and I both write rather openly -- hell, I still get complaints about some of my earlier works, in which I never really stated how things end, precisely. For that matter, it took me nearly a month to convince CP that having the MC leave, rather than stay with the characters met in the story, was where the story needed to end. There is a definite pull on the part of the reader, sometimes, to have the settled ending, closed, determinate, etc. But if you nail it down too much as a writer, the reader will chafe and want some openings, a few plotholes, something. It's a hard balance, and the only times I know someone has gotten it is when I spend the next few days going, "but what happened next!?" There are only a few novels (recently) that have done this to me; blackholly's Tithe and shanna_s's Enchanted, Inc.. (Oddly, I didn't find myself puzzling over what-happens-next after reading Vol 4 in the Harry Potter series.)

Getting back to Slo's comment, I have to wonder if Hobbs has a crit-circle, or any kind of reader feedback greater than agent and/or editor. It's through crit circles that I've discovered that sometimes what I write just isn't what other people are reading. Sometimes it's frustrating, when I need the reader to reach a specific conclusion so they understand the next step in things -- in which case, as someone (can't recall who) mentioned recently, the failure is the writer's fault, not the reader. I need to be clearer, more explicit, or just a bit less opaque, somehow.

But there are times when I'm startled (and a bit amused) to find that even though I clearly said Keegan is an inch shorter than Tetsu, one reader thinks he's a good half-head shorter. Or that although I describe Chad as a dark blond, a writer got it into his/her head that Chad is dark-haired and that's the visual and there it stays. Or that one reader sees Garrett as a self-centered jerk while another adores him for being helplessly trapped in a situation where his hands are tied to help. If I don't write from his POV but once or twice, and don't give him a chance to put up a huge billboard, then I'm leaving it open. Oh, well. Besides, it's kind of a "wait, are you reading what I wrote?" reaction at first, and then -- once I've settled down -- it's a "hey, you're right, it could be read that way..." and I start seeing things I'd never noticed before.

Which brings us back to fanfic writers raising questions and plugging holes the author missed. That makes the story collaborative, but in this day and age of costs-to-publish and buy-through minimums and copyright protections and stupid government regulation to benefit massive corporations owning copyrights... I guess it means that even if, down the line, I'm able to clarify that the only fanfic I'll slam down (to pick something randomly) is incest... I still can't, and won't, do more than make the occasional ambiguous statement about looking the other way on fanfic, and hope the fandom doesn't bite me in the ass by producing a Maldoror or a Ravenwood who slices my story to ribbons by revealing the questions I never asked.

And one last one, just now read -- great comments, go read -- from superversive:

Indeed, if I am not already familiar with the works of [the original authors], nothing in the fan fiction will appeal to me at all. The stories depend on my knowing who Frodo and Harry and the rest of the crew are, and what they did, and why I should care about them. There is absolutely no danger whatever of their usurping the place of the originals.

That is true, but I also think this ignores that it can work in the opposite direction. I had never heard of Gundam Wing, for instance, until following links on Weiss Kreuz (a fandom in which the fanfiction outstrips the original by about three hundred miles and then some)...and I came across GW fanfiction and asked, who the hell are these characters? I kept reading, and then I went and watched the original. (Imagine my shock to find the characters bore absolutely no resemblance to Madam Hydra's versions, and I really don't care who thinks M.H. is a paragon of the fandom, she's only a paragon of the promising-but-perpetually-unfinished-story, IMO.) A reader exposed to fanfiction is sometimes led into new fandoms by virtue of the connections between fans: I like writer A's work, and s/he has written in a different fandom, and being bored one day, I read that piece, and then trot off to find out about the original series. This is how I can blame kiyasama for my original curiosity about Naruto and HikaGo, or M.H. for GW, or P.L. Nunn for Weiss Kreuz... and so on.

I suppose the only conclusion is that when it's my turn to actually have reason to worry about it, I'll deal with it then, and probably by way of politely stating that incest between the two sibling-characters squicks me to no end... but what difference does it make? I can't read the fanfic anyway (or if I did, never ever breathe a word of it to anyone), because I wouldn't want to get sued by some fanfic writer for stealing their ideas about my characters. Eh, well.

Y'know, life would be a great deal simpler if we declared some things private. Religion, sexuality... and the issue of fanfic. Get a flippin' pen name, write to your heart's content, and I'll treat it as your private deal. Don't ask, don't tell -- sometimes it's a better policy than folks realize.

I need chocolate.

Comments

[branchandroot]

*snuggles you on general principles*

Personally, I like Bujold's approach. She doesn't mind if her readership fics her work; she just doesn't want to read it. So it has an archive on the biggest Bujold website, but it doesn't get posted to the ml, and only to the comm with lj cuts and clear warnings, so she can skip that entry. I think this is eminently reasonable.

Of course, Bujold's own essay "The Unsung Collaborator", about how much work readers put into a story, is my benchmark of sensible writing about the author/story/reader interaction.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I think, at heart, fanfic is essentially a flattering thing. I mean, really, when you're so absorbed by characters that you simply can't wait for the next episode/movie/chapter, that you get off your duff and write something yourself -- well, it is effort, and time. I do respect that. And I think fanfic is also an excellent way for writers to learn.

But the suit-happy US these days would make me leery of being anywhere near fanfic based on something I've written. I'm guessing I'd probably end up saying at a panel what I've said here, hope that people see the difference between literary fanfiction and visual-media fanfiction (where, as someone pointed out, there is absolutely no chance you will ever mistake a BtVS or GW or FmA story for the 'original work', thanks), at least pay some kind of lipservice respect to my ownership (hopefully by encouraging people to buy all of my stuff before writing fanfic, hah), and then carry on as if I'm utterly ignorant.

Which is why it's rather amusing that the idea of people doing fanart for my work -- again, a cross-breeding of the media, since I have no illustrations for any of my ofic -- doesn't bother me in the least, and I find rather exciting.

Yes. Headcase, eh.