(non)fiction for thought

[kaigou]

This is an old post (c 2006) from Making Light, that I came across while googling for something completely different, but being me, clicked out of curiosity. And herein follows the insight, from TNH:

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 It might surprise you to find out how many writers have works of personal erotica tucked away in their unpublished-or-unpublishable manuscript trunks.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.

This really is a basic impulse.

And the addendum is the cherry on top.

Comments

[leorising]

Gorgeous, and sums up my opinion on fanfic in general. To parse it more closely would be jacking off butterflies, IMO. Also, you're right, the addendum is the cherry on top.

Puts me in mind of Heinlein's old hero, I forget his name, the one that married into the Lazarus Long family. He was an author mainly because, as he put it (and I'm paraphrasing here), you can take Shakespeare, "file off the serial numbers", and turn Macbeth into a completely new story. That is the same story, of course, lol. I get a chuckle whenever I see a review for something like March, thinking of how the author has just filed off the serial numbers...

^_^

[leorising]

Well, okay, not exactly filed off the serial numbers. But definitely stole the firing pin! :D

*flees before the metaphor becomes any more tortured*

[branchandroot]

You know it's really too bad she's such a psycho, because when she's left alone in a small room to just write without interacting directly with real people, she does come up with some really good stuff.

[kaigou]

*snerk*

[manifesta]

OMG, that addendum. Yesss.