Dee vs. Fanfic // VOID-STAR.NET

So the other day I was cruising around Fandom Wank, lookin’ for lulz, when I came across this post. In a nutshell, it’s someone lulzing over a ‘professional’ author’s diatribe against fanfiction. I should just point out before we begin that this guy’s main claim to fame is writing Monk and Diagnosis Murder tie-in books. Note that he’s not the guy who created either of these shows, he just writes books based on them. And he rails against fanfic.

I’m just gonna let that one settle in your mind for a moment. Okay? Okay.

I don’t really have such an issue with the guy’s hard-on for ripping into the OTW. Don’t get me wrong, I write fanfic and I support it as far as my own work (original or fannish; and I love the way fanfic eats its parents) is concerned, but as a legal entity it’s on shaky ground at best and I’m not convinced I think that the ‘right’ to produce fanfic should be enshrined in law or anything. If an author really objects to it (or, worse; it’s RPS and the individual objects to it), they should retain the right to take action against it’s publication. That being said, the one thing JKR (if not the WB) gets right is the realisation that the fen is the equivalent of your own foot; shooting it is a comparably bad idea and if you have to take it off, a gentle amputation is the best way. I can say this, incidentally, with the supreme confidence of someone who loathes the Harry Potter books with all of my being and yet owns copies of them. Why? Because I had to read the canon to keep up with the pr0n. I can hand-on-my-heart say that if I hadn’t been a deckhand on the HMS Snarry then there’s no way in hell you’d be getting me to read that trash. As my interest in the fandom waned, so did my inclination to spend money on the canon. More recently, the fen has brought coin into the purses of DC by getting me interested in The Authority, and through that the wider DCU. Fanfic is not the written equivalent of movie piracy; it’s a supplement to the source material, not a replacement for it. And this brings me back to one of the complaints against fanfic that rears its head in the comments (though not by the OP), namely:

fan fiction is usually devoid of character description, including each character’s idiosyncrasies and each character’s unique way of talking and dealing with others, because its writers assume that fanfic readers already know the characters. In typical fan fiction there is not even a physical description of the characters. That means that the work is incomplete and cannot stand on its own, and therefore it has limited artistic merit.

Quoted From: Richard S. Wheeler

I find this comment interesting in that it’s both right and wrong, and also completely misses the point. As a world-be author of original fiction I can tell you that one of the hardest barriers to break is getting your readers interested in your characters. And character development itself is hard; it’s a skill many professional writers struggle vainly with, let alone amateurs and would-be professionals like yours truly. But character development is not the only skill in writing, and the thing I love about fanfic is that it gives me an medium to flex my other writing muscles. Maybe I want to work on evocative prose. Or action. Or smut. Or Xanatos Gambit-style plot construction. Sure, I can do all of these things with original characters but the edge that fanfic gives me is that I can do it on the sly. My non-fen writing experiments will invariably raise little comment, but I can throw a piece of fanfic out into the wild and reel it back with a string of reader comments attached. It’s called feedback for a reason, and learning to read it — even just the “OMG THIS ROCKS WRITE MORE!” type — is part of the art of the experienced fanficcer.¹

Think of it outside a fic for a minute. If I’m in conversation with someone and I happen to mention that recently I have been “kicking more ass than Batman”, I have a reasonable expectation that whomever I’m talking to will have enough of a mental image of Batman in their head to understand that he is an experienced kicker of ass, and by saying I am kicking more I mean I am kicking a lot. Thus this analogy works, whereas “kicking more ass than Lusiphur” does not, on account of the target of comparison being relatively obscure.

Fanfic takes this idea to the nth degree, primarily due to the fact that it is targeted at the fen. The writer doesn’t have to worry about explaining what a boom tube is, because the readers are expected to know. This means that when fandom-specific concepts pop up, unexplained, they do not derail suspension of disbelief in the way they would do in a standalone work. Actually, the emphasis is on the reader to understand² and what this all means for an author is that they are liberated from the onus of describing setting and instead freed up to concentrate on developing other aspects of the story. Ironically, the skill generally developed is creating an emotional connection to the reader (since common wisdom is that gen just doesn’t happen) and this is arguably the most difficult thing of all.

I’m not saying that fanfiction authors never do work developing characters and settings outside the box — they do and it’s called fanon — on that they don’t have to because the genre itself dictates that such things are non-essential. Saying that this trait means that the work is incomplete and cannot stand on its own, and therefore it has limited artistic merit is a bit like saying the dada manifesto fails because there’s a picture of the Mona Lisa with a mustache on the cover and you require a background in art history to understand what the fuss is all about. Whether you like dada or not is a moot point; it was influential, it’s displayed in galleries and it makes people money. So too is fanfic.

Sure, okay, I’d be surprised if Music of the Spheres — for all that I love it and inadvertently copy it — wound up preserved in the Library of Congress, or wherever posh old books are kept, but that’s not really the point either. As far as I’m concerned, the ‘point’ of fanfic can pretty much be summed up as:

• Escapism for the author. Don’t like the love interest? Don’t like the ending to the story? Think the canon glossed over something really interesting? Then change it.
• Escapism for the reader. As above, but vicariously.
• Writing practice. Not all authors do it deliberately, but it usually happens by osmosis at the very least thanks to…
• Chasing e-Fame.The best writers (or, at least, the writers with the most enjoyable stories; and the two things are often not the same) tend to float to the top. It’s a relatively enjoyable way to get known if you can pull it off.

And without getting into some vast and terrible debate over modernist versus postmodernist interpretations of what ‘art’ is, exactly, I’m personally quite happy to ascribe artistic merit to anything that works on the above levels.

Think of it this way, kids: What would you rather read? Fanfic (of your choice), or Diagnosis Murder novels.

Yeah. Thought so.

1. One of the things I love about the Blark community on LJ is the amazingly detailed feedback left by some of the key players; generally all skilled authors themselves. I’m hopeless at feedback so always feel like a heel, but those long comments? The ones where you’ve quoted every line in the fic that ‘works’ for you, even if your only comment on it is *squee!*? Even if it’s not my own fic? Those are invaluable, because it tells me the points that people make an emotional connection to the story, and to an author that shit is gold man. You guys rock. ^
2. This left me in the very surreal experience the other day of accidentally finding myself reading Smallville fic (it snuck up on me I swear!) without ever really paying attention to the series. I spent most of the plot thinking, “Wait… they did what to Lex now?” It’s like tuning into the middle of a TV series and having to fill in the gaps as you go. Confusing, but not in a way that interferes with the enjoyment of the story itself. ^
3. Note: I don’t ^