NANDINI NAYAR
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Apr05 Enid Blyton I

PENI GRIFFIN

Mar05 Last Column
Feb05 What's In Your Notebook?
Jan05 Read A Little Louder
Nov/Dec04 Creativity IV
Oct04 Creativity III
Sep04 Creativity II
Aug04 Creativity
Jun/Jul04 Social Angst and All That
May04 Reading In Public
Apr04 Elephant In The Living-Room
Mar04 Literary Synchronicity
Feb04 The Most Important Thing in the World
Jan04
Year-End Wrap-Ups
Dec03 Editors... They Ain't Want You Want, They're What You Need
Nov03 The Secret Formula for Originality - Revealed!
Oct03 An Incoherent Message Concerning Narrative Structure; or 'Reality. What a concept.'
Sep03 Preaching to the Choir
Aug03 FanFic

on ACHUKACHAT, the website discussion board...

Fanfic
The Literary Twilight Zone

An entire publishing subgenre exists to feed the appetite for more Holmes, more Trek, more this, more that. My husband has five 70-inch long shelves dedicated to the accumulation of Sherlock Holmes material, and four 107-inch shelves (double-stacked) devoted to Star Trek; and that's without tapping the vast underworld of the mimeograph machine and the internet. The walls between literary worlds grow thin in our imaginations, cross-pollination occurs, and Lord knows what will happen then. Typical is the sprawling, complex family tree which Philip José Farmer has drawn up, jumbling his favorite characters into a hodgepodge of relationships, demonstrating, among other things, that Professor Moriarty and Captain Nemo are the same person. Writers re-make popular characters to suit their tastes, turning Holmes into weird science fiction (as in Exit Sherlock Holmes, by Robert Lee Hall, 1977, in which Holmes and Moriarty are time-traveling clones); or they run off on tangents, chronicling the adventures of Inspector Lestrade or Mrs. Hudson or Irene Adler; or they graft their own characters onto the canon. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't - it depends, not only on the skill of the derivative author, but on the respect with which he treats the character.

Conventional publishing is constrained by legal and market factors which at least define an artistic space. But what if there is no market in the cash-credit-capital sense? What if the law is vague or poorly understood? What if you're a 15-year-old enthusiast with an outlet and no concept of intellectual property?

That's how fanfic happens.

I have myself committed fanfic. If you've ever wondered how Scully and Mulder would have functioned in a triple-decker Victorian Gothic novel, The Light in the Tower at Mulder Manor is for you. "Mulder Manor" was an exercise in writing to an audience and being funny on purpose. I apologize to no one for it.

For someone who wishes to write as a hobby, or who wishes to hone new skills in an accepting environment, fanfic is ideal. Just starting out, don't know how to make up characters, settings, plots? Borrow some, see how you do. Don't quite understand how setting and character relate? Borrow a setting from this author and a character from another, toss them together, see what you get. Why not? In what way is it different from copying the moves of your favorite player during football practice? Isn't this precisely what you'll have to do if you go for a career in television or comic book scripting? Relax, go ahead, it's fine.

Many stories are circulated among a small group of friends and are riddled with in-jokes. Others concentrate on developing secondary characters, play with viewpoints, or bring together disparate elements for dramatic or humorous effect. The major fan sites, such as fanfiction.net, provide a real service to amateur authors, offering critiques ("betas") and advice. It's all in good fun and often results in improved writing skills.

Well, yes, but -

While searching for a quote I was considering using for last month's column, I went to the (author-sanctioned) Lois McMaster Bujold site at "The Bujold Nexus," and got distracted checking out the fanfic. Down at the bottom of the page I found the "crossover" material, four out of five of which finds Bujold's far-future spacefarers interacting with the denizens of Hogwarts. Reading these, I found myself wading on the fringes of an implied vast ocean of alternate literary experience, in which Snape has got three wishes from a giant squid, and Draco Malfoy changes sides and becomes romantically linked with Neville Longbottom (if I didn't misinterpret the subtext).

It's clear from the way these are written that a group of people exist who have created this alternate Hogwarts in cozy isolation, one's imagination feeding into another as they drift farther and farther from the original. How does this affect how they read the new books as they come out? Do they ever get confused about which version they're dealing with? To what extent are they playing with someone else's toys and putting them back when done, and to what extent are they hijacking them? Uncomfortable memories pop up, unbidden, of the way I felt when my brother appropriated my dolls as victims in some Captain Action adventure.

The Washington Post (June 18, 2003, Section A, Ariana Eunjung Cha) did an article on Harry Potter fanfic in the frenzied days leading up to the release of Order of the Phoenix. One author cited, Christina Teresa, has posted a 250-page novella from Snape's POV. That's not a hobby or a game - that's serious writing! But why would anybody spend so much time and effort writing a book for which they cannot get paid, and could conceivably get sued, when the entire thing might be rendered moot by the next legitimate book? If you're going to put that much effort into it, why not write your own stuff?

Also in the "I don't get it" category is "NC-17" or "X-rated" fanfic. Okay, so I sort of get it. Your imagination is not restricted by time, space, reality, or good taste, and projecting your sexual/romantic fantasies onto imaginary people is arguably healthier than projecting them onto real ones. It doesn't bother me to know that there are folks out there imagining erotic relationships between Kirk and Spock, or creating a sex life for Snape. It only bothers me a little that they're inventing sex lives for Draco and Neville. What I don't understand is why anybody wants to share this stuff. Talk about embarrassingly private!

Yet there's an awful lot of this sort of thing out there; so much so that when fanfiction.net, prompted by cease-and-desist letters from copyright holders, removed all "NC-17" material, an alternate site devoted to erotic and violent Potter fanfic was started up. The attitude of one of the founders toward the protests of publishers is that they are "stifling the creativity of writers who want to explore more mature themes." Nonsense. Why can't they write the stuff and keep it private; or use the tried-and-true pornographer/parodist dodge of changing the names, or - here's a radical thought - create their own characters? That's essentially what they've done by the time they reach the point of taking their borrowed people through actions they would never take in a story by the original creator, anyway.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the denizens of any particular fansite have been unreasonably harassed by corporate lawyers. Corporations, being imaginary entities without senses of humor or proportion, have been known to attack their own fan bases in an attempt to control intellectual property, alienating people whom they should be educating into volunteer support staff. The science fiction subculture has a much better model of fan/author relations, in writers like Bujold and the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, who not only tolerate but encourage fan fiction, and thus retain some control over the extended lives of their creations.

However, insisting, as some do, that as long as the fanfic writer makes no money from his labor the original author has no right to complain, shows a lack of respect for creators that is disturbing in aspiring writers, though not all that different from the way society treats us generally. Having fun while honing your craft is one thing; living as a parasite on another's invention is quite another. Fanfic writers get all kinds of personal benefits out of their efforts - ego gratification, peer recognition, artistic satisfaction - without the trouble and intellectual expense of starting from scratch. The least they can do is respect the right of those who did the original work to set boundaries for their own creations.

But haven't I asserted many times that, once it's out of the word processor and into the reader's head, the author cannot control what happens to his work, or what it means?

Yes. And I still assert that.

I don't say that it will always be easy to tell the difference between parody and plagiary; between practice and parasitism; but there is a difference, and attention must be paid. Life is rough like that.

Fanfic is a natural impulse. Re-read Bullfinch, the ballads of Robin Hood, whatever the oldest stories are that you can access. Don't a lot of them sound as if they originated in fertile secondary minds, playing with the core characters, trying out situations, grafting one reality onto another? Obviously, this sort of activity is not bad per se; nor is it necessarily true that it will create inferior art in the long run; though at its inception it is to real literature as crochet to a pattern is to fine lace.

But in modern times, these efforts are not subject to the long process of oral revision as the stories pass from mouth to mouth, crudities polished into art by more skillful tongues, the least worthy effusions falling into oblivion. What you write is what you get, these days.

I don't know how Aesop and Homer and the Beowulf Poet dealt with imitators; I don't know if their livelihoods and reputations were threatened by such people; I don't know if their feelings were ever hurt by somebody else's handling of their material.

But I know that, independent of intellectual property law, someone who creates something that affects you enough that you want to expand on it, imitate it, and make it over into something of your own, deserves better of you than to have that creation hijacked in public. Before you post a piece of fiction riffing off of someone else's work, ask yourself: How should I expect the author to feel if he reads this?

If the answer is "mad enough to spit," for heaven's sake, keep it to yourself! The Golden Rule isn't enforceable, but you're not some internet troll whose ethical sense doesn't extend past the ability of outside forces to punish him. You're a writer. Act like one - responsibly, and with consideration for your fellows.

Resources and References

Sugarquill - All Harry, all the time
Fanfiction.net - Everything. Read at your own risk. (Includes riffs on one-shot stories such as Ella Enchanted, disrupting one of my notions about series. Hey, it wouldn't be any fun if I were right all the time.)
Fictionised - A new site, still sparse; but if you've never done this before and the others intimidate you, this'll ease you into the subculture
Restricted Source - "NC-17" Harry Potter fiction. Sample before judging.
For those who want more Holmes - Laurie R. King's Mary Russell novels are impossible to describe to a Holmes fan without a bad reaction, but are excellent once you get over the conceptual hump. I talked to her briefly at Bouchercon in Austin last year, and she complained that everyone tells her they had to be forced to start reading the Russell books. Since I'm one of those people, offering a link so maybe one of my readers will discover her without being hit on the head seems the least I can do.
The Light in the Tower at Mulder Manor - Sorry about the pop-up windows; it's not my site. You can link to lots of other XF fanfic if you're interested. And don't come to me asking "where's the rest?" I only wrote part of each chapter, because it would have taken three years of my life, without pay, to write the thing properly, and I would have had to come up with a plot that made sense, instead of creating the illusion of one.
The Bujold Nexus - Bujold's take on fanfic, and check out the awful covers she's been saddled with before you settle in to the Barrayaran folklore, filksongs, and Shakespeare's Tam Lin.
Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust - No fanfic here, though during her lifetime MZB oversaw the publication of anthologies of fan-written stories set in her Darkover world. Her 1986 essay on why prayer is not answered is a side-trip well worth taking.
Phillip José Farmer's "Wold Newton" geneology - An intimate knowledge of late-19th/early 20th pulp and adventure fiction is required to get even half the jokes. This is not a recommendation for Farmer's work, btw - I don't think he respects his own characters, let alone anybody else's. But his books are excellent examples of what can be done in this vein by one with no inhibitions; and many people do like them, I don't know why.

AUGUST 2003

Editor: Michael Thorn
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