fan fiction redux
Excellent short post on fan fiction by Pat Wrede on her blog recently....
http://pcwrede.com/originality-fanfic...
I had a posted essay on the topic myself, some years back -- good grief, nearly a decade, I see. It may be due for an update, as the fan fic scene has evolved enormously in that time period due to the internet, but the historical retrospective stands. I see my remark in it about e-books not being a mass market -- yet -- is pre-Kindle. Just 9 years later, the majority of my own book sales are now e-books.
http://www.dendarii.com/fanfic.html
(This, and most of my other essays, are included in _Sidelines_. http://www.amazon.com/Sidelines-Essay... The City Pages interview link mentioned at the end is long dead, I'm afraid, speaking of overdue updates.)
It amused me rather, at a couple of recent cons I attended, that the panels on various issues around fan fiction were by far the most energetic and engaging to their audiences. Food for thought, there. Fan fiction is not just failed or wanna-be profic; it is mostly doing other things altogether, and frequently doing them very well indeed.
Ta, L.
http://pcwrede.com/originality-fanfic...
I had a posted essay on the topic myself, some years back -- good grief, nearly a decade, I see. It may be due for an update, as the fan fic scene has evolved enormously in that time period due to the internet, but the historical retrospective stands. I see my remark in it about e-books not being a mass market -- yet -- is pre-Kindle. Just 9 years later, the majority of my own book sales are now e-books.
http://www.dendarii.com/fanfic.html
(This, and most of my other essays, are included in _Sidelines_. http://www.amazon.com/Sidelines-Essay... The City Pages interview link mentioned at the end is long dead, I'm afraid, speaking of overdue updates.)
It amused me rather, at a couple of recent cons I attended, that the panels on various issues around fan fiction were by far the most energetic and engaging to their audiences. Food for thought, there. Fan fiction is not just failed or wanna-be profic; it is mostly doing other things altogether, and frequently doing them very well indeed.
Ta, L.
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Susan
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Apr 02, 2014 06:37AM
Do you consider things like Jo Baker's Longbourn, P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberly, or Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story fan fiction? Not in the amateur writer sense, of course, but taking a loved story to another place?
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Susan wrote: "Do you consider things like Jo Baker's Longbourn, P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberly, or Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story fan fiction? Not in the amateur writer sense, of course, but taki..."I have not read these, though have read other professionally published Holmes pastiches. (I was very fond of The Seven-Percent Solution at one time.) It would depend, I think, on how much the stories are written out of the writer's own vision, for the writer's own psychological needs or agenda, versus how much they are shaped for and by the commercial market and editorial direction. This is, basically, unknowable. On the creation side, the boundaries are very blurred; only when something gets published are hard edges drawn around it, like ink lines over a color wash.
One of the fascinating things about the fanfic scene is how the "Actually, there are no rules here," affects what can be written. What happens to fiction when all the brakes are off?
In the year leading up to and away from my mother's death, I read almost nothing but online fanfic; in part because it was a new discovery, but in part, I think, because it felt like fiction without responsibility, something I needed just then.
Ta, L.
I highly recommend the Dibdin book. Sherlock Holmes fans will either love it or hate it. The end is shocking, but if you think about it, not surprising.
I am studying to be a medievalist, a Hispanic medievalist, to be exact, so you can imagine how thrilled I was to find your Chalion books. They are delightful and I could recognize the broad strokes that you had inserted in the story about Spanish history, even before I looked up information about the books and confirmed it. I read your post about fanfiction of a decade ago and I was really happy to see someone so well versed on my field, although I focus on polemic religious writing and literature rather than just history.I am not a professional fiction writer, but I have written my fair share of fanfiction (a few years ago, back when I had a life, pre-grad school). I find that I agree with your bell curve assessment of the fanfiction quality. I think I started as a fanfic writer with this "self-fulfillment" sort of wish –I wanted to play with someone else's creations and have them do what I wanted. Then I went on to be one of those "interminable, dire and vile" fanfic writers –because truly, I had ideas but I did not have the discipline or the know-how to make them into something that works or something that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Finally I discovered my love for short stories, which I think came up to be "mediocre."
I have given up on writing fiction, at least temporarily. There is also this big pressure of writing something literary in my native language, which is, quite frankly, beyond my abilities. I am one of those truly bilingual people, that thinks and writes in both languages and it ends up being really difficult to get really good at either one of them. And of course, there is the stigma in academia that if you write fiction it must only be literary fiction and anything close to genre writing gets the "ubiquitous nose-wrinkling" thing that my teachers do so well when you talk about what they dub "comercial writing."
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding fanfiction being fiction without responsibility. See, since I didn't think I had any hopes of being published, and I could be sort of "published" by just pushing a button, I had no motivation to become better at writing. Of course I rely, and continue to do so today, on excuses like there is not enough time, and writing fiction makes even less money than academia (to be fair... I am probably going to be a poor woman for the rest of my life, albeit with a string of letters behind my name).
Thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine, here's your broken link: https://web.archive.org/web/200407160...
Ursula wrote: "Thanks to the wonders of the Wayback Machine, here's your broken link: https://web.archive.org/web/200407160..."Good heavens, cool! Thanks!
Ta, L.
It works for almost any old, lost page. Go to archive.org, put in the URL, and they have a history of snapshots of pages at different points in time.
