In Defense of Fanfiction

[masterofmidgets]

So I've been seeing this blog post about fanfiction making the rounds on everybody's flist.

For the record, I've never heard of this woman or her books, although I probably won't go to any great lengths to seek them out now. And I apologize if this isn't all that sense-making, because I've been awake a really long time and my brain is wobbly. But reading everyone's replies to this author has made me think about a few things I wanted to blunder my way through, and what is a blog for if not subjecting people on the internet to my ill-conceived rambling.

So! Leaving behind that Gabaldon is demonstrating a comprehensive misunderstanding of how fanfiction works, how writing works, and how US copyright law works (I'm no expert, but anyone who lived through the scans_daily TOSing got at least a glancing look at fair use and transformative works and general copyright fuckery). Leaving behind that she is choosing to just sort of close her eyes and pretend that there's something fundamentally different about approved transformative works like, oh, The Wide Sargasso Sea or Wicked or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead or I can go on like this for hours. Leaving behind that comparing fanfiction writing to adultery, harassment, and sexual assault is PROBLEMATIC, at best. Leaving all that - it's a lot of that, but we'll leave it anyway - I am continually baffled by the idea I see every time this conversation pops up that fanfiction writers are people who just aren't good enough, brave enough, or dedicated enough to write ~real~ fiction. We want to be authors, we really do, but we're scared and lazy and untalented, so we just mooch off of other people's writing instead.

Fuck. That. Shit.

This matters a lot to me, right at the moment, because it's been kind of a busy week for me. See, you guys already know this (since I never stop talking about it), but I am an English major. I am an English major at motherfucking Stanford, which is pretty damn awesome. Just a few minutes ago I turned in a 7 page paper on the use of dialect to shape anti-slavery arguments in Uncle Tom's Cabin. When I'm done with this I am going to go read Shakespeare. This past weekend, I submitted a grant application to try to get Stanford to give me money so that I can spend my summer writing a book about cooking and food and growing up Latina and losing your family and falling in love. I haven't gotten the grant yet, but if I do, it will be awesome, and my faculty advisor thinks so too. She did her MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she's about to finish her first book, and she is brilliant and amazing, and she thinks I'm brilliant and amazing. I feel like I'm showing off here, but the point of this is not 'ooooh look how awesome I am.' The point is that I want to be real writer, and I am working hard at it, and I am on an academic path to be a real writer.

And that has fuck all to do with being a fanfiction writer.

I'm fairly up-front with a lot of my writing professors about being in fandom, because honestly I think it's been a very good influence on my writing skills and I refuse to be ashamed about that. I've written stories I wouldn't have written, I've tried things I've never done before, I've gotten the chance to work on individual weak elements of my writing without having to worry about stuff like, say, world-building. These are all good things! But they aren't the important things, not really. I don't write fanfiction so I can practice at original fiction. I don't write it because I'm afraid of writing original fiction. And when it comes down to it, I don't write it like original fiction, either. I use different plots and different character types and even different styles in the writing I do for fandom and the writing I do for class, and I don't feel like I have to choose one over the other. THEY ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.

I write fanfiction because when I watch a show or read a book or read a comic or play a game I fall in love and I'm not willing to let it go. I hate when stories are over, because then I start asking myself, but what happens next? and there isn't an answer. Except that there is this huge amazing group of brilliant wonderful writers out there who love these stories as much as I do and they look at them and say, this is what happened next, and this is what happened before, and this is what happened when we weren't looking, and this is what would have happened if they were all runway models or hockey players or zombie-fighters or if they blew up the world or if they were in love or if or if or if and I LOVE IT. Fanfiction lets me walk into a world and never have to leave again, and that is an incredible thing. It isn't disgusting. It isn't immoral.

I guess the point of this is, someday I will be hopefully be a big famous novelist of big famous books, and if anyone wants to write fanfiction about them I will be the happiest person ever, because that would be so fucking cool. And I promise not to be an asshat about it. Although I don't promise not to write fic under a pseudonym of all the weird pairings everyone thinks will never hook up in canon, just to screw with people. :)

Comments

[everysecondtuesday]

I don't write fanfiction so I can practice at original fiction. I don't write it because I'm afraid of writing original fiction. And when it comes down to it, I don't write it like original fiction, either. I use different plots and different character types and even different styles in the writing I do for fandom and the writing I do for class, and I don't feel like I have to choose one over the other. THEY ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
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