First, I am just astonished that among the top stories on CNN are Ahmadinejad’s comments at the UN (which are so bugfuck scary shitass motherfucker holy shit that I splutter), and news about Clay Aiken coming out of the closet and Nicole Kidman drinking water to become pregnant. Jesus fucknuts. Juxtaposition of WTF, much?
Second: a rather curious but happy byproduct of the Twilight empire: the actual town of Forks, WA, is receiving a huge tourism boom – which their economy is most happy about. I love that the town is totally into it, from organizing a blood drive from the “Cullen’s” house, to marking a spot for “Dr. Cullen” in the hospital lot. More power to ‘em. May their fire trucks be shiny and new, and their residents happy and mellow.
Now here’s a big question, and each artist has to, I think, answer it on their own, because it’s really a question of ownership and property of art – one that comes up in the court system over and over again. The town’s embracing of their role in Meyers’ series is one manner in which the subject of a creative work adapts to the attention because of it. But consider the artists’ perspectives, and the wide variations of reaction in how their art is used.
In this corner: Suzanne Vega discussing the remixes and interpolations of her song Tom’s Diner (duh duhduh duh, duh duhduh duh, duh duh duhduh na duhduh na…) and how she’s embraced them, even released compilations of various artists’ versions of the same song:
15 years later, “Tom’s Album” continues to sell. People think it is a bootleg and sidle up to me whispering, “Have you seen this? Someone put this together.”
“Yes. That someone was me.”
However, it was a logistical nightmare to administrate. I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission . . . to use their version of my song!
While still a defender of copyright protection – Vega met with the original remixers of the song, DNA, and arranged for a flat fee agreement after DNA had remixed the song in 1990 and sold it out of a corner store – her perspective is interesting, particularly in the context of isolation in which she wrote the song itself. (Also, the part about Vega’s role in the invention of the mp3 is freaking fascinating.)
And in this corner, we have Annie Proulx, who is pissed as hell about fanfic regarding her characters in Brokeback Mountain, particularly when they send her the product of their fanfic labors. Her response is rant-tastic, because she’s horrified that readers would rewrite her story with a happy ending, stating that:
There are countless people out there who think the story is open range to explore their fantasies and to correct what they see as an unbearably disappointing story….
Most of these ‘fix-it’ tales have the character Ennis finding a husky boyfriend and living happily ever after, or discovering the character Jack is not really dead after all, or having the two men’s children meet and marry, etc., etc. Nearly all of these remedial writers are men, and most of them begin, ‘I’m not gay but….’ They do not understand the original story, they know nothing of copyright infringement—i.e., that the characters Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar are my intellectual property….
Proulx then states that she thinks that the fanfic rewrites are motivated by the male writers’ feeling that they can write the story better than she, a woman, could. I don’t know about that, as it seems like a huge leap of guesswork to assume the motivations of a fanfic writer, but her perspective as to the ownership of the characters and the ending of their story is different from Vega’s eager collecting of variations, covers, and remixes of her song. I’d love to hear a debate with the two of them discussing intellectual property, and how fans interact with their artistic creations.
What do you think? Would you be irritated with someone taking your characters and writing fanfic about them? Do you think someone who seizes your characters and rewrites the ending is “exploring their fantasies” in a manner which you find objectionable? Or would you collect them for your own amusement? Where do you fall on the Vega/Proulx continuum?
Thanks to Karen and December for the links.
Jenna, thank you!
Doubt it. He ripped off a lot of his stuff from his contemporaries and/or immediate predecessors. He was just better at telling the stories.
My personal theory is that art begets art. If an artist produces something that moves people, then they have done their job—fan-fic is a by-produce of making your characters so memorable, so moving, that they want ownership of your world. Most of us have read a book or story and imagined ourselves in the main character’s place—fan-fic is the electronic extension of that (since I’m pretty convinced people would just let these fantasies exist in their own brains if it weren’t so damn easy to type them out!) and more power to the reader who wants to interact with the artists work.
Very often, artists will take a character/painting/song that moved them and interpret that in their own work. As long as the artist has done the groundwork of taking that initial inspiration and MAKING IT HER OWN CREATION the result is simply art in evolution. If it’s a blatant rip-off, people will know. (Sometimes, even if it isn’t, even if it’s just inspired by and adapted from, people will assume that because the secondary work has some basic cosmetic similarities to the first one, it is a rip-off. Not necessarily true. It all really boils down to theme—if the themes are completely different, the heart and soul of the works are different, even if some of the mechanics—vampires/elves/alcoholic super-heroes/what-the-fuck-ever—are similar. Getting my students to recognize the function of archetypes is one of the most frustrating things EVER.)
As long as people aren’t making money from fan-fic, it’s really just really literate mental masturbation, and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have survived my teenaged a little sumpn o’ dat!
*blush* YEARS, ‘teenaged YEARS’ without a little sump’n o’dat’ *grumble* frickin’ proofreading!
handyhunter Jim Beaver wore a shirt with “I ship read John/Bobby” Picture is here: http://users.livejournal.com/_sin_attract/198220.html
I just keeping wondering why Proulx is so upset by such tame fic. Her fandom (small as it is) doesn’t have very much strange stuff going on it. Makes me wonder how she’d react if the fandom was a over the top as Twilight or Harry Potter or even Buffy.
@ Alex:
But the motivations of fanfic’ers…well, for my ‘novel’ (it really just seemed to have grown as I went along), I really enjoyed the setting, the characters, and, oh god, I loved the plot of a video game called Tales of Symphonia. So the story ended, and I started thinking about what could happen afterwards.
I hope everyone else can forgive some off-topicness (if not, I’ll be quiet), but Alex, who are you writing about? (I never expected to find a fellow fan of Tales of Symphonia here…!)
That’s really great read for me, always enjoying your posts.
@Vyc
Go on Fanfiction.net and look for the Exsphere Saga.
Looking back now, I can see some things I’d have done differently. Maybe some time I’ll get my motivation back and re-write.
But here’s a link, for your conveniance.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2483177/1/The_Exsphere_Saga
Thanks, Alex! *bookmarks it for later perusal*
The fanfiction is typically on the internet. I know there are things out there on the internet that I posted on message boards 10+ years ago. The original context of the post is lost because those message boards are gone, but the post is still there. Books in many cases don’t have as long a shelf life as electronic posts for obvious reasons. You might still find the original work in a UBS, but unless they too are online it’s very possible that the only easily accessible file will be the fanfiction.
People have contacted me to say they’ve written fanfic of my books. I don’t mind. I’m flattered that the books meant enough to the person/persons to inspire them to play in my world.
BUT, I can’t read any of it, for the same don’t-sue-me reason multiple authors have listed. And when I get those occasional “I fixed what you did wrong with Character A or Book B” emails, then my appreciation for the enthusiasm that led to the fanfic wanes a bit. Still, as long as the fanfiction is free and done for fun, go for it! Just don’t try to sell it. Or ask me to read it. Or email me and tell me to please repeat what you did in your fanfic so my books will be better, lol.
Hmm..tough one. Stories referencing things that no longer fall under copyright laws(like Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas and so on) do get sequels and some are good while others are not. The same holds true for fanfiction..There’s genuine creativity going on and there’s people who can barely spell. It does seem like a good rule to not send your fanfic to the original creator though.
Whedon sometimes references things in his shows that are not shown(like why Dracula owed Spike money) and that seems like bait for the fans to come up with their idea of how things happened.
But that’s not something for every creator to do.
i loved the lost duke of wyndham. i have quite a few julia quinn books but i haven’t read thomas’s story yet… i’ll pick that one up ASAP…
i thought i was commenting on the lost duke of wyndham thread… not sure what happened….????
I’m late on this one, but I absolutely loved it when my fans wrote fanfic. Until I lost my original message board in a sad twist of technological fate…I used to join in and drop spoilers that way. 🙂 Hopefully I can start it back up on my new board and get just as involved again. But I never looked at it as an invasion of my personal creativity…I saw it as a great way to interact with my fans and let them have some fun.
I’m also late on this, but I just wanted to throw something out there: it seems to me that the reason why this topic is so complicated is that people are coming at it from a bunch of different standpoints – ethical, legal, personal, historical – that don’t really jive with each other. Our current legal understanding about intellectual property isn’t really based on ethics so much as business interests so looking at the topic from these two viewpoints will inevitably result in vastly different results. Several people have mentioned Shakespeare and his thieving ways, which to me is a good example of this difference: intellectual property didn’t exist as a concept during his time so the legal question that we are talking about has pretty much nothing to do with him and his works.
For me personally, I don’t like the way that intellectual property laws work so if I was published (which I do hope to be some day) and people wrote fanfic based on my work and even in some way profited from that fanfic, I would be fine with that. My characters stop being mine when they are out in the world and as long as the facficcer didn’t claim to be me or claim that there work is the “original” then they can do their thing.
In my experience, such as it is, if something in fanfic is intriguing, I will often go look for the original material. Thanks to UBS, ebay/half.com, amazon, etc, etc. it’s not that difficult to find out of print books; sometimes the price might be a bit steep, especially for something I’m just trying out, but wait long enough and you might come across a copy that’s more reasonably priced. Although this is more the case, for me, for tv shows (and the occasional movie).
But I still maintain fanfic/fandom is good advertising, if nothing else. I might not have even heard of [obscure book/show/movie] if people weren’t posting stuff about it. I don’t know why that would be more preferable to people not writing fanfic (or meta) about it at all.
This is an odd one for me … my coauthor and I have several completely original works that are in various stages of completion (none published, yet). We took some time off to write a fanfiction story, though, for two main reasons: she’d had the rough outline of the tale in her head for almost 15 years (since seeing Superman II), and we were so excited by the possibilities presented by the recent movie in the franchise, Superman Returns. There were also certain things about the film that left a lot of hardcore Superman fans scratching their heads … we wrote a fanfic to answer those questions and to pave the way for the story my coauthor wanted to tell since she was 12 years old.
Now, this story became quite widely read and known within the fandom, and the writing of it really honed our skills – nothing like instant, weekly reader feedback! People created art for our story, which was just amazing. One reader actually asked our permission to set a one-shot story in our version of the ‘verse … a fanfic of a fanfic. So I’m looking at this from four perspectives: author of original work that may one day be fanfic-ified, author of a fanfic, author of a fanfic that has its own fanfic and fanart, and as reader of all of the above.
The way I see it, there’s One True Story in my head, one particular conglomeration of characters and plot points, that is sacred and inviolable, forever and ever amen. Ditto my coauthor, a hardcore Superman fan (her name is actually Lois, I kid you not), and she has even been known to claim that licensed usage of her beloved Lois Lane is out-of-character.
I think if we, as authors and readers, really love a work of art enough, we will get protective of the way we relate to it. When we encounter a version of it that seems wrong to us, whether it’s our own work or just something we know really well and deeply identify with, we tend to get upset, hence Proulx’s reaction. The whole point of an ending like that in Brokeback Mountain is to leave you with a bittersweet taste in your mouth, the joy of the love that was and could still have been, but for the grief of loss. It’s natural for people to want to give their favorite character a happy ending … but that doesn’t serve the story. My advice to Ms. Proulx would be to accept people’s fanfic as a compliment – she made them feel something so deeply that they had to write about it.
Which is basically how I feel about anyone else using my original characters in fanfic. If you’re not making a profit, then fine, you can play in my sandbox. Enjoy! If I think your characterization sucks, I won’t tell you. I inspired you to do something, and if someone reads your work, it may result in free publicity for me. Readers of our fanfic story have told us that they went and purchased the earlier Superman films, solely because of our story. Some even bought the recent film when they otherwise wouldn’t have, because we delved into the depths of character and backstory that you just don’t have time for in a movie. Look, oh high and mighty owners of the copyright, we just made you some money!
Code help58 … yeah, I need help writing shorter comments…
Great post.
Fan fiction is flattery. It’s a sign that people are so engrossed in your characters they feel they know them really well. In some cases they may even get so engrossed they feel they own them.
I’ve been (only slightly) involved in making a fanfilm in the Star Wars realm. (I just helped with the grammar, haha). George Lucas is incredibly generous with his universe and allows others to play in his sandpit as long as you don’t try and make a buck out of it. As others here have said, it’s great publicity for the original works. But I do think there is a bit of arrogance about it too – I mean, who didn’t watch The Phantom Menace and think “I could do better?”
Everyone donated their time and skills to make the short film. Some people involved used the experience as a springboard for movie careers. We have fun spotting a friend’s names in big-budget movies (in the technical jiggery-pokery section).
If my books reach a big enough audience that people start writing fan fiction, I’ll be delighted. But I seriously hope nobody sends me their stuff. I won’t read it because
a) won’t have time
b) it might upset me
c) don’t want to open myself up to “you stole my idea” claims. Better to stay arms length from it.
3. Do not attempt to make money off your fanwork (i.e., don’t bind it and sell copies, etc.).
Binding it and selling copies is precisely how much fanfic was distributed back in the Dark Ages before net access was widespread. They’re called fanzines. Been there, done that, as both writer and publisher. There are still a few fanzines around even today, because some of us prefer our reading material on dead rainforest. The key point is “making a profit”—covering your production costs and maybe making a bit of seed money to cover the initial costs on the next issue was fine, making a tidy profit on it was Frowned Upon. (Which didn’t stop one or two people treating their zines as their second income stream.)
As for how I feel as a profic author about the possibility of people writing fanfic of my work:
a) What Scalzi Said, only I’d like to see the yaoi art, thanks.
b) if only…
And having hit “post”, it occurs to me that I should expand a little on fanzines. As mentioned, this was a very common way of distributing fanfic, and it was a form of underground publishing. It wasn’t just an author slapping together their stories and selling them—much fic was published in anthology zines, where lots of authors submitted their stories to an editor (who in many cases actually *did* edit), who would then put together the zine and distribute it.
Longer stories might be published as standalones, but even there, many authors would send their novels to an experienced editor/publisher, for pretty much the same reasons that a lot of us send our original fic to an established publishing house rather than self-publishing.
personally, the whole twilight thing creeps me out. And these twits seems to think their stupid little series is somehow more emotionally deep and fulfilling than Harry Potter how? Oh, wait, it’s not strictly romance, which Twilight claims to be, therefore it really doesn’t matter anyway, right? Tell that to the twitlighters I’ve been unfortunate to come across and hear about. It’s cool that a small town is embracing its new found fame and all, but really you gotta think about something when you look at that. These are girls dropping everything they can to roadtrip over to a small town just to oo and aw over it and then later complain that it isn’t exactly like what is written in the books.
In the article I read, they gave even creepier instances of people being harassed by these crazy people. A kid lost his library card only find out later some girls picked it up and kept it, probably auctioning it off at ebay or something. Some out of town mothers approaching a Forks cheerleader and offering money to take her uniform. Girls giggling as they take driftwood from LaPush and watch a Quilute indian chop wood. HP has its share of absolutely crazy people (The whole of the Harry/Hermione ship), but at least the grand majority has the sense to not try to make a trip over to England and Scotland just to see if they can find people playing quidditch in a back garden or something. Then, you’ve got the Avatar crazies (The Zutarians) who go nuts at the slightest provocation, but STILL they can’t be compared to the absolute craziness of the twitlighters.
And then of course I have my working theory as to why these girls and their moms love the series so much: A) hot guy gets with supposedly ordinary girl who turns out to not be so ordinary, but the author doesn’t really show us exactly why she’s not so ordinary, but it gives these girls hope that they too can find their own perfectly perfect vampire boyfriend. 2) The education system has slowly been taking various things OUT of the education system so that I have to actually explain who Jeanne D’Arc and Robin D’Loxley are to people in a game that should be filled at least in part with the same nerds as I am and if this is the case then they’re likely taking out bits of English out until these girls can’t tell the difference between real, well written litterature and trash lit. (And no Romance is not in the trash lit section as far as I’m concerned. I love my romance novels, but I’m incredibly picky about them, however that’s not the point. The point is that my definition of “trash lit” is pretty narrow and boy have I seen doozies.)
oh, the fanfic debates…. I do believe these happen everywhere that some form of fanfic has been created.
Some people say – Don’t do it, you’re stealing other people’s creations and you can get sued to dust. I’ve also heard ‘why would someone waste their time writing fanfic when they could write something original?’ And I’ve heard the old ‘but the authors don’t like it’ and this generally points towards Anne Rice. And let’s not forget the often heard “how could you write those characters doing that?!? It’s just not right!”
Other people say – ‘but it’s just for fun’ or ‘why discourage something – anything – that causes our children/teens to read and attempt to write.’ I’ve also heard/read a lot of people saying ‘it’s great practice for writing skills’ and ‘it’s a form of therapy’ or it helps build a feeling of emotional connection to others who liked that same book/series/movie.
I’ve read fanfic for several years. I’ve written some fanfic. I’ve seen all sorts of debates over it, and been in a few mild ones with people I know.
Let me add a few normally accepted fanfic rules from most of the places that I’ve been at…
1 – Include warning labels for things that might squick people, such as a higher degree of sex or violence than the source material, or non-canon slash, incest, non-consensual activities, or character death. If a fic involves romance, it s normally requested that the characters are identified, so people who don’t want to read about character #2 or anyone dating Character #7 or anything but #3/#8 can avoid such things.
1a – many fandoms have multiple characters who share an initial. There is a frequently repeated cry to identify characters with more than an initial – who is ‘A’, or ‘P’? Which of the three people who have that combination of initials do you mean? If you want to read about Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley and click on a fic labeled as containing H/G only or discover that it contains Hermione/Grawp or Hagrid/George or Horace Slughorn/Gilderoy Lockhart then you will be horribly disappointed. And possibly appalled. Likewise, for the BtVS fandom, does ‘A’ stand for Angel, Anya, Ampata, Anne, Angelus, or ADAM?
2 – Disclaim! Disclaim often and freely, and forget not to cite the original author or legal owners if you can – though it can be tricky to sort out exactly who owns the rights to a particular movie or television series.
3 – Certain authors have made statements that they do not wish to see certain things in any derivative works involving heir characters, such as JKR once said she didn’t want to hear about people writing the children of her series engaging in under-aged sexual activities so that young readers couldn’t stumble onto a fanfic and be shocked/appalled at what Ron and Harry were doing (or Harry and Ginny. Or ___ and ____. I don’t think the specific people were the point.) I believe Anne McCaffrey requested that if people wrote stories involving her dragon riders, that they not contain any explicit sexual details. It is generally considered the polite thing that if the Author of the Canon Work requests Thou Shalt Not… then don’t.
4 – most prefer if you label a fic that may contain spoilers, particularly for television series, as not all nations are on the same broadcasting channel, or not all fans get and read a book at the same rate. That way, a person who wants to not know until they read it/see it can wait, while someone who can’t wait or doesn’t mind can choose to read.
I have to agree that there are large quantities of fanfic that can best be described as bad. Spelling by phonics. Minimal grammar, punctuation and formatting (do these people understand the concept of paragraphs?) Plot-by-numbers. Part of this can be explained by the age of the authors, and part of it makes me cringe for the educational levels of this country.
But there are also fics that may be tolerably written that just don’t appeal to me – a fandom I’ve never read/seen – why would I read fanfic with characters from a book I’ve never read? A genre that I don’t care for – something labeled as ‘mystery’ if I’m not in the mood for that, or labeled ‘horror’ when I’m craving something light and fluffy. Or ‘dear God, not another fic about character #19!’ – Something isn’t ‘bad’ because it doesn’t appeal to me (or you, or Todd, or the guy in the corner…’
Some are written to explore things the creator didn’t cover – just what did cause Jesse to miss the bus and arrive late at the meeting? Why was Sarah’s lipstick smudged? What happened to the pet dog that we never see again after the 4th week of the season? Others explore how an event could have impacted people, the stuff that isn’t shown because the series/books go on to the next week’s (mis)adventures, or because it affects a side character.
Others take a ‘what if’ approach – what if she had got there a few minutes earlier, and caught the thief? What if someone had caught the secret lovers in the act? What if he’d said ‘yes’ (or no, or…)? What if the character used some of the intelligence they’re supposed to have, or gave in to that fiery temper? What if the hero hadn’t been in time to save the day?
Sometimes they are written because the fans didn’t like something – they hurt that a favorite character was killed. Sometimes this is to remember them, sometimes it’s used as emotional therapy. (of course, you DON’T SEND IT TO THE CREATOR OF THE SHOW!!!)
And sometimes things are just… strange.
Many people use fanfiction as ‘practice writing’ – you can play with plot pacing, dialog, action sequences, personality interactions, description and mood – and get people’s commentary on what you did and how it worked, didn’t work, or could be improved (take those comments carefully). This sort of thing can help someone’s writing improve tremendously.
…but for the love of… everything, don’t try to claim ownership of someone else’s work, be it a minor character created by the author, or someone else’s story about where that guy got his tattoo and why.
And at the end of the day, it’s not something that you should let get your blood pressure up. Unless it’s your story that got stolen.