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Fanfiction: The Why and the Way
Sep. 3rd, 2003 01:46 pmNeil Gaiman talking about fanfiction. http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2002_04_07_archive.asp#75170854
Neil has some very good things to say, and about the best stance you can hope for from a writer, I think. Led me to thinking about fanfiction, and the whole point of it, at least for myself.
t's funny. When I started fanfic, I was an art student in college, a little bored and looking for more reasons to put off assignments. I wasn't thinking about a writing career at that point, nor was I sure what I really wanted to get out of it. Consequently, I spent most of that time reading, and very little of it plucking away on my first work. Ended up leaving the art side, andfound myself in Journalism. Writing became the career choice. So, it became time to revisit that fanfiction thing.
Well, fanfic isn't a career, despite what people may have you think, and I was looking to sell my work for money. Lots of money, preferably. Only trouble was that I still had a lot of skills to learn, and needed to find where to do that. I never liked the creative writing classes in high school because I don't feel you can teach creativity. You can teach style, genre, atmosphere, characterization and the technical guts of writing, but the ideas are something you either have or you don't have.
I used to be part of the DelRay Sci-Fi on-line workshop. GINGERBLUE won an Editor's Choice award back a few years ago as Most Promising Opening Chapter. I was trying to focus on original work, but found two major problems. First, large original mailing lists are like throwing work into a vacuum. Feedback and reviews are rare at best, and at worst, non-existant. The second problem was that as soon as you 'publish' a piece of work on-line, you basically can not sell it. Fanfiction suddenly seemed to be the best way to get around that.
Remember the hubbub on the WEF a few years ago, about fanfiction? One thing that I noticed during those arguements was that those who were deriding fanfiction were doing so based on the idea that all fanfiction authors wanted to be comicbook writers. So, by wasting their time with non-original work, they were actually 'parasites' on the genre. I rather liked Steve Gerber's rant about how anyone who doesn't write about their own work isn't fit to call themselves a writer. They gently pointed out that all of the current comic greats had worked on a property created by someone else at some point, and then led him away to get his medication. The ever constant line was 'why don't they write and post their own original fiction', again missing the point that internet published fiction is basically unsellable, and most people who intend to write professionally want to keep a hold of their ideas as currency for the future. As for thr 80% or so that don't want to write professionally, writing withen a fandom is the enjoyment.
That's how I looked on fanfiction around the time of my first story. This is the perfect test ground for all sorts of things. Even if I screw it up, I'm going to get feedback and people telling me where I went wrong. It means that I don't have the fanbase other writers who concentrate on specific characters or genres, but I do have one of the most varied bodies of work of any comic fanfiction writer. I've done one of the few crime thrillers, worked in Victorian prose, dealt with non-sympathic villians in the first person. Run through comedy, drama, horror, parody, and even a musical. Each of those areas has added to my toolkit of writer's tricks.
Over the last year or so, I've been slowly pulling away from fanfiction. Not due to a lack of ideas or a diminished love of it, but due to simple economics. I came into the fandom to learn writing tools that I didn't have, and to a large extent I've done so to the point that the professional work is getting noticed and considered. Plus, I write full time for a living these days, and even if it is commercial shilling, it's well paid commercial shilling. I plan to be a full time fiction writer in a few years, which will really put things on the move. I've largely done so by going through and treating the medium of fanfiction as a professional one. Now, taking those lessons has got me past the next step, and on to the one past.
The thing Gaiman gets is that a writer writes, and whether just as a fan, supporting the work or as an intended professional, working towards actual publication, fanfiction serves as an asset, and not a challenge. And yes, RPS is really really creepy too.
Neil has some very good things to say, and about the best stance you can hope for from a writer, I think. Led me to thinking about fanfiction, and the whole point of it, at least for myself.
t's funny. When I started fanfic, I was an art student in college, a little bored and looking for more reasons to put off assignments. I wasn't thinking about a writing career at that point, nor was I sure what I really wanted to get out of it. Consequently, I spent most of that time reading, and very little of it plucking away on my first work. Ended up leaving the art side, andfound myself in Journalism. Writing became the career choice. So, it became time to revisit that fanfiction thing.
Well, fanfic isn't a career, despite what people may have you think, and I was looking to sell my work for money. Lots of money, preferably. Only trouble was that I still had a lot of skills to learn, and needed to find where to do that. I never liked the creative writing classes in high school because I don't feel you can teach creativity. You can teach style, genre, atmosphere, characterization and the technical guts of writing, but the ideas are something you either have or you don't have.
I used to be part of the DelRay Sci-Fi on-line workshop. GINGERBLUE won an Editor's Choice award back a few years ago as Most Promising Opening Chapter. I was trying to focus on original work, but found two major problems. First, large original mailing lists are like throwing work into a vacuum. Feedback and reviews are rare at best, and at worst, non-existant. The second problem was that as soon as you 'publish' a piece of work on-line, you basically can not sell it. Fanfiction suddenly seemed to be the best way to get around that.
Remember the hubbub on the WEF a few years ago, about fanfiction? One thing that I noticed during those arguements was that those who were deriding fanfiction were doing so based on the idea that all fanfiction authors wanted to be comicbook writers. So, by wasting their time with non-original work, they were actually 'parasites' on the genre. I rather liked Steve Gerber's rant about how anyone who doesn't write about their own work isn't fit to call themselves a writer. They gently pointed out that all of the current comic greats had worked on a property created by someone else at some point, and then led him away to get his medication. The ever constant line was 'why don't they write and post their own original fiction', again missing the point that internet published fiction is basically unsellable, and most people who intend to write professionally want to keep a hold of their ideas as currency for the future. As for thr 80% or so that don't want to write professionally, writing withen a fandom is the enjoyment.
That's how I looked on fanfiction around the time of my first story. This is the perfect test ground for all sorts of things. Even if I screw it up, I'm going to get feedback and people telling me where I went wrong. It means that I don't have the fanbase other writers who concentrate on specific characters or genres, but I do have one of the most varied bodies of work of any comic fanfiction writer. I've done one of the few crime thrillers, worked in Victorian prose, dealt with non-sympathic villians in the first person. Run through comedy, drama, horror, parody, and even a musical. Each of those areas has added to my toolkit of writer's tricks.
Over the last year or so, I've been slowly pulling away from fanfiction. Not due to a lack of ideas or a diminished love of it, but due to simple economics. I came into the fandom to learn writing tools that I didn't have, and to a large extent I've done so to the point that the professional work is getting noticed and considered. Plus, I write full time for a living these days, and even if it is commercial shilling, it's well paid commercial shilling. I plan to be a full time fiction writer in a few years, which will really put things on the move. I've largely done so by going through and treating the medium of fanfiction as a professional one. Now, taking those lessons has got me past the next step, and on to the one past.
The thing Gaiman gets is that a writer writes, and whether just as a fan, supporting the work or as an intended professional, working towards actual publication, fanfiction serves as an asset, and not a challenge. And yes, RPS is really really creepy too.
