I’ve written one piece of fanfic, back when I was in my teens, featuring the Uncanny X-Men, the supervillain Arcade, and an embarassingly thinly disguised version of me. I’m curious what people’s experience in the arena of fanfic are — what do you think someone gets out of writing it? Is there a world that you’d find more tempting than others to write fanfic in? Is it a useful exercise, an entertaining diversion, or a waste of time?
As always, you have the option of posting something unrelated to the topic, if you’ve got a snippet or observation you want to toss into the comments!
1 • Fábio said:
June 20th, 2008 at 1:55 pm, permalink
Cat, in fact I wrote several fanfics a few years ago. I did it at a time when I wasn´t satisfied with what I´ve been writing so far, so I decided to just sit back and relax.
But even now, I get myself thinking that some of those stories (all of them published at http://www.hyperfan.com.br/ – sorry, they´re available in Portuguese only) worked as very useful exercises for me. I´m especially fond of a Hellblazer story I wrote in which John Constantine goes to Rio de Janeiro with his punk band Mucous Membrane, gets in touch with afro-brazilian dark cults and Umberto Eco at the same time. I could play with some postmodern tropes, and, what the hell, it made me happy.
2 • Michael Gordon said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:07 pm, permalink
I think I only actually wrote fanfic once (as opposed to just living it through daydreams for my entire childhood and adolescence) after seeing Matrix Revolutions. I was so disappointed with the film I felt the need to write my own version. It picked up at the end of the second film and, while it did not feature a character representing myself, it did have one of my own fictional characters as a vital piece of the story.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people writing fanfiction, though my opinion may chance should I become a published author and stumble across a bit of slash-fic featuring characters I would never want to think of that way… but that’s a very specific kind of fanfic. In general I think if someone’s got potential to be a great author they should be spending their time on original works, and for everyone else, well, it harms no one.
3 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:11 pm, permalink
Fan fiction? Well, I can tell you, genre fans are interesting enough, you don’t need to write fiction about them. Anyone who has been to a genre convention can tell you that. Geesh.
Oh! Fiction written BY fans. I see.
4 • Cat Rambo said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:13 pm, permalink
The Constantine story sounds awesome – I wish I could read Portugese!
I also really like the idea of fanfic as “the way the story should have gone” – it hadn’t occurred to me as a spur for it.
5 • Michael Gordon said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:15 pm, permalink
One must also differentiate fanfic that can actually be published, primarily fiction using public domain characters. If Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Thursday Next series, Anno Dracula, and Fables count as fanfiction then I am all for it.
6 • Fábio said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:16 pm, permalink
Maybe I can translate it for you soon – it´s a short piece.
7 • Michael Gordon said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:23 pm, permalink
Fanfic for aspiring comic book writers is probably extremely useful, like a portofolio/sketchbook for an artist. You never know when a fanfic writer for X-Men will become a paid writer for X-Men, for example.
8 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 2:50 pm, permalink
I agree with Michael. If your goal is to be a genre fiction writer, then write original materials.
I can see how some might argue that writing fanfic can be a training exercise for writers, providing them with known settings and characters to practice their plotting, dialogue, etcetera upon.
But writing your own work that you can submit for publication takes time. Time to write it, time to edit it, time to submit it, and edit it, and submit it, and edit it, and submit it … and to write your next story or book in-between the editing and submitting.
It’s like that saying, “a writer writes,” except to add that a writer who wants to be published writes to be published.
It is hard sometimes to stay focused, or to figure out how to get past that one point in your story, or how to fix that one thing you know isn’t working in your book. And things like fanfic are evil distractions, the path of least resistance, a way to feel productive without moving towards the real goal. As are blogs. But we won’t go there
Also, when you write entirely original material, the characters sometimes take you on unexpected paths. When creating the world, you find the need for unexpected plot points or characters or entire cultures. Minor characters insist on larger roles. Etcetera and so forth. So by going with established characters and settings and cultures, you limit the sources of inspiration, you shackle your Muse.
BUT, for everyone else, fanfic is awesome. It’s another way to have fun and play with the source material, and to exercise our imaginations, and to participate in a social experience with others who share the same interest. All good stuff.
9 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 3:05 pm, permalink
IDEAS FOR COUNTRY-WESTERN STAR TREK
Firefly was a brilliant series, so much so that I wouldn’t feel worthy to write fanfic about it.
So instead, here’s some of my ideas for a Country-Western Star Trek fanfic universe:
1. Mudflaps with chrome naked ladies are hung from the warp nacels.
2. Scotty keeps an endless, secret stash of Romulan Chew.
3. Kirk, the greatest hand-to-hand fighter ever seen, is constantly being challenged for his Wrestling Federation of Planets Belt.
4. There is increased racial tension on the bridge when Kirk insists on putting the Dixie flag above the Federation symbol.
5. Instead of constantly adjusting his uniform top when he stands, Picard adjusts the sock in his black denim pants.
6. DeAnna Troy is grabbed by the crew, given a buzz cut, forced to down three beer bong shots, then stranded on a deserted planet, because many of the male crew members absolutely DO NOT want to get in touch with their feelings.
Riker, however, does pause to mention how much she resembled Barbara Streisand in Yentl with her hair all short like that.
He is promptly beaten.
7. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the crew returns to earth of the past to bring two bovine cows back to the future so that they can be “real” cowboys. However, upon reaching the past, they discover that even then most “cowboys” had never touched a real cow. Disappointed, they take a pair of Freightliner trucks back instead.
8. The Federation is dependent on Romulan oil reserves, ravaged by a horrible poverty rate, and under constant criticism from all other races for polluting the universe with their S.U.V.s (Shuttlecrafts Using V-8s), which max-out at warp 2 and only get 14 lightyears per gallon.
Whoopie Goldburg’s character, “sensing” that reality has been shifted somehow, investigates and discovers that Romulan agents went back in time and helped George Bush Jr. become an earth American president in the 20th century, thus setting technological and environmental advancement back immeasurably.
She is able to finally prove to the crew that they are in the alternate, evil reality because shortly after the Romulans arrived and began establishing their mind-control transmissions (disguised as right-wing conservative radio shows) circa 1992, most of the men started wearing goatees.
10 • Jeremiah Tolbert said:
June 20th, 2008 at 3:24 pm, permalink
Fanfic is a direct product of the digital age. I’m sure it existed before internets and protointernets, but this technology has allowed it to flourish.
Everywhere you have media that encourages people to interact with it. Video games, social websites, and so on. The internet is a collaborative medium, and the barriers of entry to publishing content is about as low as you can get.
It seems to me that it is completely natural that people have expected to be able to “play” with their media because that’s what everything else wants them to do. Whether the insert themselves or not isn’t the issue that concerns me. What I find utterly fascinating about it is that thanks to the internet, the line between producer of media and consumer of media is nearly vanishing. The fan and writer divide? Nearly nonexistent in SF these days.
I think this can only be viewed as a good thing. Now, I frown on the practice of people trying to make money off the copyrights of others, but fans doing it for their entertainment, and their friends can only help the original copyright holder.
As a writer, I would be nothing but pleased to find out someone was writing fanfic based on my work. Maybe I should be writing video games, because that kind of interaction with my work excites me.
11 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 4:33 pm, permalink
Personally, I tend to have more fun mocking bad movies or shows than writing my own episodes.
Great point, Michael, that comic fanfic might be used as a kind of portfolio for getting a job working on whatever it is you fanficked (is that a word? Well, it is now).
And Jeremiah, yeah, I totally would dig it if someone wrote a fanfic story about one of my works. Because, you know, that would mean my work was published. And liked.
Perhaps fanfic is the grownup version of playing with action figures.
You know, for those grownups who don’t just play with the action figures.
Damn. The head just came off of my Randiana Jones. Excuse me a sec …
12 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 6:00 pm, permalink
On this day in history, Muhammad Ali was convicted of refusing induction into armed services (1967). How is this genre-related? Well, for me, personally, Muhammad Ali will always be a true hero, not only because of how he spoke, and spoke out, but also because he appeared in a Superman versus Muhammad Ali comic book that is one of my vivid memories from childhood. http://www.supermantv.net/articles/ali.htm
They don’t seem to do many cross-over comics like that anymore, making one-offs based around real world heroes. Or do they? Maybe I just don’t see them.
There were also the old Hostess snack comic ads, or the Radio Shack comics like the TRS-80 Whiz Kids, who used their IBM home computer to thwart criminals, with the help of superheroes like Superman and Wonder Woman: http://snarkfree.blogspot.com/2005/08/top-five-general-comic-book.html .
Anyway, as a lame way to tie this back around to the blog topic, I suppose you could compare these spinoff/ commercial comics almost a kind of professional fanfic for profit.
PS – Also on this day in genre history, Errol (Leslie Thomson) Flynn was born in 1909. I loved watching movies like Captain Blood and The Adventures of Robin Hood when I was young (still do). True fantasy movies, especially decent ones, are far and few between, but the swashbuckling period pieces fill the gap nicely. I include Zorro in that group. Give me a good sword duel or fancy bow work, and I don’t even miss the lack of magic or aliens or time travel. Much.
13 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 6:04 pm, permalink
Does making up stories clearly satirizing a movie count as fanfic? Maybe anti-fanfic? Here’s my take on The Happening, for example: http://quantumage.livejournal.com
14 • Randy Henderson said:
June 20th, 2008 at 6:38 pm, permalink
How Might the “Book ATM” Impact Genre Publishing and Fan Fiction?
I first read about the book ATM in the November 12, 2007 edition of Time Magazine, among the lists of zowie new inventions.
It boasts the ability to print any soft-bound book you want (or at least that it has access to) in just 3 minutes, for $3.00. They come bound and with color covers.
How might such an invention impact the publishing industry? How might it shake up bookstore giants like Barnes & Nobles, and Borders?
No more will I go to a mega-chain looking for a good new bit o’ fantasy, and scream in frustration as they have the second book of every series that sounds interesting, but never the first (“but we can order that for you…”).
Perhaps the ATM’s digital memory will not be subject to the same space constraints that limit the number and variety of books that are available on shelves (oh look, an entire section just to cover Star Wars, or Robert Jordan).
On the other hand, how much of the ATM’s memory will be allotted for Fantasy and Sci-Fi, versus, say, Romance, or celebrity tell-alls? And of the fantasy, how much is unique, epic fantasy, and how much is a variety of books about a snarky young lady struggling with her ties to the [insert dark creature/power here]?
Perhaps books will be available faster, and for longer periods, if we are not dependent on the publishers actually creating prints of the books.
And might publishers be open to a larger number of new voices if they can launch them exclusively through the ATM, without the costs involved in printing and shipping actual books?
Will it help or hurt publisher profit margins? And by extension, will it impact the billion-dollar salaries that most common writers make today?
And might it also continue the trend of putting the job of promoting one’s work more and more onto the author rather than the publisher?
Another important question is, will it flood the market with crap (or, some would say, more crap)?
I see it as similar to, but not exactly like, the advent of digital photography, and internet publishing. They allow anyone with access to a computer to post a flood of amateur material.
While on the one hand this removes the restrictive funnel of the major publishing houses and magazines, it also removes the quality filters to an extent, and creates that much more painfully awful stuff you have to wade through to find that sparkling gem o’ a story or novel.
It might also open up fanfic to a wider audience. For example, perhaps the publishers and studios can create official “fanfic” sites tied to their properties that you could post stories to. Those stories could then be rated by readers. And people could go to the ATM and print out anthologies of the top rated fan fic pieces per month or year.
15 • Nivair Gabriel said:
June 20th, 2008 at 7:21 pm, permalink
Fanfic is fucking awesome. Here’s the retrospective I wrote before the last Harry Potter book came out in 2007:
Tomorrow, my childhood ends, and the days of happy speculation will be over. I know everybody talks about Harry Potter, and it feels weird to be joining in on the fun when I am completely out of fandom and not even going to a book release party, but I have to say something, because it’s my last chance.
After the third book was published and the word began to get around, I bought the first book. When I finished that, I went back as soon as I could for the other two and stayed up all night in my room, on my tiny plastic red chair, with my flexible little fluorescent desk light. I think the cushion fell off the chair somewhere in the middle of Prisoner of Azkaban, but I didn’t care. By the time that book ended I was on the floor, not even dressed for bed yet, and as the sun started to rise and the sky outside turned blue-grey I realized there was no way I would be able to make it to the next book with my sanity intact.
More than a hundred people read and loved my writing because of Harry Potter. I met my soulmate (and countless other friends) through Harry Potter. I was plagiarized for the first time by another Harry Potter fan. I wrote a column for a website visited by thousands when I was twelve years old; I gave writing advice to graduate students and fourth-graders and they all took it to heart. I was a minor celebrity. If I interviewed another Harry Potter author for my column, they got exposure. When reporters did stories on fanfiction, sometimes they contacted me for a quote. I learned to negotiate, to edit, to encourage, to share, to critique, to write — because of Harry Potter.
I was the first person at my local bookstore to get my hands on Goblet of Fire, and the local radio station interviewed me, breathless and anxious to get back to the first chapter, as I waited at the door for my ride. When Order of the Phoenix came out and I got to page 806, I cried alone in my living room for four hours. I was there before twincest, before FictionAlley, before “Paradigm of Uncertainty” ended. I was there when the first RPs started. I was there for the screencapping and diagramming of all the bottle text in the Hall of Prophecies. I was there.
(And let’s not forget those tubs of Chocolate Fudge Brownie I shared with my friends every summer on Harry’s birthday. Cheers, guys. It was awesome.)
I don’t really care about participating in crazy discussions anymore; I’m no longer the girl who wants nothing but Harry Potter merchandise for Christmas. Tomorrow night, I’m planning on going to sleep like everybody else, and waking up to my Amazon box. I haven’t reread the whole series, because I don’t think my ultimate experience needs to be tomorrow. I don’t need it to end that quickly. I want to tell my kids and grandkids that, as much as possible, I enjoyed Harry Potter on my own terms.
I can whine all I want about not getting to see a Beatles concert, but if I could choose one global entertainment phenomenon to live through, it would be this one. Thank you, J.K. Rowling. Thank you for everything.
It’s kind of a shame that everybody just has to read as fast as possible so that they can get back to their regularly scheduled lives and stop shunning the phone lines, the television, and the Internet. Time is our enemy. Still, here I am, on one side.
I’ll see you after the weekend, when I will be on the other.
16 • Clint Harris said:
June 21st, 2008 at 1:42 am, permalink
I wrote an unintentional fanfic once. It was an X-Files script. I didn’t know quite how that whole Hollywood process worked and thought I could just submit it someplace as a script and Chris Carter might buy it. I have since been educated on the process.
That is until I read something about one of the main guys behind Battlestar Galactica. He did just that with a Star Trek: TNG script and wound up being one of their regular writers. Now his own show is wildly popular.
So, once again, my world was turned on its ear. Not to worry though. This happens a couple times a week.
It gets me thinking though. Look at all the Star Wars novel tie-ins, the TSR books, the Star Trek, Indiana Jones, and Star Gate novels out there. Isn’t that basically FanFic? Those folks seem to do already working with someone else’s creation. Maybe it’s not so bad.
17 • Cat Rambo said:
June 21st, 2008 at 6:48 pm, permalink
I’m proclaiming Randy Henderson winner of this blog for a beer, because western Star Trek made me laugh. Drop me a line with your Paypal address, Randy?
18 • Phoebe Harris said:
June 22nd, 2008 at 12:19 am, permalink
Fanfic?
My dirty little secret is that a few years ago I wrote a >150 line epic poem for the sole purpose of settling a theological debate on a message board for a then unrealeased niche MMORPG. Because, of course, poetry is always so devastatingly effective in gaming forums.
The worst part is, it’s not bad. Except that there are probably only about a dozen people in the entire world who would have the slightest idea what I was talking about. On the other hand, I did learn a hell of a lot about writing poetry. And the whole exercise was one of the main things that convinced me that maybe I could actually still write.
19 • Cat Rambo said:
June 22nd, 2008 at 12:22 am, permalink
Yeah, I guess if you’re looking at it that way, the X-Men weren’t the only source of my fanfic. I’m responsible for the vast bulk of satirical political poetry in Armageddon over the last couple of decades.
20 • Damien G. Walter said:
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:36 pm, permalink
I’ve written two fan-fics. One was a Games Workshop Warhammer 40k piece, which got me back into writing four or fuve years ago. The secod was for one of the earliest online games – Stellar Crisis.
At the time I thought the Stellar Crisis story was wonderfuly original, being about a young boy who believes he is playing a game when actually he is leading a battle on alien civilisation. Then I discovered Enders Game, and my bubble was burst.
The problem with fan-fic is that its fan-fic. As a previous poster said, it takes a lot of time to write good stories to submit. If you invest that time writing fan-fic, then you won’t have the time to write original fiction.
21 • Matt’s Bookosphere: 6/22/2008 « Enter the Octopus said:
June 22nd, 2008 at 5:32 pm, permalink
[...] Fanfic: Menace or Threat? [...]
22 • Jon D. said:
June 25th, 2008 at 6:58 pm, permalink
Fan-fic should be left where it started, the fans. If they buy it from each other than great, more power to them. As soon as they take themselves too seriously and demand fame from the rest of us, let’s chop off their proverbially heads.
Fan-fic is worse than sci-fi original movies and we all hate those.
Keep in mind that the primary reason this genre (if I can call it that) sucks so bad is the lack of stand alone noteworthiness. If I have to read a whole series of books or watch a T.v. show all the way through front and back to understand what the heck you’re trying desperately to say in your 150pp stapled stack of dot matrix paper book, then you aren’t saying it well and it should be relegated to a supplementals compilation for some lower IQ future generation to waste their 2 seconds uploading into their empty brains.
If no one will publish it but you, it’s because it sucks.