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Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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A reminder about who you're writing for, and why
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Hmm - I suspect that a true beginner would lurk on this forum and only the boldest post to this crowd. We are ROBUST after all. ;-)This might be a good place for something I want to talk about: Mary Sue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue
Start with the Wikipedia article.
Mary Sue or Marty Stew are wish-fullfillment characters. They are usually 'too-good-to-be-true' and appear in TV Fan Fiction like Star Trek as well as best-sellers. Bella of Twilight is a Mary Sue and Harry Potter is a Marty Stew.
As more readers are aware of Fan Fiction and Slash (Fan Fiction Erotica) we, as writers, need to be aware of these literary sub-culturea as well.
This is the link to Wikipedia on Slash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fi...
Primarily - street-cred with today's under 40 crowd requires awareness.
I'm not going to tell anyone what or how to write, I just want to bring these matters to your attention.
M/M romance has evolved out of Slash. M/M is VERY hot market. M/M is Man/Man. M/F/M is Male/Female/Male, another hot market. There are other combinations - which brings me to another blog post we should all be aware of:
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/01/201...
All these factors are going to come into play when we are marketing our e-books to readers who are very savvy to the issues in different genre. And just as Mary Sue links to Slash, and Slash links to Romance, Thrillers and Literary fiction have overlapping readers.
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Thank God I'm not so poor I have to work in those markets!
As for Mary Sue, most novels are a form of wish fulfilment, and the better ones are a walking normative case. (Normative = things as they should be.) Mary Sue is worth warning against not because of what she is but because of the crudity with which she is implemented by novices and incompetents.
You may not care. However, this is the world of our readers. We should know who they are and what their reading backgrounds are. This isn't the world of stuffy Trade Publishing. This is the fast and furious free-for-all of Indie publishing.
Mary Sue is definately worth understanding and avoiding. The Dragon Tattoo MC has Mary Sue tendencies - horrendously abused and out for vengence.
Also Fan Fiction is important because so much is translating from Fan Fiction to the Indie world and from there it will filter in to Trade Publishing. It is just as important as Face Book and Twitter.
Dakota's audience is coming straight from that Demographic as is Katie and Jeremy's.
It's all about knowing your reader.
I'm on the younger side compared to a lot of you all and the product of hardcore geek culture (if it's geeky, I probably liked it and/or was involved it at some point). Mary Sue and fan fic are something I'm extremely familiar with. :)I don't know if I let certain reader things really affect my process. It's not that I'm an artist(tm) as much as just a storyteller who wants to tell stories that appeal to me.
Though, I'm rather poor at the moment, so commercial considerations aren't something I ignore entirely. It has changed my prioritization of certain projects. I'm in graduate school for something unrelated to my writing, have kids, et cetera, so have to be pretty careful about time.
My general idea is to write what I want and then see if both my wife and myself enjoy it. We're both avid readers with overlapping but not identical tastes. I figure if a manuscript is interesting to both of us, it has, in general, it'll have an audience.
I'm not above publishing stuff that has little potential audience, though. It's not as if, for example, the world is screaming for Heian-era suspense. Heck, I could probably write a novel a month just in the time I spend researching the Heian-era.
On the other hand, I publish to write one Heian suspense/thriller this year, versus four or so more straight-forward genre books with more built-in audience (YA UF, Regency PNR, and fantasy). I enjoy every book I write, but I honestly can't say that if money wasn't a concern at all that I might not spend more time writing obscure HF about medieval Malta or something. ;)
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You must be pretty young, Kat, if you think trade publishing was stuffy. It is corporate publishing that was stuffy, still is stuffy. Trade publishing in the days of the gentleman publishers might have appeared exclusive and elitist (it wasn't; there was always room for talented and interesting people) but it was a riot. We ate in the best restaurants, we drank vintage wines, we travelled first class, etc, etc, all of which we charged to the publisher. Publishing expense accounts weren't as lavish as those in advertising but they were pretty agreeable.
It is indie publishing that is stuffy in its risible efforts to match the stuffiest aspects of present conglomerate publishing, constantly measuring itself against the worst of the current practices it tries so hard to emulate. It is indie publishing that fears so much that it will offend a single book buyer that it says nothing interesting, ever. Trad publishing, the real thing before the conglomerates, didn't care who it offended, the more the merrier. ("At least we weren't whores," John Blackwell said the last time we spoke.)
Kat says,"Also Fan Fiction is important because so much is translating from Fan Fiction to the Indie world and from there it will filter in to Trade Publishing. ... Dakota's audience is coming straight from that Demographic..."
According to a study I had Gemma commission from Joanna Truscott so that we could better aim Dakota at her target market, the demographic of sports car racing as described in LE MANS a novel is A/B. That's not where they do fan fiction. Even NASCAR is not a blue-collar sport any more, hasn't been for twenty years. Currently the fastest-growing segment of the NASCAR audience luxuriates in median earnings over $75K, and your average NASCAR fan's median family income long since passed $50K; your average NASCAR fan today is a college graduate. They don't have time for fan fiction either. Dakota isn't planning a drag racing book among other reasons because she doesn't know how to speak to people who attend drag races, the only large-scale motor sport with a blue-collar profile.
Kat says, "It's all about knowing your reader."
Quite.
Andre - Fan Fiction has nothing to do with blue-collar. Who told you it did? They gave you bogus information.It is about the tech-savvy under 40 crowd - most of whom are college educated. The very people I've worked with for the last 20 years as a Tech Support Analyst. They are the early adopters of technology - and they are the driving force behind the rapid rise of e-books. They read voratiously - much of it online.
It's okay - I will continue to spoon feed you the 22nd Century.
PS - Yes, I'm VERY young. (Rolling eyes)
Jeremy A. wrote: "I'm on the younger side compared to a lot of you all and the product of hardcore geek culture (if it's geeky, I probably liked it and/or was involved it at some point). Mary Sue and fan fic are som..."You and I speak the same Geek language. (fist bump)
I'm passing useful information to my friends. Not passing judgement on stuffy literary types who scorn genre fiction. (cough, cough)
Mary Sue is a trap easy to fall in. It's a pattern worth avoiding, but you can't unless you know what it is.
I run all my characters through the "Mary Sue Litmus Test' to make sure I'm not fallling into that trap myself.
And here I sit, having no clue what fan fiction is.
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Nothing I've seen since has changed my mind, despite the fact that I've run into some perfectly agreeable people and competent writers have come out fan fiction. It is still my opinion that fan fiction is plagiarism, theft. I think it is simply stupid for writers to permit it, because the writers of fan fiction contaminate the characters and milieu that are the original withers' stock-in-trade.
Kat's idea that fan fiction will be taken up by the big publishers and save literature gave me a chuckle. That's like suggesting that Motown take up tribute bands while the original bands are still recording. The big publishers aren't so stupid as to permit copycats to contaminate or dilute their brands, who are their authors.
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Andre Jute wrote: "Those copycats are thriving already. I keep stumbling across Harry Potter/Hogwarts clones."Interestingly enough, there is an YA UF/PNR author, Cassandra Clare. She's had a fairly good level of success with a trilogy and now is in a second trilogy.
She honed her skills over the years writing Harry Potter fanfic (which is kind of interesting because her genre choices and focus are in a different direction). She was a sort of bigwig in the Harry Potter fandom before transitioning making it with her own writing.
There's also the weird bad lands of media tie-ins where the central creative control of the milieu is looser (such as television-show tie-ins).
Traditionally, for example, the Star Trek and Star Wars franchise have been defined by their two different approaches to tolerance for fan material.
For the most part, Lucasfilm has taken a dim view of any sort of derivative material.
Paramount, with Star Trek though, went the other route tolerating or even encouraging material (provided it wasn't for profit). Not is there tons of fanfic, this has lead to the slight strangeness of entire Star Trek movies and decently long series being made by fans with no connection to Paramount.
Now Star Trek fans are the people who basically established the patterns for modern fandom. They are the ones who pioneered the themed cons, modern fan fiction, heck even slash. Aggressive fan response gave the show an extra season and has fueled other stuff, so it may just be the powers that be took that into account.
There's even a fan series that had several actors from various Star Trek franchises guest starring.
All that, though, isn't based on a single author's material. So the contamination of vision is inherent, perhaps
I go back and forth on what I think of fan fic. I was never all that interested in writing in because I'd rather just put the effort into my own works (even if derivative). I did write a book that was kind of a a YA urban fantasy vaguely inspired by the Wizard of the Oz (used more archetypes than actual characters or plots), so I don't know. Maybe that's kind of the same thing?
I don't know how I'd feel if someone wrote fan fic of work Part of me thinks I'd be flattered, but I suppose it would depend on what that fan fic was.
Would what that guy did with Salinger's Holden Caulfield be considered fan fiction? He got shot down by the courts, didn't he?
On the non-geek side of thing, there's also an entire sub-genre that basically could be called Jane Austen Fan Fic. These books typically are either "further adventures" of Austen characters or insert new characters into interactions with the Austen canon characters.It used to be confined to romance and novels-of-manners, but it's spread out to other genres. I have some author friends who specialize in this sort of thing.
A lot of these books have been trad published, even before the current rise in e-publishing, though they usually were associated more with specialty smaller presses.
There's a decently high-profile book out right now (trad published) called "Death at Pemberly" (high profile enough that I can find it sitting around at places like CostCo and Target), murder mystery with characters from Pride and Prejudice.
Now, on a fundamental level, the big difference in JAFF versus say Star Trek FF is that Jane Austen's work has been in the public domain for a long, long time, so there's no interference with somebody's legal rights or potential livelihood.
It's an interesting phenomenon though.
Other interesting case study just came to mind:The Wind Done Gone.
A version of Gone With the Wind from a point of view of a slave.
I'd actually call this Anti-Fan Fic, in that it was a story written not because of particular love of the initial material but rather perceived extreme deficiencies. No difference legally, I suppose, but interesting philosophically.
The author and publisher were sued by the Mitchell estate who still held the copyright. Initially, there was some talk of it being protected under protections for parody works. At the first major legal hurdle (a US appeals court), the defendants were on the way to victory. The appeals court reversed an earlier decision against them.
Now, it never got any higher than that though because the publishing company settled out of court with the Mitchell estate and then went on to publish the book. No royalty split though, I think they just handed them some cash.
EDIT: Actually, I suppose being Anti-Fan Fiction may have legal implications (at least in the US) because if one is satirizing the material, one can try and claim parody.
I ran into the wide-spread Darkover Fan Fiction community through a writer's forum called Forward Motion. Bradley launched a dozen writers, Mercides Lackey and Holly Lisle amongst them.The influence is everywhere - Even Dean Wesley Smith wrote Star Trek and Star Wars tie-ins under several different pen names. He still writes under several different pen names.
"Pride and Predudice with Zombies" can be called Fan Fiction or Smoosh. And the entire M/M (Male/Male) Romance craze started from Slash.
The Vampire craze goes back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction.
Patrica - Google Fan Fiction, and you will see it. There are websites with gigs of stories from different movies, TV shows, video games - all written by fans. Many of these fans have adopted pen names are now Indie writers.
Even more are voraious readers - they've picked up the e-readers and run with them.
Andre Jute wrote: "Thanks, Kat. I'm sure you mean well."I have all my friends' best interest at heart.
I was about to write about the fuckups indies perpetrate by closely imitating the worst features of traditional publishing, as if that would somehow legitimise them, when I stumbled across this piece from La Rusch, which says it quite as well as I would, and more politely.
Of course we're all professionals or aspiring professionals with several books and working on more, and it is a bit sad that on ROBUST we don't get more of the true beginners that we could help, but all the same the warning is timely after the recent threads running to many pages minutely dissecting free giveaways.