Why Fanfic Makes Us Writers
Why Fanfic Makes Us Writers
This rather shambolic and indisciplined "essay" is the result of a lot of thinking I've done about fan fiction in the past few weeks.
1. ENTRANCE COMMENTS
This thinking was kicked off by cupidsbow's thought-provoking piece Why Fanfic Makes Us Poor, and a lot of the comments responding to that essay - many of which took side issues and elements to her main essay and argued about them a lot. This is the nature of the beast with Livejournal: we don't stay on-topic. It's a good space for free-form discussion and conversation. This essay probably won't respond too closely to what cupidsbow wrote, but that was the starting point and if you haven't read it yet then you really should. It's worth the reading, and the subsequent debate.
Another interesting piece that kept me thinking was crankynick's piece Why Fanfic Makes Us Stupid. A lot of what I'm writing here is probably closer to his piece than cupidsbow's, and again it's definitely worth reading and thinking about. I think it's fair to say that both writers have vastly different attitudes to and opinions of fanfic in general.
This essay may or may not touch upon what these two dudes wrote. I'm writing it up as I go along, and am pretty much going to just purge out my opinions on fanfic as they occur to me. Feel free to reply in the comments. Feel free to agree, disagree, whatever. Be as brutally honest or even as just plain brutal as you like.
2. FULL CONFESSION
Hi there. My name is Grant Watson. I am, from time to time, a writer. I have had some plays produced, some short stories published and I've developed or co-developed a few television programmes, two of which went a short distance before crashing and burning and another that got as far as having a pilot episode produced for a national broadcaster. I also occasionally produce a comic book of some mild acclaim, The Angriest Video Store Clerk in the World. Writing is what I want to do for a living. It's what I have an overriding passion for.
I am also a fanfic writer. I haven't written fan fiction in quite a long time, and most of it has vanished away into obscurity, but a few pieces are around if you know where to look for them (not that I'd come right out and tell you where to start looking). If you do read any of my fanfic pieces, be gentle: I wrote them a very long time ago.
To be honest I think I have a fairly interesting perspective on fan fiction, because I have experienced it from "both sides of the fence": I have written fan fiction myself, and I have read fan fiction produced by other people that has used my own original characters. I have even, disturbing as it is to type this for people to actually see, been written about without my consent in real-person slash.
3. IT'S VALID
Fanfic often gets denigrated as a poor substitute for original fiction. It gets picked on, made fun of and widely derided. Critics will ask questions like "Why don't you write original stuff?", or tell fanfic writers "You're not being very creative."
In my opinion, fanfic is a completely valid art form. It requires creativity and talent to do successfully, and it also takes a level of effort and dedication. I also think that the skill set for writing fanfic is decidedly different from the skill set for writing original fiction. This is something I'm probably going to come back to later. I don't think all fanfic writers are necessarily ever going to produce decent original fiction, but at the same time I really don't think all authors of original fiction would be able to easily sit at their computer and type out decent fanfic. It works both ways, and while one may be more respectable than the other, it doesn't necessarily mean that one is always going to be better than the other.
4. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
But "better" is something that always comes up. The argument of quality is, as crankynick put it, "the elephant in the room". Put simply, it would very hard for the fanfic community to successfully argue themselves as a valid art form worthy of respect if most of what they wrote wasn't actually any good.
And to be honest, most of what gets written isn't any good. In the case of fan fiction, I think Sturgeon's Law works as a severe understatement. Sure, there's an extensive fanfic culture of "recs" at work, and this goes quite a long way of separating the wheat from the chaff, but the signal-to-noise ratio of fan fiction is far from ideal.
I've encountered the argument that "professional fiction is full of bad fiction too", and it's an argument that does have an amount of weight. There is quite a lot of quite wretchedly awful stuff getting published and distributed out there by the major publishing houses. Just not as much. And the grammar is usually better. And even a fairly awful-yet-popular author like Dan Brown can still turn out relatively functional turns of phrase.
5. IT'S NOT THE QUALITY
To my mind, the answer to this problem of quality and respect is simply to neatly sidestep it: quality is not the point. The fanfic community is, in the main, a very open and supportive one. It is an amazingly great place to write fiction and actually get feedback on it. It is a place where you can make a much closer and more personal connection with your readers than a professional author might.
As a training ground for aspiring writers, there are a lot worse places to go than a fanfic community. The easiest way to learn something is to do it, and the easiest way to start writing fiction is to write fanfic. For a beginning writer, half the work is done for you. You are given a genre, a set of characters and a set of character conflicts when you start a fanfic piece. It takes a whole pile of jobs out of your hands and leaves you to simply work out how to write a short story.
This isn't to say all fanfic is "for beginners", or that fanfic is only worth using as a training ground to writing "real" fiction. But it is a brilliant place for that, and it's certainly what I used it for.
6. BUT IS IT EASIER?
OK, so that last section was for beginners and dabbling amateurs. This doesn't preclude complex and worthy artistic pieces being produced in fanfic form.
I said I'd get back to this, and I have: different forms of writing require different skill sets. For example: I have written both original plays and theatrical adaptations of pre-existing literary works. The skills required to develop original characters and situations, an original storyline and good character interactions and character development are very different to the skills required to read a novel and then distill its plot, characters, theme, tone and cadence into another media. The easiest place to see the kind of thing that I mean is in the movies. Fight Club the novel, by Chuck Palahniuk, is a savage and rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness trip of a book. It would superficially be considered unfilmable. Yet screenwriter Jim Uhls managed to take the parts that would work best on screen and structure them into one of the most inventive Hollywood screenplays of the past 30 years. I honestly don't think that Uhls' screenplay is a lesser work than Palahniuk's novel, because the skills needed to write the adapted screenplay are so different. It's like comparing painting to sculpture.
I would argue that fanfic - good fanfic - uses a very different skill set to original fiction.
Most of the fanfic I've written and read was based on science fiction TV shows. Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Star Trek and so on. All of this intellectual property, or IP, was developed for the medium of television. That means that we saw action and we heard dialogue.
Prose fiction is different to that. Sure you can still use a lot of dialogue, but action gets a bit harder to express succinctly. On the other hand, now you're suddenly able to include what the characters are thinking. How they are feeling. And this isn't something you can just make up, because those thoughts and feelings have to reflect the characters dialogue and action as seen in the source IP. This is why I think so much of fan fiction is about character relationships and their emotions: television drama rarely has the time for this kind of thing, so we as fanfic writers create the material to fill what gaps we find in the material. (And, in a sort of aside, I think there's a great example in the current series of Doctor Who which is, in some part, written by fans and ex-fanfic writers. The new series is far more concerned with character relationships and feelings than the plot-centered original series was. And I think that there's a very strong argument to be made for the new focus to be a direct result of some of the writers' backgrounds.)
It can work the other way too. We can write fanfic that opposes what is represented on screen. Slash fiction is an obvious example of this: Star Trek may never show Kirk and Spock as lovers, but we can take that step and transform the characters in a reaction to what the producers have made rather than an adaptation of it.
As a reader, I think that really good fanfic should (a) reflect the IP it is based on, (b) provide fresh insight into the characters and their relationships to one another, and (c) cover territory and areas that the source text does not. And I think that it's a really tricky thing to do all three at once, and therefore writing really good fanfic isn't a simple as it sounds. It certainly isn't "easier than original fiction". As I have been saying, the skill set is different.
7. MUST WE BE POOR?
More in response to the title of cupidsbow's Why Fanfic Makes Us Poor than anything else, I wanted to point out that professional fan fiction is not only possible but it already exists.
It's called media tie-in fiction, and it is a professional form of writing that - at its best - uses all of the skill sets I was writing about a few seconds ago.
I said "at its best", and this is a real problem for media tie-in stuff. The skill set is different, but professional publishers by-and-large will only want to deal with demonstrated professional writers. They need to guarantee someone can sign a contract and deliver a publishable manuscript, and their guage for judging that is past professional experience. This means that for the most part media tie-in novels are written by "jobbing" authors who do not necessarily possess any great interest in the IP. They're writing for the pay cheque, and they'll write something generic and ordinary and crushingly dull for the fans of that IP. You got this a lot in Pocket Books' range of original Star Trek novels. Sure there were a few highlights, but the majority of books were formulaic and poor.
The absolute best, and I mean amazingly good media tie-in fiction ever published worldwide was published between 1991 and 1997, and it was published in the UK by Virgin Publishing Ltd. I refer, as many of you would already have anticipated, to the twin Doctor Who ranges: The New Adventures and The Missing Adventures.
The first three New Adventures were written by professional authors: John Peel, Terrance Dicks and Nigel Robinson. The Dicks novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, was pretty good. The Peel and Robinson books... not so much. But the fourth novel was different.
Timewyrm: Revelation was written by a fan named Paul Cornell. It was an adaptation of his pre-existing fanfic. It blew most of its readers away. The difference was astounding, because here was a book that got inside its characters' heads and showed us how they felt. It took Doctor Who into new and different directions. It challenged our expectations of what a Doctor Who story could be. (Paul's a professional writer now. He writes for Doctor Who on television, he writes original novels and comic books for Marvel and 2000 AD. He's also (plug time!) a Guest of Honour at Swancon 2008.)
By actively encouraging fans to submit unsolicited manuscripts, Virgin Publishing tapped into the fanfic community and successfully published the most progressive, interesting and hands-down highest quality tie-in fiction ever produced. Many amazing authors got published by them: Kate Orman, Lance Parkin, David A. McIntee, Lawrence Miles, Mark Gatiss, Russell T. Davies, Matthew Jones... the list goes on for quite a while.
The only difference between The New and Missing Adventures, and the best fan fiction available today on the web, was that Virgin paid their authors and had them liaise with a decent editor. The lines proved that not only was fanfic not necessarily a threat to tie-in fiction, but that it was unquestionably the best possible training ground for writers of that tie-in fiction. Courting the fans was good business.
Sadly there isn't an equivalent out there today. The publishers of the original Stargate novels were open to submissions for a while, and Black Flame was happy to look at pitches for their New Line horror novels too, but right now I don't think any avenues are open. They all should be.
8. SO WHAT'S IT LIKE?
Obviously the stuff here on in is personal experience. Other creators and people probably feel quite differently. But I thought I'd include it because you rarel read or hear about fanfic from the other side.
A few years ago, when my comic was at its most productive, two things happened. The first was that I signed with a Sydney-based production company to produce a half-hour television comedy based on the comic. The second was that a local fan started including the character of the Angriest Video Store Clerk in his own comic strip. It was a weird feeling, and I was caught between being surprised, flattered and confused. It was actually my best friend who pointed out "OMG you've been fanficced."
Having someone take your characters and use them without your participation is quite weird. To me it was overwhelmingly flattering that someone would like something I'd created enough to play with it themselves. On the other hand there's this overriding thought of "well I would never have made my character do that". Basically I wound up coming to terms with the fact that were two versions of the same character: the one that I had written and drawn myself, and then this second version that had been received and translated by the fanfic creator. And his version was totally valid. It just wasn't my version.
The most painful thing I had to do, however, was politely get in touch with him and ask him to stop. The problem was that as we were in the middle of developing a TV series, there was a concern that in the unlikely event that a TV executive would see the fanfic version they might think it was somehow related to our TV version and would colour their perception of it. It felt ridiculous, but the TV industry is strange like that. And oddly litigious. I didn't want to be causing anyone any trouble while we were in that liminal development phase. The TV show is gone and over now. Nobody bought it. So if anyone wants to do Video Store Clerk fanfic at the moment, they should go right ahead. Just FYI.
The legal stuff continues to bother me. Crankynick described quality as "the elephant in the room", but I think it's actually copyright. It's a big argumentative trap that I've fallen into myself. On the one hand, copyright law in most countries seems fairly clear that if I own some intellectual property then no one can use it in public without my consent. On the other hand, copyright law doesn't mention fanfic in any way, and a lot of fanfic authors and commentators are very quick to argue "fair use".
Put simply: no one that I know of has ever been sued or prosecuted for writing fanfic. It is not specifically referenced in the law. But that does not automatically render it legal. I personally think it would be much easier with our current laws to argue that fanfic is not legal than it would be to argue that it is. Then again, I'm not a lawyer. The more brutal version of my point of view is that the average fanfic writer might earn 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year. If Viacom or Newscorp came a-suin', who do you think is going to have more lawyers arguing for a win?
I doubt anyone will ever be prosecuted for fanfic, and I don't think anyone should ever stop, but if you don't have a license to write the spinoffery it doesn't mean you're not breaking any laws. In practical terms copyright is such a side issue it's barely relevant. It's just always annoyed me to see people claim cast-iron legal protection for a case that's never been officially argued.
9. WHAT'S IT LIKE 2
Of course as mentioned above, I've also been fanficced personally into at least two "real-person slash" (RPS) stories. I've read one of them. I haven't read the other.
Being slashed is icky. It's kind of invasive. It's not very nice. It makes you feel slightly violated in the least upsetting way possible, but it does make you feel like someone's somehow very gently assaulted you.
I have no problem with slash in general. I've even read a fair bit of it out of intellectual curiosity. But RPS makes me feel creeped out, and I've never understood its appeal. I have several friends who write RPS, and I still like them, but I've never understoof why they wrote RPS. I doubt I ever really will. I think this is because it's not about fictional characters but about real people, and the argument that "celebrities are only fictionally constructed personas anyway" doesn't hold water with me. There's still a real person at the other end, and they may not necessarily like reading about how they had sex with someone they may not have had an interesting in having sex with, and having random strangers read about that sex as well.
10. THE MEANDERING CONCLUSION
I've been writing for so long I'm now at a loss to tie it all together and actually make a point here. I think that my main points are as follows:
- Fanfic is a valid art form.
- Fanfic uses a different skill set to original fiction.
- Professional fanfic is possible, has been done, and should be encouraged.
- Nonprofessional fanfic is probably not legal, and is certainly not categorically legal.
- Fanfic can be flattering to the creator of the IP.
- Real person slash really creeps me out.
This rather shambolic and indisciplined "essay" is the result of a lot of thinking I've done about fan fiction in the past few weeks.
1. ENTRANCE COMMENTS
This thinking was kicked off by cupidsbow's thought-provoking piece Why Fanfic Makes Us Poor, and a lot of the comments responding to that essay - many of which took side issues and elements to her main essay and argued about them a lot. This is the nature of the beast with Livejournal: we don't stay on-topic. It's a good space for free-form discussion and conversation. This essay probably won't respond too closely to what cupidsbow wrote, but that was the starting point and if you haven't read it yet then you really should. It's worth the reading, and the subsequent debate.
Another interesting piece that kept me thinking was crankynick's piece Why Fanfic Makes Us Stupid. A lot of what I'm writing here is probably closer to his piece than cupidsbow's, and again it's definitely worth reading and thinking about. I think it's fair to say that both writers have vastly different attitudes to and opinions of fanfic in general.
This essay may or may not touch upon what these two dudes wrote. I'm writing it up as I go along, and am pretty much going to just purge out my opinions on fanfic as they occur to me. Feel free to reply in the comments. Feel free to agree, disagree, whatever. Be as brutally honest or even as just plain brutal as you like.
2. FULL CONFESSION
Hi there. My name is Grant Watson. I am, from time to time, a writer. I have had some plays produced, some short stories published and I've developed or co-developed a few television programmes, two of which went a short distance before crashing and burning and another that got as far as having a pilot episode produced for a national broadcaster. I also occasionally produce a comic book of some mild acclaim, The Angriest Video Store Clerk in the World. Writing is what I want to do for a living. It's what I have an overriding passion for.
I am also a fanfic writer. I haven't written fan fiction in quite a long time, and most of it has vanished away into obscurity, but a few pieces are around if you know where to look for them (not that I'd come right out and tell you where to start looking). If you do read any of my fanfic pieces, be gentle: I wrote them a very long time ago.
To be honest I think I have a fairly interesting perspective on fan fiction, because I have experienced it from "both sides of the fence": I have written fan fiction myself, and I have read fan fiction produced by other people that has used my own original characters. I have even, disturbing as it is to type this for people to actually see, been written about without my consent in real-person slash.
3. IT'S VALID
Fanfic often gets denigrated as a poor substitute for original fiction. It gets picked on, made fun of and widely derided. Critics will ask questions like "Why don't you write original stuff?", or tell fanfic writers "You're not being very creative."
In my opinion, fanfic is a completely valid art form. It requires creativity and talent to do successfully, and it also takes a level of effort and dedication. I also think that the skill set for writing fanfic is decidedly different from the skill set for writing original fiction. This is something I'm probably going to come back to later. I don't think all fanfic writers are necessarily ever going to produce decent original fiction, but at the same time I really don't think all authors of original fiction would be able to easily sit at their computer and type out decent fanfic. It works both ways, and while one may be more respectable than the other, it doesn't necessarily mean that one is always going to be better than the other.
4. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
But "better" is something that always comes up. The argument of quality is, as crankynick put it, "the elephant in the room". Put simply, it would very hard for the fanfic community to successfully argue themselves as a valid art form worthy of respect if most of what they wrote wasn't actually any good.
And to be honest, most of what gets written isn't any good. In the case of fan fiction, I think Sturgeon's Law works as a severe understatement. Sure, there's an extensive fanfic culture of "recs" at work, and this goes quite a long way of separating the wheat from the chaff, but the signal-to-noise ratio of fan fiction is far from ideal.
I've encountered the argument that "professional fiction is full of bad fiction too", and it's an argument that does have an amount of weight. There is quite a lot of quite wretchedly awful stuff getting published and distributed out there by the major publishing houses. Just not as much. And the grammar is usually better. And even a fairly awful-yet-popular author like Dan Brown can still turn out relatively functional turns of phrase.
5. IT'S NOT THE QUALITY
To my mind, the answer to this problem of quality and respect is simply to neatly sidestep it: quality is not the point. The fanfic community is, in the main, a very open and supportive one. It is an amazingly great place to write fiction and actually get feedback on it. It is a place where you can make a much closer and more personal connection with your readers than a professional author might.
As a training ground for aspiring writers, there are a lot worse places to go than a fanfic community. The easiest way to learn something is to do it, and the easiest way to start writing fiction is to write fanfic. For a beginning writer, half the work is done for you. You are given a genre, a set of characters and a set of character conflicts when you start a fanfic piece. It takes a whole pile of jobs out of your hands and leaves you to simply work out how to write a short story.
This isn't to say all fanfic is "for beginners", or that fanfic is only worth using as a training ground to writing "real" fiction. But it is a brilliant place for that, and it's certainly what I used it for.
6. BUT IS IT EASIER?
OK, so that last section was for beginners and dabbling amateurs. This doesn't preclude complex and worthy artistic pieces being produced in fanfic form.
I said I'd get back to this, and I have: different forms of writing require different skill sets. For example: I have written both original plays and theatrical adaptations of pre-existing literary works. The skills required to develop original characters and situations, an original storyline and good character interactions and character development are very different to the skills required to read a novel and then distill its plot, characters, theme, tone and cadence into another media. The easiest place to see the kind of thing that I mean is in the movies. Fight Club the novel, by Chuck Palahniuk, is a savage and rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness trip of a book. It would superficially be considered unfilmable. Yet screenwriter Jim Uhls managed to take the parts that would work best on screen and structure them into one of the most inventive Hollywood screenplays of the past 30 years. I honestly don't think that Uhls' screenplay is a lesser work than Palahniuk's novel, because the skills needed to write the adapted screenplay are so different. It's like comparing painting to sculpture.
I would argue that fanfic - good fanfic - uses a very different skill set to original fiction.
Most of the fanfic I've written and read was based on science fiction TV shows. Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Star Trek and so on. All of this intellectual property, or IP, was developed for the medium of television. That means that we saw action and we heard dialogue.
Prose fiction is different to that. Sure you can still use a lot of dialogue, but action gets a bit harder to express succinctly. On the other hand, now you're suddenly able to include what the characters are thinking. How they are feeling. And this isn't something you can just make up, because those thoughts and feelings have to reflect the characters dialogue and action as seen in the source IP. This is why I think so much of fan fiction is about character relationships and their emotions: television drama rarely has the time for this kind of thing, so we as fanfic writers create the material to fill what gaps we find in the material. (And, in a sort of aside, I think there's a great example in the current series of Doctor Who which is, in some part, written by fans and ex-fanfic writers. The new series is far more concerned with character relationships and feelings than the plot-centered original series was. And I think that there's a very strong argument to be made for the new focus to be a direct result of some of the writers' backgrounds.)
It can work the other way too. We can write fanfic that opposes what is represented on screen. Slash fiction is an obvious example of this: Star Trek may never show Kirk and Spock as lovers, but we can take that step and transform the characters in a reaction to what the producers have made rather than an adaptation of it.
As a reader, I think that really good fanfic should (a) reflect the IP it is based on, (b) provide fresh insight into the characters and their relationships to one another, and (c) cover territory and areas that the source text does not. And I think that it's a really tricky thing to do all three at once, and therefore writing really good fanfic isn't a simple as it sounds. It certainly isn't "easier than original fiction". As I have been saying, the skill set is different.
7. MUST WE BE POOR?
More in response to the title of cupidsbow's Why Fanfic Makes Us Poor than anything else, I wanted to point out that professional fan fiction is not only possible but it already exists.
It's called media tie-in fiction, and it is a professional form of writing that - at its best - uses all of the skill sets I was writing about a few seconds ago.
I said "at its best", and this is a real problem for media tie-in stuff. The skill set is different, but professional publishers by-and-large will only want to deal with demonstrated professional writers. They need to guarantee someone can sign a contract and deliver a publishable manuscript, and their guage for judging that is past professional experience. This means that for the most part media tie-in novels are written by "jobbing" authors who do not necessarily possess any great interest in the IP. They're writing for the pay cheque, and they'll write something generic and ordinary and crushingly dull for the fans of that IP. You got this a lot in Pocket Books' range of original Star Trek novels. Sure there were a few highlights, but the majority of books were formulaic and poor.
The absolute best, and I mean amazingly good media tie-in fiction ever published worldwide was published between 1991 and 1997, and it was published in the UK by Virgin Publishing Ltd. I refer, as many of you would already have anticipated, to the twin Doctor Who ranges: The New Adventures and The Missing Adventures.
The first three New Adventures were written by professional authors: John Peel, Terrance Dicks and Nigel Robinson. The Dicks novel, Timewyrm: Exodus, was pretty good. The Peel and Robinson books... not so much. But the fourth novel was different.
Timewyrm: Revelation was written by a fan named Paul Cornell. It was an adaptation of his pre-existing fanfic. It blew most of its readers away. The difference was astounding, because here was a book that got inside its characters' heads and showed us how they felt. It took Doctor Who into new and different directions. It challenged our expectations of what a Doctor Who story could be. (Paul's a professional writer now. He writes for Doctor Who on television, he writes original novels and comic books for Marvel and 2000 AD. He's also (plug time!) a Guest of Honour at Swancon 2008.)
By actively encouraging fans to submit unsolicited manuscripts, Virgin Publishing tapped into the fanfic community and successfully published the most progressive, interesting and hands-down highest quality tie-in fiction ever produced. Many amazing authors got published by them: Kate Orman, Lance Parkin, David A. McIntee, Lawrence Miles, Mark Gatiss, Russell T. Davies, Matthew Jones... the list goes on for quite a while.
The only difference between The New and Missing Adventures, and the best fan fiction available today on the web, was that Virgin paid their authors and had them liaise with a decent editor. The lines proved that not only was fanfic not necessarily a threat to tie-in fiction, but that it was unquestionably the best possible training ground for writers of that tie-in fiction. Courting the fans was good business.
Sadly there isn't an equivalent out there today. The publishers of the original Stargate novels were open to submissions for a while, and Black Flame was happy to look at pitches for their New Line horror novels too, but right now I don't think any avenues are open. They all should be.
8. SO WHAT'S IT LIKE?
Obviously the stuff here on in is personal experience. Other creators and people probably feel quite differently. But I thought I'd include it because you rarel read or hear about fanfic from the other side.
A few years ago, when my comic was at its most productive, two things happened. The first was that I signed with a Sydney-based production company to produce a half-hour television comedy based on the comic. The second was that a local fan started including the character of the Angriest Video Store Clerk in his own comic strip. It was a weird feeling, and I was caught between being surprised, flattered and confused. It was actually my best friend who pointed out "OMG you've been fanficced."
Having someone take your characters and use them without your participation is quite weird. To me it was overwhelmingly flattering that someone would like something I'd created enough to play with it themselves. On the other hand there's this overriding thought of "well I would never have made my character do that". Basically I wound up coming to terms with the fact that were two versions of the same character: the one that I had written and drawn myself, and then this second version that had been received and translated by the fanfic creator. And his version was totally valid. It just wasn't my version.
The most painful thing I had to do, however, was politely get in touch with him and ask him to stop. The problem was that as we were in the middle of developing a TV series, there was a concern that in the unlikely event that a TV executive would see the fanfic version they might think it was somehow related to our TV version and would colour their perception of it. It felt ridiculous, but the TV industry is strange like that. And oddly litigious. I didn't want to be causing anyone any trouble while we were in that liminal development phase. The TV show is gone and over now. Nobody bought it. So if anyone wants to do Video Store Clerk fanfic at the moment, they should go right ahead. Just FYI.
The legal stuff continues to bother me. Crankynick described quality as "the elephant in the room", but I think it's actually copyright. It's a big argumentative trap that I've fallen into myself. On the one hand, copyright law in most countries seems fairly clear that if I own some intellectual property then no one can use it in public without my consent. On the other hand, copyright law doesn't mention fanfic in any way, and a lot of fanfic authors and commentators are very quick to argue "fair use".
Put simply: no one that I know of has ever been sued or prosecuted for writing fanfic. It is not specifically referenced in the law. But that does not automatically render it legal. I personally think it would be much easier with our current laws to argue that fanfic is not legal than it would be to argue that it is. Then again, I'm not a lawyer. The more brutal version of my point of view is that the average fanfic writer might earn 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year. If Viacom or Newscorp came a-suin', who do you think is going to have more lawyers arguing for a win?
I doubt anyone will ever be prosecuted for fanfic, and I don't think anyone should ever stop, but if you don't have a license to write the spinoffery it doesn't mean you're not breaking any laws. In practical terms copyright is such a side issue it's barely relevant. It's just always annoyed me to see people claim cast-iron legal protection for a case that's never been officially argued.
9. WHAT'S IT LIKE 2
Of course as mentioned above, I've also been fanficced personally into at least two "real-person slash" (RPS) stories. I've read one of them. I haven't read the other.
Being slashed is icky. It's kind of invasive. It's not very nice. It makes you feel slightly violated in the least upsetting way possible, but it does make you feel like someone's somehow very gently assaulted you.
I have no problem with slash in general. I've even read a fair bit of it out of intellectual curiosity. But RPS makes me feel creeped out, and I've never understood its appeal. I have several friends who write RPS, and I still like them, but I've never understoof why they wrote RPS. I doubt I ever really will. I think this is because it's not about fictional characters but about real people, and the argument that "celebrities are only fictionally constructed personas anyway" doesn't hold water with me. There's still a real person at the other end, and they may not necessarily like reading about how they had sex with someone they may not have had an interesting in having sex with, and having random strangers read about that sex as well.
10. THE MEANDERING CONCLUSION
I've been writing for so long I'm now at a loss to tie it all together and actually make a point here. I think that my main points are as follows:
- Fanfic is a valid art form.
- Fanfic uses a different skill set to original fiction.
- Professional fanfic is possible, has been done, and should be encouraged.
- Nonprofessional fanfic is probably not legal, and is certainly not categorically legal.
- Fanfic can be flattering to the creator of the IP.
- Real person slash really creeps me out.