What have you been writing recently?

[Dikiyoba]

The other thing I feel is that fanfiction must usually be writing under a fixed ceiling, because the really great story involving established characters, the story in which they were born to appear, has already been written. The best juice has already been squeezed out. What's left to write, at least usually, will be second-best at best, no matter how well you write it.

Say what? There are endless stories that can be told using the same characters, the same setting, the same continuity. Many of them can be really great if handled properly. The original Star Wars was a good movie, but the consensus is that The Empire Strikes Back is even better. And that's before you add in retellings, alternate continuities, the ability to focus on secondary characters and different events, the ability to use different techniques and formats... one published story, even a whole series of published stories, is a drop in the bucket.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

Naw; I think it's pretty rare for there to be a bucket holding that many drops. Sure, lots of characters have more than two hours of film or a hundred thousand words in them. But not a lot more than that, not of really good book or film. A genius could maybe turn out a new classic by unexpectedly breathing life into a veteran schlock character like Mack Bolan, but to expect a character who has really clicked in a really good story, once, to do as well again, is almost like asking lightning to strike twice. if you say that TESB was better than SW, then I say that the series went steeply downhill after TESB.

 

I'm not saying you can't somehow keep shoving the characters out onto stage for another run, almost indefinitely. I'm saying it doesn't take too long for me to prefer re-reading the really good version, or moving on to something else entirely.

[Xaiya]

There's a lot of ways to go about fanfiction (and yes, having fun is of course a possible aspect. I also have fun reading some of the good ones). There's an example of a particularly interesting one of Harry Potter that's a what-if, basically. I'm pretty sure only two characters are actually different initially, but that's enough to completely change everything about the story. There's some issues, yes, particularly in the beginning where Harry seems a bit too good at retaining all that information for an 11 year-old, but it's still a good example of one way to take fanfiction. Hell, Harry Potter has issues of its own canonically, which the fic lampshades to all hell. There's no real ceiling. There's a lot of things that can be done with established stories, and not just fantasy ones.

 

The basketball example is a tad misleading. Writing isn't (necessarily) a contest. You aren't (again, necessarily) competing with other writers. It could be more akin to playing an instrument, such as the guitar or piano. I doubt you actually meant that, but instruments are probably a better example anyways. It also goes along with your comparison of writing with established characters (practicing with established music), though I still feel that fanfiction has a lot more ways to explore said established characters/settings than you think. More than anyone alone can think of, probably.

[Lilith]

I talked to another friend about this today and he described it as "the joy of finger-painting with culture" -- part of the appeal is precisely that you're taking a cultural touchstone that has relevance to people and putting your own mark on it.

[Student of Trinity]

I'll agree immediately that the musical instrument is a much better analogy for what I meant than any competitive sport; the point I was trying to make was that writing is fun in a way that makes one want to get better at it, and the element of competition was a distraction from this that I didn't intend.

 

The musical instrument analogy also captures the idea of fanfiction as being something that steps a bit away from pure composition, in the direction of performance. Not every musician composes their own scores; there's an art of interpretation, as well. I raised the issue of actors versus playwrights above, but maybe jazz musicians are the more apt comparison. Jazz has recognizable pieces, originally written by someone, but every performance is supposed to have a lot of improvisation. It's also true that a decently skilled musician can play solely for their own enjoyment, producing sounds that maybe no-one else would want to hear.

 

In effect, just as a lot of music blurs the boundaries between composition, performance, practice, and listening, fanfiction blurs the line between writing and reading. It sounds to me as though some kinds of fanfiction actually constitute a form of a literary criticism, expressing insights about the original work, and just doing it in a medium other than the traditional critical essay.

 

My fundamental discomfort with fanfiction still remains. Writing is a much cooler medium (in McLuhan's sense) than music. It's lower bandwidth; more conceptual. Compared to a tune, even the most lyrical piece of prose is more of an idea and less of a thing. While I like the jazz analogy as a way of explaining the direction fanfiction is facing, I don't really buy the analogy as a claim to artistic status. A good jazz player uses a huge amount of very unusual skill to produce, within a few minutes, a complex body of sound whose detail, even in MP3, would stretch to thousands of pages of text. That's a technical detail but I think it expresses a significant fact. Playing good jazz is orders of magnitude harder than writing even pretty good fanfiction, I think. There is a distinction in writing between large-scale originality — inventing major characters or whole settings — and detailed craft, but although the craft part of writing is also a creative exercise, I don't see that it's as huge a deal in itself as the challenge of turning notes on a page into notes in the air.

 

I still think fanfiction must at least normally be writing under a ceiling. The room may be wide, but it has limited height. The best stories have a lot of synergy between plot and setting and character and theme. These elements all blend into each other, and make each other what they are. The best characters have grown together with their original plots, and they won't have the same synergy with anything else. The best characters grow continuously within their original plots, and this is an important part of the story; preserving a character exactly as they were at the end of an original story doesn't mean keeping the character at all, because originally they were growing and changing up to that point. All fanfiction is zombie fiction, if it tries to maintain the known characters exactly as they are.

 

Yet allowing an established character to change, in a new story, is inherently dubious. The odds are, I think, that the result will be daubs on the Mona Lisa. And even if one supposes that the new character developments are written by an artist with skill equal to the original creator's, a good story is good because the character developments involved were somehow the ones that fit, especially well, with that story's particular plot — and plot and character together added up to something really interesting. Looking to repeat that kind of synergy is like asking lightning to strike the same spot twice. Plus, trying to make major character development really work in a story is hard. Restricting yourself to doing it with pre-established characters has got to be like rock-climbing with weights in your pack.

 

The best I can see being done is basically accepting zombie status, keeping developed characters essentially as they are, but trying to add just a few rather small and cosmetic innovations — behavioral changes in the character that can fall within the range of day-to-day variation that everyone expects. This is a ceiling, to me.

 

Maybe I'd be happy with this sort of compromise: fanfiction is folk art. In some ways that's an elitist judgement, but in some ways it's the opposite. I feel that more people who spend hours writing fanfiction could spend at least a few more of those hours also writing from scratch. Start with your own blank canvas, step out on stage, swim out from shore: you can do it.

[Lilith]

you seem to be working under the assumption that most of the art that people write fanfiction of is so good as to be difficult to improve upon in the first place

 

considering the kind of work that attracts fanfiction, that's, uh

 

not necessarily a safe assumption

 

i think some people's motivation in writing fanfiction is to take bad art that they nonetheless feel compelled to have a relationship to and try to turn it into something worthy of its importance in their lives. more broadly, it's a way for people to assert their stake in the increasingly commercialised culture that surrounds them. it's a form of criticism, as you say, but it goes beyond that to become a form of political engagement. from that perspective, to ask "why not create original fiction" misses the point completely, because the goal is not to create another cultural product competing in a commercial marketplace but to undermine that very marketplace: to challenge the whole idea that a story is the kind of thing that can belong to someone

 

yes, sometimes writing fanfiction is like throwing a can of paint on the mona lisa. and sometimes throwing a can of paint on the mona lisa is a good and important thing to do, especially when the mona lisa is the only painting you've ever been allowed to look at and you need a way to tell people that it's not all it's cracked up to be

 

let me put it this way: i taught in a high school at the peak of Twilight's popularity. every 14-year-old girl had to have an informed opinion on Twilight, or else she was a social outcast. in a context like that, to say "start with your own blank canvas" is a cruel joke: nobody is interested in your canvas, because you don't have a billion-dollar marketing machine behind you. fan fiction can be a kind of immune response to a toxic cultural product that's been forced down someone's throat. it's a way of saying: if i am being forced to have a relationship to this story, then i will relate to it on my terms, and i will make it into what i need it to be

[Aran]

(We're winning. Guess you shoulda taken part afterall, huh, Aran? Too late now! )

 

Haha! My secret plan is to write 50,000 words next weekend within the last five minutes. Who will be laughing then, huh?

[nikki.]

(disclaimer: this is probably all rubbish, but it did at least get me out of writing something i ought to really have been writing! yay!)

 

Well, I got to the party even later than Riibu (hi!)...

 

First of all, Goldenking and Lilith have pretty much summed up everything I want to say, and far better than I'd be able to do it.¹ The metaphor of the Mona Lisa is exactly how I like to think of fanfiction (bearing in mind that I am not a writer, nor reader, of the genre); I'm much more interested in individual responses to art than I am the culturally agreed "meaning" of a particular piece, and it seems to me that this is what fanfic encourages. Characters, settings, plots - none of these are the sole property of one author, but are cultural artefacts that shape the world upon publication. If I want to create an "original" story (an impossible task!) and include a character that is self-involved, slouchy, grumpy, but ultimately a good guy, why can't I just use Han Solo? If I do that, why can't I write a story about Han Solo working in a bar, or the Queen of England getting a nose-job?² Fiction bleeds into reality constantly, so why is it so bad that I take this stuff and stick it back into a fiction of my own choosing?

 

Rather than repeat what Riibu said about fanfic being fun, or what Lilith said about it being a way in which people can find solace or comfort, I'll address something that I can't recall being approached anywhere else here. Going through the thread, I found a couple of things that made me think that SoT just sees fiction differently to the way in which fanfiction-writers (and myself, and mot other people in this thread) do. That's not to say SoT is wrong or right, but it might help highlight where I think he's coming from. Of everything, these are the three things I have the biggest problem coming to terms with:

 

- I guess it exists precisely because it's almost always unpublishable and everyone knows it.

 

- I'm inclined to say that the existence of a definite "what really happened" is one of the main things fiction is for.

 

- Imagining events and situations that seem impossible in real life is the whole point of fiction, "

 

First of all, it's not fair to simply say "most of fanfiction is bad" (i.e. unpublishable). I think the simple truth is that "most fiction is bad" (but then I'm cultivating for myself a reputation of being elitist towards literature, so feel free to ignore me). I happen to dislike Middlemarch and its ilk. I cannot bear to read Dickens. But - I am at peace with the idea that this is somehow a huge failing on my part, and I CAN see positive elements in these texts. At the very least, I can see why they must exist. Fanfic may not be the postmodernist trash I like to sully my mind with, but it does have some of the same merit. Examples such as Fifty Shades show that fanfic is (alas!) culturally important - maybe as an example of how not to write literature, but also due to it being phenomenally successful - this alone shows our society's involvement with art much better than a by-the-numbers reimagining of a realist text ever could.

 

(Also, just to put all this stuff about culture into relief, fanfic is probably also tons of fun to write, and probably also written by people who don't give two hoots about who is going to read it. I DO think these two points the most important, but I have to argue from a position I at least know a little about.)

 

SoT, you seem to regard fiction as a way of imagining events and situations that are impossible in real life (ignoring the most dominant genre of fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries by doing so!), and, at the same time, see it as a way of showing "what really happened" - fixing things down (in realistic or non-realistic settings), right? Well, that's fine on occasion, but isn't ambiguity more fun sometimes? If we were told at the end of Inception that it was, in fact, reality that Cobb had reached, would that make it a better film? Personally, knowing that he's happy regardless makes it a far more compelling ending. Why does everything need to be resolved? I can understand that the ambiguities of the real world make a fixed and final answer desirable, but isn't this simply a false promise? Hearing that "this is what happened" and believing it is, I think, slightly lazy, and, more dangerously, denies somebody the ability to imagine, to create, something else. The responsibility I felt for the progression of the plot is taken from me, and I may as well have read a Wikipedia article.

 

As an example, Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books, and is quite rightly considered a classic. It also more or less ignores SoT's criteria for what fiction should be; it portrays events that are quite believable and imaginable in the context of "real life", and manages to end with nothing really being settled upon. We are told a story of a story, and it's up to us as readers to try and settle those, or move on and accept that they exist as they exist. Most pertinently, though, is the fact that this story, told by the housekeeper and then to us, confuses whether or not the people described are real, or imaginary, or whether they did the things they are supposed to have done, or not. Between the housekeeper's version of events, and the version of events that are then related to us, the reader, there are about three or four versions of Heathcliff and Cathy running around. The housekeeper is retelling a story that happened, and of course changing it as she does, and this story is then changed again when it is recorded for us: H+C are, I think you can argue, fanfictionalised in the very story they appear in (and where I have failed to do so here, I'm almost certainly going to when I have more time )

 

Fanfiction takes endings, which may or may not be fixed, and characters, and invests in them something new. It shows a reluctance not to accept blindly what we're told, a tendency to create and reimagine, and, again, it's probably also really really fun.

 

 

1. In fact, Goldenking and Lilith are now by far my two favourite posters. As I was reading this thread I grabbed my copy of Barthes, and was all but ready to directly quote until I came to GK's post. So now I have to do something else. Hmmph.

2. http://www.jgballard...hinoplasty.html (apologies for the poor quality. it's just about readable)

[Student of Trinity]

First of all, it's not fair to simply say "most of fanfiction is bad" (i.e. unpublishable). I think the simple truth is that "most fiction is bad" ...

My guess that most fanfiction is unpublishable was a theory as to 'why now' — why is fanfiction (however far back its precursors may go) only now a thing? The theory was that the internet has made publication, in the form of online posting, cost nothing. Fanfiction sprang up as soon as the publication cost barrier fell, hence it's a plausible guess that publishability was the one thing holding it back, before. I happen to suspect that most fanfiction is what I would call bad, because I also feel that most fiction is bad. I never got far in Middlemarch, and though I'm not sure how to define what it's ilk may be, I am certain that it has a vast ilk, and that I hate all of them. I approach books in general with narrowed eyes, and a genre whose defining feature seems to be that nobody is willing to pay for it doesn't soften me up any.

 

I certainly don't see fanfiction as a scourge on society, or anything. It keeps people off the streets. Actually it's got to be one of the more constructive activities that the internet supports. As a therapy or a way of dealing with obnoxious peers, I'm sure it's a great constructive response. If it's even just a way of putting pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding, I'm not trying to tell anyone to shut up and bleed like a man. I am a bit worried that it's a box some people are still staying in when in fact they're in good enough shape to stand up and step out of it.

 

SoT, you seem to regard fiction as a way of imagining events and situations that are impossible in real life (ignoring the most dominant genre of fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries by doing so!), and, at the same time, see it as a way of showing "what really happened" - fixing things down (in realistic or non-realistic settings), right? Well, that's fine on occasion, but isn't ambiguity more fun sometimes? If we were told at the end of Inception that it was, in fact, reality that Cobb had reached, would that make it a better film? Personally, knowing that he's happy regardless makes it a far more compelling ending. Why does everything need to be resolved? I can understand that the ambiguities of the real world make a fixed and final answer desirable, but isn't this simply a false promise? Hearing that "this is what happened" and believing it is, I think, slightly lazy, and, more dangerously, denies somebody the ability to imagine, to create, something else. The responsibility I felt for the progression of the plot is taken from me, and I may as well have read a Wikipedia article.

 

Yeah, I'm normally just not very interested in realistic fiction. My feeling about reality is that I've already got one of those. I don't necessarily feel that everything has to be resolved, but I do feel that resolution is a rule that can be broken when you can get away with it, rather than a rule that should be repealed. A little ambiguity goes a long way. It doesn't take much before I lose interest in the story entirely, because nothing in it seems to matter any more, anyway. There is no actual Sherlock Holmes there, to go away and live his own life regardless of what I think of him. If I have no idea who he really is, then he's nobody at all, and who cares? I want a story that isn't afraid of commitment. Ambiguity is only interesting against a strong background of resolution.

 

I've never read Wuthering Heights. When I was in high school it was a set book in an early grade, so most people had to read it, but I took some kind of enriched English stream that avoided it. I didn't have to read it, and it had bad buzz, so I never did.

[Lilith]

SoT, i guess the core of our argument is that you've been focusing on whether fanfiction can be good writing and i don't actually think that literary merit, however defined, is anywhere near the most important thing about how most people relate to fiction (fan or otherwise). i'm not especially invested in saying that fan fiction can be "good writing" by any particular set of standards because i think to a large extent "good" and "bad" are beside the point. i mean, Michael Bay movies consistently manage to be major cultural spectacles, even though only a contrarian would say they have much objective artistic merit. you keep asking "why does fanfiction exist? why do people write it and why would anyone read it?" and yet you keep distracting yourself from the reasons you're offered by coming back to whether it's good writing, which doesn't really play a big part in any of those reasons

[Randomizer]

It's not whether fanfiction is bad, it's whether the author is good or bad. Twenty years ago before the Internet became popular, a bad author would have a harder time getting published and getting the work distributed. Vanity presses sprang up for those authors that wanted their works printed and were willing to pay for it. Now with Internet sites like http://wwww.fanfiction.net, anyone can publish and be seen by a larger audience for free.

[nikki.]

It's not whether fanfiction is bad, it's whether the author is good or bad. Twenty years ago before the Internet became popular, a bad author would have a harder time getting published and getting the work distributed. Vanity presses sprang up for those authors that wanted their works printed and were willing to pay for it. Now with Internet sites like http://wwww.fanfiction.net, anyone can publish and be seen by a larger audience for free.

 

Er, what? What does it matter who the author is, as long as the text is "good"? You seem to be implying that "good" authors have an easier time of getting published, whilst simultaneously ignoring what it is that makes them "good" or "bad". An author is only as good as the stuff they they write/the one-liners they spout on Question Time.

 

(I mean, I agree that it's not whether fanfiction is "good" or "bad", as you say, that matters, but the rest of your post is a little puzzling.)

[Randomizer]

Good authors start out publishing good text, however once they are established they can sometimes get anything printed no matter how bad the text just on their previous reputation.

[Actaeon]

Most of my writing lately has been in the form of newspaper articles. I suspect that most of y'all would find the small-town subjects in question boring, but if I end up covering something with a broader appeal, I'll consider posting it. After I let the Calref folks appraise it.

[In Half Now]

(*waves for everyone, by the way*)

 

SoT, it really sounds like to me this whole original fiction vs fanfiction matter you're wondering is because you place them on different intrinsic value levels, where original starts at the top, and fanfiction a step or few lower. And that the trouble of seeing any worth in writing fanfiction is because you see it automatically as 'lesser' than that of original - regardless if it's actually better written or not. Or that because it's on a lesser step, it automatically cannot be as good. But it's perfectly likely that there are terrible books (well, in anyone's personal viewpoint, obviously), and great fanfic stories. And vice versa. I really don't get this line of thought my self, because it's very far removed form what I feel about stories, in that I place them on different value levels depending on how much I'm entertained by them, regardless of whether they're original, or fanfiction. But it does make me kind of understand what you mean by writing under a ceiling. I just don't agree with it, because the reasons for it aren't meaningful enough to me.

 

About another thing you said.

I feel that more people who spend hours writing fanfiction could spend at least a few more of those hours also writing from scratch. Start with your own blank canvas, step out on stage, swim out from shore: you can do it.

This sounds super patronising. Who said they're not writing original fiction? And that still doesn't mean there's anything wrong with writing fanfiction, for every valid reason others have said here! (and with which all I very much agree.) You did say you're a perfectionist, but you're smart, you know people are different. And I don't see why anyone should be judged as trying less when they're doing what they want to do, for whatever reason.

 

Hmm. Automatically, anyway. If the writing is terrible, then I think I can judge them a bit. But if it doesn't... *shrug*

[Dikiyoba]

There is a distinction in writing between large-scale originality — inventing major characters or whole settings — and detailed craft

 

Most writers I know, including myself, have very little problem with large-scale originality. Ideas are everywhere, and they're cheap, even major characters and detailed settings. It's getting it down on paper that's the hard part.

 

but although the craft part of writing is also a creative exercise, I don't see that it's as huge a deal in itself as the challenge of turning notes on a page into notes in the air.

 

If you are trying to write a masterpiece and you don't think the craft part of writing is a huge deal, give up now! (If you're writing for fun, or practice, or some other reason, then this warning is not for you. Keep writing and have fun.) Craft is the bulk of creative writing, not ideas. If you don't wrestle over questions like "Does this sentence sound right?" or "Is this scene at the correct narrative depth for this story?" then no matter how great your characters and setting, odds are you'll end up with a cacophony, not music.

 

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

SoT, it really sounds like to me this whole original fiction vs fanfiction matter you're wondering is because you place them on different intrinsic value levels, where original starts at the top, and fanfiction a step or few lower. And that the trouble of seeing any worth in writing fanfiction is because you see it automatically as 'lesser' than that of original - regardless if it's actually better written or not. Or that because it's on a lesser step, it automatically cannot be as good. But it's perfectly likely that there are terrible books (well, in anyone's personal viewpoint, obviously), and great fanfic stories. And vice versa. I really don't get this line of thought my self, because it's very far removed form what I feel about stories, in that I place them on different value levels depending on how much I'm entertained by them, regardless of whether they're original, or fanfiction. But it does make me kind of understand what you mean by writing under a ceiling. I just don't agree with it, because the reasons for it aren't meaningful enough to me.

That's well put. I don't agree, but my disagreement is a matter of taste. It's a strong taste that I can't imagine changing, but I can't call it a rational argument. I have a horror of imitation. The idea of fanfiction somehow makes my skin crawl, except as a kind of joke or send-up, or a therapy, or a training exercise with limited goals. It just seems wrong, to me, as a creative art. I can't claim that's any kind of objective judgement, but that's how I see it.

 

I could perhaps make an exception for a bad story with one or two elements that had potential for a much better story. One of my very favorite books, Treasure Island, is described by the author in the preface as a sort of fanfiction for the whole genre of pirate stories that he read as a boy; and of course Treasure Island is a three-star chef's burger and fries. The thing there is that although Stevenson apparently took a lot of tropes from the genre, he didn't need to take any recognizable characters or places or items. I can see how a bad book might still have something in it worth stealing, but I don't see why the theft would have to be admitted. At least I don't think this would happen very often.

 

That remains just my personal taste. I didn't think it would be condescending, because I took it for granted that nothing in this whole discussion could possibly be objective. I was puzzled as to why fanfiction has become a thing now, when it never used to be, years ago. If I don't like it, I obviously don't have to read it, so there's no reason anyone should take my opinion seriously enough to change their behavior in any way just to suit me.

 

If anyone is writing fanfiction just because they're shy about inventing their own characters, then I'd like to encourage such people to give it a shot.

[Student of Trinity]

Most writers I know, including myself, have very little problem with large-scale originality. Ideas are everywhere, and they're cheap, even major characters and detailed settings. It's getting it down on paper that's the hard part.

 

If you are trying to write a masterpiece and you don't think the craft part of writing is a huge deal, give up now! (If you're writing for fun, or practice, or some other reason, then this warning is not for you. Keep writing and have fun.) Craft is the bulk of creative writing, not ideas. If you don't wrestle over questions like "Does this sentence sound right?" or "Is this scene at the correct narrative depth for this story?" then no matter how great your characters and setting, odds are you'll end up with a cacophony, not music.

I agree in part, and partly disagree.

 

I agree that the largest scale originality is worth much less than one might think. "Elves and dwarves, but the dwarves are really robots!" is not something to worry about anyone stealing. The elevator pitch idea is much easier to have than one would like to think, when one has one's first one; and it's an infinitesimal contribution to the final product. When I was a kid I worried a lot about having ideas like that. I worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with them. I thought that if I could only get one, I'd have it made. I was wrong on both counts.

 

I also agree that the craft of hammering sentences and scenes together is really important. I still don't think it's as big a deal as playing performance-grade music, but it's what will inevitably take up almost all the time of actually writing a book. The thing is, though, that I actually know this part of writing pretty well by now. I've been writing something or other almost every day for over thirty years, so I reckon my total word count must be up in the millions. The point I want to make with that is that in-the-trenches writing is something that just comes with practice. In that sense, despite all the time it takes, it's not a bottleneck. Not having it will certainly kill your book; there, I agree. But for poorly written sentences and scenes, there's a straightforward remedy. Write moar. This stuff can always be made to work, if you work at it long enough.

 

The thing that I never learned by writing mostly expository or argumentative prose for all those years, but have discovered in pounding out a 135K word novel draft over the past eighteen months, is that there's a lot of levels of fiction design between scene and synopsis, and these levels are deadly. Maybe a few more decades of practice would make me as confident at these levels as I am at writing paragraphs, but in the long run we're all dead. When you haven't yet written a dozen good novels, there are lot of really hard challenges in getting a longer story to work properly together. Things have to click, and although a few things seem to click by themselves, most of them have to be made to click. You can labor mightily over paragraph after paragraph to the end, and yet end up doing no more than dragging a clunky story to its tired conclusion. Producing something that zings from start to finish is a lot more than just having a large-scale idea, but it's also a lot more than just writing decent prose.

 

Maybe this is just because I'm only starting out in this game, but at this point I have the alarmed impression that the problems at this does-it-click level don't always have remedies. I think you can easily find yourself half-way into a novel that just won't work. You can fix any bad sentence or paragraph, but I'm not sure there is any fix for characters that are just fundamentally lifeless or unappealing, or that just don't have anything to say to each other. Or at least, the only fix possible will be tantamount to scrapping the whole book and starting over, with a few recycled parts. In this sense I feel that writing original fiction is a blood sport. You really don't know whether you're going to make it. It's scary but it's a rush.

 

Taking predefined characters seems to me to mean ducking a lot of the really hard challenge of writing good fiction — but it's also the part that I think may be most interesting and rewarding. I certainly don't mean that everybody has to try to climb that particular mountain, but I don't like to think of people missing it just out of fear that they can't manage it, or not realizing that it is there.

[Upon Mars.]

What do you call originality?

[Cairo Jim]

One thing I like about Sci-Fi is that it can be quite original. Sure there is usually a few common elements like spaceships and hyperspace, but in general good Sci-Fi's usually have a whole universe created from scratch. Even to the point where there's a distinct alien species with a distinct language that occaisonaly becomes somewhat a cult status, like Klingon or Goa'uld

[VCH]

Anyone write fan-fiction for poems? Here's a short one I did for Poe's poem "The Tell-Tale Heart".

 

~The Servant~

 

I know he watches me. Every night the servant opens my bedroom door and peers in. Oh those eyes—I can feel them from across the room even though my own are shut. I should have fired him long ago. But who else would work for so little? I know he thinks I am mad, perhaps I am, but no more than he.

 

Long hours I sit in bed perfectly still, unmoving, all the while reaching out, testing the room for his presence. If he were to attack me, a neighbor would hear a scream. Not my scream, his. A knife, a very sharp one, I have long hidden under my pillow. He will be surprised; that would slow him.

 

Here he is again, opening my door, so carefully, so quietly. He thinks I do not notice, but I do. I know; tonight he comes to kill; his actions are much more deliberate. But I am ready—my knife . . . where is my knife?! It must be on the kitchen table where I cut bread for my supper. I freeze. No knife means no escape. Yes, here he is opening that lantern just a slit, now more. What should I do—scream, run? No, I am too old. He would over-power me. Minutes slip by into hours. More light comes from his lantern, now trained on my eyes. At last he has worked up the courage to do what he came for.

 

My servant of far too many years jumps upon me—a knife jabs into my chest. What, is this my knife in his hands? Oh how careless I had been! Several long heart beats pass, then silence.

 

—————————————————————————————————

 

Also, lately I've thought it would be cool to write fan-fiction about animals--their life-cycles and everyday doings. As part of my master's research I got pretty involved in learning about parasite life-cycles, which can be super complex. This caused me to think that I could write short-stories from the animal's perspective--maybe a parasite, maybe a lion--and basically tell the story of their life or part of it, but in a kind of humanized way. I started one such story for one of my research species, but haven't finished...

 

My biggest problem with writing is that I don't like to edit--I'm super lazy--so my first draft is usually the last draft.

 

[spoileralt=Dear reader, This account which I tell now for the first time, is not unique to me.]PREFACE

 

 

Dear reader,

 

This account which I tell now for the first time, is not unique to me. In fact there are many like me who could tell a similar story, in some cases even more fantastical than my own. Yet I maintain in the most steadfast nature that every word is the truth. I have too much respect for you, dear reader, to use fiction as a tool to juice up an accounting of historical facts

 

By writing this I hope to enlighten you on a world too often ignored, belittled and scoffed at. For if you look around you, truly look at the world, you might notice that there are many more things going on than you once thought. Look past the birds which are obvious, ignore the flowers which are gaudy, and cast your gaze down, down, down into the Earth’s third environment—not land or water but flesh. Because here you will find that things are never boring, that everyday happenings are worthy of respect and admiration, not disgust.

 

However, dear reader, I ask, that if you are incapable of an open mind, you should stop now, read no further. I am not writing this for those of you whose minds are set like old concrete. I write for those of you willing to admit wrongs, and change course when evidence dictates it. Please read on if the latter description suits you.

 

——————————————————————————————————

 

CHAPTER 1

I Leave Home

 

I was born in darkness, utter complete darkness, the kind that would make you think you were asleep if not for the desperate want to find your way about. Or at least that is how you might find it, myself, I was quite at home in that soft warm, pulsating feathered body. My parents were near, each locked in a lovers’ embrace now in its 30th year, and I had many 1,000s of brothers and sisters on all sides. To use a human cliche, life was good. But the good thing about good things, is that they end, for if they didn’t, we wouldn’t know they were good. And so it was for me that on the 16th day of March I was free-falling towards the ground at the edge of a partially ice-covered lake in Southern Canada. Many of my siblings were not as fortunate as me, as they landed not in the cold waters between the ice and shore but on the dry shore itself. I am not ashamed to say that I wept for them. But as you will see, death is normal for my species, as we are born in so copious amounts that each one of us has very little chance of surviving. Our strategy is not the human strategy of patient parenting but more so the gamblers strategy of placing chips on every colour on a roulette table to guarantee a win. Both strategies work, but ours is sadder.

 

CHAPTER 2

I Steal a New Home

 

 

 

 

From the 16th of March to the 20th of May I lay perfectly still except when the waters of the lake washed over me. I was not idle during this time, however, my body was changing drastically. I was no longer a single cell within a tough oblong egg-capsule, but instead had become what those humans who care to notice have termed a miracidium. If you are wondering what a miracidium looks like, picture a hairy raisin, as that more or less accurately describes me at that age.[/spoileralt]

[springacres]

I've had an Avadon 2 fanfic floating around in my head since I started playing it, and I'm finally getting around to writing it in blog format. Might take awhile, though. I'm still writing the first chapter

[Dikiyoba]

Also, lately I've thought it would be cool to write fan-fiction about animals--their life-cycles and everyday doings. As part of my master's research I got pretty involved in learning about parasite life-cycles, which can be super complex. This caused me to think that I could write short-stories from the animal's perspective--maybe a parasite, maybe a lion--and basically tell the story of their life or part of it, but in a kind of humanized way. I started one such story for one of my research species, but haven't finished...

It's original fiction, not fan-fiction, if it's inspired by/about animals, unless it's about a specific cartoon or celebrity animal.

 

Writing from the perspective of non-human organisms is fun. A lot of Dikiyoba's short stories tend to be about animals or plants.

[Student of Trinity]

SoT, i guess the core of our argument is that you've been focusing on whether fanfiction can be good writing and i don't actually think that literary merit, however defined, is anywhere near the most important thing about how most people relate to fiction (fan or otherwise). i'm not especially invested in saying that fan fiction can be "good writing" by any particular set of standards because i think to a large extent "good" and "bad" are beside the point. i mean, Michael Bay movies consistently manage to be major cultural spectacles, even though only a contrarian would say they have much objective artistic merit. you keep asking "why does fanfiction exist? why do people write it and why would anyone read it?" and yet you keep distracting yourself from the reasons you're offered by coming back to whether it's good writing, which doesn't really play a big part in any of those reasons

 

I don't seem to myself to have been distracted, because of course for me whatever it is that is drawing my interest is the thread. I agree that the topic is a bit ill-defined.

 

The original question was indeed about why fanfiction exists. For me at least the default premise about why fiction in general exists is that good writing is worthwhile in itself, so 'to write a good book' is always a sufficient answer to the question of why someone writes. So for me the question of whether fanfiction is good writing was an automatically spawned sub-thread.

 

The implicit thesis that I at least helped to propose, if only for argument, was that people read and write fanfiction, even though it is bad writing, for purposes other than producing good writing. I heard other people to propose the antithesis that fanfiction isn't bad writing, and the effort to write well is indeed part of why people write fanfiction.

 

The somewhat waffling synthesis seems to be that whether fanfiction is good or bad writing is in some way a bad question, so let's stop talking about it and just agree that there are other reasons for writing fanfiction. I'm pretty sure this is a cop-out, though. Calling writing 'good' or 'bad' is just a way of summarizing a whole bunch of more detailed reasons for why one might want to read it, and the cloud of aspects of goodness and badness is bound to have some overlap with the 'other reasons' for writing fanfiction. People seem to want other people to read their fanfiction; people seem to want to read fanfiction; and people seem to want to give and receive praise and criticism about fanfiction. The quality of fanfiction as writing does not really seem to be beside the point at all.

 

The kind of synthesis I'd like better would be to identify some particular ways in which fanfiction may be bad, and other ways in which it may be good. Then the conclusion would be that people who are into fanfiction weight some aspects of literary quality more highly than others. The emergence of this non-traditional set of preferences could be related somehow to the existence of the internet. The growth of fanfiction could be understood as a sort of genre speciation.

 

We've clearly bumped into this, but I at least haven't really framed such a conclusion explicitly. If I try to summarize things we've said so far, that lead in this direction, then I'd say we have indeed identified some ways in which fanfiction can be both good and bad.

 

On the good side, street-level writing of sentences and paragraphs is pretty much the same whether you're writing Twilight fanfiction or the second coming of Anna Karenina. I'd say fanfiction can be as good as any writing in this respect. And it would be pretty easy to understand a new tendency to value this aspect of writing more highly, in comparison to aspects of writing that are only relevant for larger chunks of text. Short formats have become more important, and I for one welcome our new tweeting overlords. People have been complaining for centuries that attention spans have been shrinking, but I just find most older writing to be ridiculously long-winded.

 

Also on the good side, figuring out what a given character would do in a new situation is a legitimate part of good writing. So is figuring out what new situations would best showcase a character. Fanfiction is clearly very strong on these aspects of writing. Why might people have become more appreciative of these aspects in particular, recently? Maybe the internet has brought so many characters within easy reach that the market is simply glutted, and using the ones we have better has risen in value, in comparison with generating new ones. I dunno. Something.

 

Given a situation and character one can determine what comes next, and given a character and an action one can ask what situation would be most appropriate. Fanfiction practices solving both those problems. The third comparable problem is to posit a situation and a series of consequences, and then come up with the character who would react to that situation by inducing those consequences. Fanfiction seems to be weak on this, and this happens to be the way I seem to like to approach characters, so fanfiction leaves me rather cold. I find it very hard to start with a character on a blank canvas, and feel I need to work towards characters, starting from other things. Conceivably this is a male-female difference. If that were true, then the fanfiction story could be that some relatively small other cause has made it a bit easier to produce writing in a way that comes more naturally to women, and so it has been amplified.

 

Another way that fanfiction is weak, I would say, is that it doesn't try to solve the hardest problem of all: given nothing, find a coherent combination of situation, characters, and events that is really interesting. This is really hard, though, and saying that fanfiction doesn't try to do it may just be like saying that a climber isn't tackling Everest. Even if you do aim for Everest, it's smart to get a lot of smaller mountains under your belt first. Perhaps for someone like me the fictional analog for climbing smaller mountains is to start with a rather unoriginal plot, a somewhat original setting, and then figure out the characters who will drive that plot in that setting. Perhaps fanfiction just permutes the elements, and starts from unoriginal characters. It may not be what I'd do to work up towards Everest, but it may not really be any less ambitious.

[Dikiyoba]

Woo, Dikiyoba wrote over 1,000 words today. Woo.