original fiction, fanfiction, and ice hockey

[kaigou]

While writing contemplating post/modernism and textuality, I was reminded of bookshop's list of professionally published titles that qualify as fanfiction. Among the titles noted are (just pulling a few out as examples):

- the musical Cats, a fanfic of T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
- Michael Cunningham's The Hours, a modernized reworking of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
- John Guare's decorated play Six Degrees of Separation, RPF of real-life con artist David Hampton and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
- Neil Gaiman's 2004 Hugo-Award-winning Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover fanfic, "A Study in Emerald," his Lovecraft fanfic, "I, Cthulhu," and his Chronicles of Narnia fanfic, "The Problem of Susan."
- Tracy Chevalier's novel Girl with a Pearl Earring and Susan Vreeland's novel The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, and the 2 Vermeer paintings they are fictions about, real and imaginary.

It seems that the definition in use here is that 'fanfiction' is "that which interacts intertextually with an existing work." By that standard, there's (obviously) a boatload out there we can call fanfiction. More than that, apparently, if the determination of "acting intertextually" can apply when the original text is a person or group of persons, or even a painting. Or two. It's possible to have intertextuality when you have this text and that text, but first you kinda need a text on both ends, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little inter, too. The more we frame retellings and adaptations — even biographies! — as intertextual, or as fanfiction, the more we dilute the concept.

This is why, as much as I'd like to applaud bookshop's collection of titles, I think it's also a disservice. I get the intention (or at least the intention appears to be) tacking some credibility onto the label of 'fanfiction'. I get that it's supposed to make the average fanfiction person say, "gee, I'm in a long line of Very Credible and Certainly Valid legacy of storytelling!" From the number of responses, there's no denying the list hit a major nerve, and I think that says something right there. But I think it's saying something else, something possibly even more important, that's getting drowned out in the self-congratulatory aspect of the post.

Some of my reaction is, I suspect, because many of the 'this' half of the texts (grounding text) are significant Western classics and/or much-loved works. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters; Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes. ...and a fair percentage of the rest are quote-unquote "real person fiction". That alone bugs me, because by that standard, every person who's written historical fiction or historical non-fiction has, in effect, written fanfiction. (And I'd also think it's a good chance that Cunningham would have been mocked by his fandom for having so little creativity that he could only "update and retell".)

Intentionally or not, the list's inclusions, taken as a whole, do seem to imply that these (loosely-labeled) fanfictions have cachet and credibility, and not just because they had the time/money to pay for permission. There's a veneer of legacy and importance in the majority of the original works; these are Big Name Writers being rewritten. While your fanfiction could never reach such heights, seeing how it's a high school AU of a mid-80s Japanese animated television show that revolved around mechanical flying lions the size of small water towers. I mean, sure, there's legitimacy, and then there's, well, not. Clearly, if you're going to twig your textuality's 'inter', you should at least pick something classy to be inter-ing with, if you get my drift.

Like fanfiction, the majority of the works also rely on the notion of intertextuality: I mean, if you worship Moby Dick as a great American classic (and you probably read War and Peace too, and probably liked it), then it's possible you see Ahab's Wife as either complete blasphemy against the original or as a crystalline paradigm shift that made you reconsider your love all over again. Or, if you hated Moby Dick (and only used War and Peace as something to throw at an annoying younger sibling), it's possible you'd see Ahab's Wife as a beautiful attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, or you may see it as an example of how no amount of pig ears will ever be silk.*

* I had The Wide Sargasso Sea and Ahab's Wife confused. Eh, well, whales, crazy women in the attic, yeah, it all runs together.

Either way, you can't get around the awareness that this story is tied, inextricably, to that story. The first informs the second, and that's on purpose, but does that make it fanfiction? When I stop and think twice, only then do I realize: the list is not elevating fanfiction. In fact, I'd argue it's actually derogating fanfiction.

---

Let me tell you a story.

My sister attended an art school, which considering both of us were jocks in high school, I found rather amusing — and, okay, I found pretty much all of the art students pretty amusing, too. I mean, art, art, art, and boy, there was a serious lack of common sense sometimes in the school's dormitories.

Anyway, my second roadtrip up to see her (it became a regular thing), I noticed a sign up on a dormitory billboard. "Come see YOUR NADS!" it shouted, which... ya gotta admit, is probably the last thing you'd expect to see with an official school stamp okaying the poster for distribution. Apparently the school — a school consisting entirely of, well, artists of different ilks — had an ice hockey team. I use that moniker very loosely, mind you, give my sister's pleased statement that, "this year we even have a guy who knows how to skate!"

Yes. It really was that bad.

I believe the 'Nads played, hrm, a university from Connecticut or Massachusetts, the week previous. The beleaguered 'Nads had lost. By about 72-2, and the two goals were clearly pity-goals (but had been met with huge cries of joy from the art students). I said, "that's not ice hockey scores, that's basketball scores." My sister's comment was succinct: "that's because it's not a game, it's a farce."

However, she and her classmates informed me with no little amount of satisfaction, it didn't matter. They still had the best signs.

Imagine this: an art school, hosting a home game, and for them the competition isn't really on the ice. That's just an excuse to get together... and SHOW OFF YOUR SIGNS. The Brown University's ice rink became the scene of every font- and illustration-based crime imaginable, all variations on "GO NADS". The one with the best sign, wins.

If all that matters to you is the competition on the ice — or, more fairly, if your goal is competition and the rest is, well, icing — then you'd probably see this school's team (and its unbroken tradition of being, frankly, permanently defeated) as pretty damn pathetic. But in the view of my sister and most of her friends, you would be missing the point. Game? Game! That's just an excuse, man, LOOK AT THIS AWESOME SIGN I MADE. I mean, we're talking sign wars.

What's important here is that the game was the reason, the excuse, for coming together, and it certainly wasn't secondary. It's just that it wasn't necessarily primary, either: the art students created their own vibrancy, and had buckets of fun doing it. In some ways, you might even say that in knowing they were destined to lose, they were then free to take victory on their terms, as they defined it: by having the best damn signs of any team's fans, ever.

That is where, and how, fanfiction is also victorious.

---

We do a lot of talking in fandom, we fanfiction writers, about how we're just practicing for original fiction, about how this losing team is just a springboard for eventually attending a school with a legitimate ice hockey team where everyone can skate and not just a single right winger. We do the mandatory fan-dance of insisting we're learning a whole lot with every game (and I'm not ignoring that this may be so) — but if this were true, why not just go ahead and write original fiction? It's a matter of saving face in a culture where appropriation and copyright and intellectual property are so regulated — to introduce rationalization of the 'I'm just practicing, it means nothing' sort — but let's be honest, here.

It most certainly does mean something. I dislike anyone diluting our something-ness by trying to tell us that because other hockey teams win (by their standards), we could be awesome, too! It's a consolation prize, but it's one that requires winning at terms not written by fandom.

For many professional fiction writers, including the most recent in the round of ranting, their title of 'original fiction' means that fanfiction thus must be 'un-original fiction'. They win, we lose. And if you can't win, you should get off the ice. Pretending like you're contributing, like you have any hope of it, is wasting the Author's time and confusing the Srs Fanz who are here to enjoy the savory taste of yet another win. That's also, I think, where the especial viciousness comes in from some professional authors. They're not only mad at the fanfiction's hockey team bumbling about on the ice; that's bad enough, but it's made ten times worse when the incompetent hockey team is clearly enjoying the hell out of themselves anyway.

Oh, for crying out loud, it seems to me the Authors are crying, you just look like idiots without a clue and not even having the decency to care. If you can't win — if you can't write Original Fiction — you shouldn't even try. And if you do want to win, then you do it by practicing your original fiction Vrry Srsly, instead of goofing off with this idfic and crackfic crap, and especially stop goofing off on the professional author's own personal ice. The nerve!

I admit that fanfiction, on some levels, is rather silly. There's no clear (financial) benefit, and it's probably something that you don't tell too many folks about, outside your fandom. You want ridiculous, it's hours spent on elaborate signage for a team that will never win, or weeks spent on epic masterpieces that re-use and re-cycle characters from some two-bit, half-run mid-70's American space opera. So, plenty of us don't publicize it, and I daresay a fair number of us also rankle at the hints from well-meaning non-writing friends that maybe it's time to "get serious" and write "real fiction".

Except that this assumes the only reason to play the game, to attend the game, is to win. It ignores that the discourse within fandom (interior and exterior to the subset of fans who write and read fanfiction) creates a communality for which professional fiction has no real correlation. At least, none within the act of creation. After publication, sure, there may be similarities, in terms of attention and discussion and reviews... but the crucial point is that fanfiction is created within a crucible of a community. That's what sets fanfiction apart.

The very fact that the question of reviews and critiques within fandom can create a decent-sized imbroglio all on its own says something to just how strongly we value, and expect, this interaction. Oh, we can certainly say, often quite modestly when speaking to professional writers (or defensively, as the case may be): we'd never make money on this, so reviews are our 'payment', as though that were the sole reason to ever put pixel to screen, as if this justifies our seemingly-ridiculous glee in the game despite our losing team. We discount the pleasure in writing (and exchanging) fanfiction for its own sake, when we try to express our joy in light of someone else's standards, especially when by those standards, we will always lose.

But, like the Nads with the awesomest sign-making fans ever, I think that it's in knowing we're off the board, so to speak, that we have the freedom to do what professional fiction can't. We can play with things: we can riff, and reference, and twist, and distort, and force characters to have sex or flip genders or wake up on a distant planet in bed with a secondary character from a story that wasn't even written in the same language as the first.

We can mock ourselves, and each other, and the characters; we can break every rule of Proper Writing by inserting author's notes mid-paragraph, or detailing that ~this~ means thoughts and #that# means telepathy while *this* means emphasis. We can write scripts and break the fourth wall something fierce; we can take the entire premise of a story and turn it on its head, dump the cast into high school to put on their own play or throw them into a WWII barracks. We make male characters get pregnant, and we make female characters the bane of the rest of the cast's existence, and vice versa and sometimes all at the same time.

All these things we do, and I'm not saying they're all things we would necessarily all agree are good ideas. Hell, a lot of fanfiction revolves around a lot of ideas that aren't just id-fic, but downright idiotic fic. But even those among us who write egregiously low-rent second-rate fanfic that's complete crack with no reason for existing other than the sheer hell of it are still fanfiction writers. They are still part of the fandom, and bring as much vibrancy to the table as any BNF. We may scoff at some of the fanfiction out there and call fanfiction.net a complete pit of suck, but in almost ten years I've yet to meet a single fanfiction writer say of another, "oh, s/he isn't really a fanfiction writer."

You write the story, you post it for the fandom to read, you participate in the community: you are a fanfiction writer. Period, end of sentence. You made your sign, you bought your ticket to the game, you had the guts to stand up and wave your sign for the rest of us to see: you are a fan and that's worth something, no matter what the score at the end. You're here. You're one of us. Let's play.

---

To label professional fiction as 'fanfiction' is, like I said above, a disservice. Not to professional fiction — to them, it's a compliment, if you think of it in terms of implying that they're a leading voice of a significant and vibrant fandom with really awesome signage. But it's a disservice to we denizens of fandom, and especially any fandom's writers.

To grant fanfiction legitimacy by allying it with original-intertextual fiction rather than the multi-directional free-for-all that is fanfiction requires that we simultaneously dismiss, even disparage, the glorious playfulness of fanfiction. It's denying that fandom is the source and audience for our work, and saying that fandom plays no significant role in what we create or how we create it, because here are non-fandom works considered 'fanfiction' and they did it by playing by the rules. It's saying if we want to win (on their terms), we could do it if we played by the rules, too. That's not the intention of the list, but that's one of its messages, underneath.

No, fanfiction will never win, not by original fiction's terms, but that has little to do with rules, ultimately, and everything to do with the pleasure we get, independent of what's on the ice. Like my sister's college ice hockey team, knowing we'll never have the most numbers on the scoreboard is, I think, part of what makes us free to break every rule out there, and then some, and then to rewrite all the rules to suit us and rewrite them again. When you know you can't win on someone else's terms, either you give up, or you figure out a way to win on your own damn terms. Fanfiction does win on its own terms, every time someone posts another chapter or another story, and I won't let non-fandom-born non-fanfiction try to claim — or let someone grant them right to claim — even an iota of our community's victories.

---

Allow me to add, so it's clear: this is not an argument with bookshop, who has post after post that I admire and enjoy. This is an argument with the perception that to legitimize fanfiction, we must do so by emulating and prizing those similar works that are not, underneath, anything like us at all. They lack the one thing that makes us awesome, win or lose: us.

Besides, we have the best signs ever.

Let's play.

Comments

[annotated_em]

*hearts you immensely*

[tesserae]

I *love* the story about the art school's ice hockey team. It's the perfect example of what joy can result from having the courage of your convictions, which is also the thing I love best about fanfiction and its more-than-one-dimensional intertextuality. For me, that's what's alway missing from pro fanfic: the sense of its being part of an ongoing conversation, just as the art students' signs were.

And I *hated* Wide Sargasso Sea; I thought the writing sucked, and never finished it.

[hl]

Uhm, but aren't you implying, by saying: More than that, apparently, if the determination of "acting intertextually" can apply when the original text is a person or group of persons, or even a painting. Or two. It's possible to have intertextuality when you have this text and that text, but first you kinda need a text on both ends, and it wouldn't hurt to have a little inter, too., that RPF and, say, anthropomorfiction, or even a boatload of yuletide fic (many of them, say, retellings of fairy tales) is not fanfiction?

And, uhm, I also would like to remind you do have JA fanfiction writers in your flist, and we aren't particularly respected culturally wise (those spinsters writing Darcy); as always, the distinction is not on the subject of the fic, but on who does it, and in what context (professionally or not).

I think than in not seeing yourself reflected in the paradigm behind that post (that fanfiction is just, in the end, literature, and works mostly the same way that literature has always worked--or at least, that's my conclusion!) you're saying that that paradigm doesn't work for any fans, and any fans who embrace it are doing it to give fanfiction the patina of legitimacy: well, I don't.

I 'do' fanfiction and fandom for two reasons: one is the one you exposed, about community, etc, the other one, because I love literature and making it is a pleasure and a privilege, and not at all ridiculous, even if doing work for no money is discredited in our society. And I know people who do it only for the second reason, and people who do it only for the first, and people who do it for both. And I'm pretty sure there's people who are fans and write fic for entirely different reasons.

[kaigou]

heh. thanks.

[kaigou]

that's what's alway missing from pro fanfic: the sense of its being part of an ongoing conversation

Exactly, and I think that's the part that deserves more respect. I mean, the list establishes that the fundamental action of fanfiction -- to write of, and to reference, a pre-existing thing -- is not, on its own, considered an evil act. (Setting aside the relativistic context of whether there's 'permission' or 'copyright violation', of course.) That's all fine and good, and an argument that has its place, but I dislike that it effectively reduces fanfiction to nothing more than 'retellings and adaptations'.

Dude. I looked at Wide Sargasso Sea and my immediate thought was: who the hell reads Moby Dick when there's not a 9th grade English teacher telling you it's going to be on the test? Is this like the Cliff Notes version (of the original), but with better writing and a twist to the point of view? Regardless of the author's actual skill, I couldn't help but feel like the book was already suspect, in some ways, because of humanity's propensity to latch onto something as a means to proclaim its erudition. And what's more erudite than a truly inaccessible and doorstop-sized epitome of Classic American Literature than freaking Moby Dick?

[windsorblue]

I agree with a whole lot of what you've said here, and it's going to take me some time to chew on what I want to say in response. Other than the knee-jerk "you go, girl", that is.

[shippen_stand]

Here via tesserae. As above, nothing to add at the moment, except...

I'm subscribing to your journal, just to catch if you write something this cogent even once a year.

[kaigou]

I'm just going to truncate the replies, because it's clear you really want to debate this instead of just seeing that this particular post is not a question but a statement of opinion/response. Normally, yes, I am all about the discussion, but not always. So I request you save your thoughts, and raise them again when I do a post that is opening up the floor to wider debate about what is, is not, and could be and could not be, various whatevers of fandom and its creations.

[hl]

Ah, sorry, totally miss-interpreted your intentions with this post.

[kaigou]

No problem. Just look to the next post, instead.

[branchandroot]

It's a consolation prize, but it's one that requires winning at terms not written by fandom.

This, this, this. We are our own thing, and that's a wonderful thing, even thought the part about idiotic-fic is also true.

[tiercel]

I thought Wide Sargasso Sea was about Jane Eyre, not Moby Dick. Also, Moby Dick is an awesome book.

[kaigou]

Ahahahaha. YOU ARE RIGHT. I've been thinking of Ahab's Wife all this time. Oi. Must revise.

Also, I bet you read War and Peace and even liked it.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

This is basically a request for clarification, before I become inadvertently obnoxious at you. Am I correct in assuming from comments above that this post isn't a place where you want to noodle around at the tangle of issues raised? Not at all surprisingly I totally agree with you on some aspects of this, but not on all of them -- but as much fun as trying to figure out where I'm not quite following the argument would be for me, I'm not even remotely interested in playing that game when you didn't mean for this to be a venue for it.

[kaigou]

More like: this is my statement of where I'm at. The post that follows this is the opening for debate. I just didn't want to end up feeling like I was being forced to backpedal on a post where I'm not discussing facts so much as my starting point, if that makes sense.

[tiercel]

Hey now, I'm not /crazy/.

Well, not that crazy anyway.

[kaigou]

I attempted to read Anna Karenina, and was a chapter into it (and starting to like it, oddly) when I overheard my godmother ask my mother if either of them should warn me about the ending, and then my mom ruined it (not realizing I could hear) by saying, "Doesn't Anna throw herself in front of a train?"
OH HAY THANX MOM.