cry havoc

Okay, my training is in literature, heavy on modernism and post-modernism (though I'm deserting to the school of Cultural Studies for my Phd, it's a false separation really). I actually think it's not a matter of difference so much as degree. I don't believe in 'original fiction' - I think any writing, as far back as record of fictional writing goes (The Iliad? Correct if wrong?) is a matter of conventions and expectations (be they generic, market-based, audience-focused or other) and what the text does with those conventions and expectations: how it departs from them. Some texts are very pointed and self conscious about this ('My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', 'The Wasteland') and some attempt to mask it through claims of Romantic 'originality' (ideologically suspect, and frankly wrong). One of the reasons I like Supernatural is it's self-consciousess re: genre tropes (I recall a justified backlash against a poster somewhere who complained that the deal-with-the-devil plot had been 'done before' - argh!!) With fanfiction, however, it's a much more explicit, because there's more explicitly taken (whole characters, settings) and sometimes more explicitly changed (AU). I'd say the main difference is about the structures expected. To borrow your metaphor, fanfiction is obliged to decorate the house, but doesn't have the burden of building one if it doesn't want to. It can build as much or as little as serves it's immediate purpose. Within academia, there's an increasing celebration of non-fanfiction that rejects the building of the expected house - prose poems or stories in verse, for example - but in the contemporary marketplace there are still very conventional expectations about structure that go back to Greek aesthetics: beginning, middle, end. It can be a bind on professional writers that don't necessarily want to follow market forms, and ff gives opportunity for that kind of experiment without making unreasonable demands on the reader.