Erm, I think we're talking at cross-purposes, due to different definitions here. The stories I mentioned -- Wicked and Ash -- are both professionally published (and well-received) fiction, but both are stories with a level of subversiveness reliant on the reader having some familiarity with an existing text, and that do not attempt to file off any serial numbers, as fanfic writers like to say. The same goes for the recent rash of Jane Austen with vampires, and Jane Austen with zombies, and so on. I'm using "fanfiction" here basically to mean "a story that does not attempt to cloak its origins as reliant on an existing story written by someone other than this story's author -- using the same characters, events, settings, and premise as the existing story". In that case, fanfiction in general can find a home in the published world (setting aside the legal questions of copyright protections). By that definition, one could even say that whots-his-face who's "finishing" Jordan's series is doing a type of fanfiction, that nearly all Star Trek and Star Wars books are fanfiction of the movie, and that novelizations of movies are fanfiction, and even "official sequels" like the Mitchell family's attempt to renew its copyright via a 'sequel' to Gone with the Wind are a type of fanfiction: and all of these are professionally published works.
In the subset of fanfiction in which there is no official permission -- the gray underbelly of other-story-reliant fiction -- then yes, the marketplace is a huge dividing line. Part of that is because of the legal issues, and part, as you mentioned, is because of the different market that demands and shapes the fiction itself. And I definitely agree, from what I can see, that fanfiction doesn't have pressures that pro-fiction has, seeing how there are now several writers who continue to write fanfiction even as their own work is published professionally. That says to me that there's something they get from (or can do with) fanfiction that they can't get/do in their original fiction.
My point (mostly, and I do have one!) in these posts was considering how fiction works, and trying to demonstrate that fanfiction -- so often treated as the red-headed step-child of fiction -- does have its own techniques and skills that are valuable in and of themselves. These skills may be translatable to pro-fic (to some degree), but I'm tired of seeing fanfic denigrated as unskilled when in fact it does some pretty amazing things given its pre-existing constraints.
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Date: 19 Dec 2009 04:06 pm (UTC)In the subset of fanfiction in which there is no official permission -- the gray underbelly of other-story-reliant fiction -- then yes, the marketplace is a huge dividing line. Part of that is because of the legal issues, and part, as you mentioned, is because of the different market that demands and shapes the fiction itself. And I definitely agree, from what I can see, that fanfiction doesn't have pressures that pro-fiction has, seeing how there are now several writers who continue to write fanfiction even as their own work is published professionally. That says to me that there's something they get from (or can do with) fanfiction that they can't get/do in their original fiction.
My point (mostly, and I do have one!) in these posts was considering how fiction works, and trying to demonstrate that fanfiction -- so often treated as the red-headed step-child of fiction -- does have its own techniques and skills that are valuable in and of themselves. These skills may be translatable to pro-fic (to some degree), but I'm tired of seeing fanfic denigrated as unskilled when in fact it does some pretty amazing things given its pre-existing constraints.