Weather And Fanfic
Crow in the birch trees, black against yellow that will soon become green. Windchimes rattling and singing. It’s windy, as it has been for the past few days, sweeping old out, bringing new in. The cats are curled up sleeping, except for one cat who has refused to come home. We don’t know if he’s Passed On or merely enjoying the comforts of some other cat dish. The Sullen One is quiet and thoughtful whenever this is mentioned.
It’s sad.
The sky is a blank sheet today, ready for weather to be written on it. The kids are watching Return to Oz, and I’ve remembered just how much I enjoy this movie. Which brings me to yesterday’s discussion of “fanfic.” (Link courtesy of the magnificent Bear.)
Every writer, if they are on the right path, gets to a point where they’re writing other people’s characters. It’s training wheels for the writing muscles. If you are still on the right path, you grow out of it, derivative works notwithstanding. (They are another kettle of wax, so to speak.)
The rise of the Internet means that nowadays budding writers don’t write their fanfic in spiral-bound notebooks like I did (easily burnable, if it comes to it. Which it did for me, for reasons best left buried in the Land of Unspeaking.) No, they write in digital archives open to other people’s rating and perusal. If you are tough and flexible, this bothers you only a little, and you will Grow As A Writer. (Hopefully as a human being too, but I make no claims.)
The only difference between fanfic now and fanfic ten years ago is the Internet. Period. And like any advance in the spread of technology, the vast mass of more data means we’re not seeing a different proportions of good fanfic or bad fanfic. The numbers are just bigger, that’s all. It’s like my Shotgun Theory of Submissons.
But as for the inalienable right to write fanfic…I don’t know if I can go that far. If an author says, “Please don’t use my characters” one has to respect that, as one writer to another. It’s courtesy, it’s what you do, and that’s that. And of course if one gets paid for using someone else’s characters, we all know what that is, and the word ain’t pretty.
I tend to think plagiarism is like porn–like Justice Potter, I knows it when I sees it. I also think most fanfic comes from a place of love and respect, and it keeps the fans happy. (Which is no small thing.) I mean, come on. Someone loves your work so much they spend time and creativity wanting to crawl into and recreate it? Your characters speak so loudly others want to share them? That’s good! Why bitch about it?
On the other hand (and if you’ve read me for any amount of time, you know there is ALWAYS another hand) we live in a society where creative people are not granted a living wage as a right. Between reserves against returns and getting paid only twice a year (if we’re lucky and the publisher is gracious) writers don’t get much to feed themselves and their kids. And don’t tell me we should be doing it just because we Love Art. That’s a copout. A writer or painter has just as much right to earn enough to eat as a lawyer or ditch-digger.
As Gene Wilder put it, we are the music makers and the dreamers of dreams. We feed the soul like farmers feed the body. Why are we not allowed the right to earn a decent wage while doing so?
Well, that’s a side-issue too.
Now for the thing I’m thinking that tries to satisfy both sides. There is a necessary tension between the explosion of fanfic and the dialogue about writer’s absolute rights to their own characters. It’s like the tension between free speech and hate speech–we need to ask the questions and explore the gray area, realizing all the while that it is not the solution that is important. It is the willingness for us to ask the bloody question and (here’s the kicker) listen to each other.
One thing Livia doesn’t mention is that most derivative works, like Scarlett or Finn, of even Jasper Fforde’s work, deals with classics–books where the author, while beloved, is still indisputably dead. (Passed on. Singing in the choir eternal. Like the parrot. *smacks self for going Monty Python*) There’s a certain amount of fair-use that comes into play fifty or a hundred years after an author is dead. Especially if that author penned a classic.
Living writers now have to deal with insta-fanfic. Which isn’t a BAD problem–it means people are giving you free advertising and they loved your work. I don’t know what’s bad about that…unless they’re getting paid for stealing one’s characters, or unless one’s asked them nicely to respect some boundaries when it comes to what is, after all, one’s creation.
There’s one more important aspect to this. If you’re writing fanfic, and you get to the point where someone else’s characters are confining or (watch for this) you think you could do it better than the writer you’re imitating…then write your own stuff. It’s high time. A lot of the bubbling toiling and troubling about the rights of fanfic writers (such as they are) is smoke and steam keeping y’all from where you need to be.
Which is butt in chair, fingers on keyboard, writing.
Because that is, after all, the bottom line.
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