The periodic Fanfic discussion Revives...

[seawasp]

prestoimp pointed out one of the latest in a series of established writers talking about the EEEEEEeeeeeeeeeevils of fanfic, this time from Robin Hobb.

EDIT: Apparently Robin wrote this about a year ago. My response is still valid, even if this is not, actually the "latest" screed on the topic.

Once more I must reiterate my statements from before, just because... someone should, and that someone should be a published author. I'm not as well known as Robin Hobb, but I am someone who knows about the basics of the field... and some of Robin's statements are, not to put too fine a point on it, utterly ludicrous. Let's look at some of them:

Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.
What utter rot. No one except idiots (and overexcitable fangirls) confuse fanfiction with the real stuff. The vast, VAST volume of Potterfics out there have had exactly ZERO effect on J.K. Rowling's reputation. No one I have EVER heard of has contended that they have formed their view of an author based on the fanfiction made from the author's work. I've seen a few cases of obsessive fangirls convincing themselves of something about an anime based on doujinshi and their own preferences, but no one thinking sensibly would do this. This isn't "identity theft". No one is claiming to be the author in question. Fanfic writers do not in any way, shape, or form imply that they have any direct association with the author. In short, there isn't anything at all to support such a hysterically extreme position. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero.

That’s not flattering. That’s insulting. Every fan fiction I’ve read to date, based on my world or any other writer’s world, had focused on changing the writer’s careful work to suit the foible of the fan writer. Romances are invented, gender identities changed, fetishes indulged and endings are altered. It’s not flattery. To me, it is the fan fiction writer saying, “Look, the original author really screwed up the story, so I’m going to fix it. Here is how it should have gone.”
The key words here are "to me". This is a case of an author taking things far too seriously. Our words aren't holy writ. They're stories. They produce reactions. If they don't, in fact, we're failures. Authors who don't produce reactions don't sell many books. It's perfectly natural for a reader who reacts strongly to your writing to do something about it, if they feel at all interested in writing themselves. Some of the reactions will be, um, not for family consumption. Some will be negative -- yes, they ARE basically saying you screwed up. What amazes me is that Robin Hobb acts as though that should be taken seriously. Is there a SINGLE author on the entire planet who has never had a negative review? Is there ANY written work on earth that hasn't been lambasted by someone? I don't think so. Not so long as the written work had more than the writer's ten closest friends as readers, and maybe not even then. SO WHAT? This is one of the most important lessons any published author, or actor, needs to learn: SOME PEOPLE WILL HATE YOUR STUFF. And those inclined to write may REwrite your stuff. I, personally, rewrote a number of classic stories that peeved me, such as "Harrison Bergeron". (personally, I'd call that "anti-fan fic"). And some will honestly want to explore new or different paths. Again... SO WHAT? If they were trying to get it published for money, under YOUR name, that's a problem. But they're not.

Note, also, that even the money question isn't particularly important. In Japan, fanfiction is a major industry -- one that actually has made money for the fanficcers. And one which is watched closely by the regular publishing industry for potential new talents. Which leads us to...

“Fan fiction is a good way for people to learn to be writers.” No. It isn’t.
ACTUALLY, yes, it can be, Robin Hobb. You are wrong. You are completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong. Different people learn the tricks of writing many ways. The most CRUCIAL is to write SOMETHING. Anything. But write. I actually learned a fair number of techniques doing fanfiction with my wife; specifically, if anyone anywhere thinks I can write interesting characters, they can probably credit my fanfic work with teaching me how. A number of other writers, some of them very well known indeed, have "committed fanfiction" in their past, and if it didn't teach them anything it sure as hell didn't HURT.

Fan fiction and copyright.
One subject that Robin almost-sorta gets right. Yes, copyright has NADA to do with money. But infringing is a different issue. You generally can't infringe on COPYRIGHT unless you are copying someone else's stuff directly. What you *CAN* infringe on without doing that is Trademarks. This is a very fuzzy area of law, and the excesses and stupidities of things like the MPAA, RIAA, etc., have just made it fuzzier and more annoying. Bottom line, you may well NOT be infringing on copyright, but that WON'T protect you if some jerk with more money than common sense decides to sue you on it. OTOH, if you play it right, the jerk will lose far more from the bad publicity than they could possibly have lost even if you WERE selling your fanfics for 20 bucks a pop and hitting the NYT bestselller lists.


The other stuff is just more of the same, including the old "why write fanfiction instead of original stuff? It's not creative!" which is an entirely separate line of bullshit. By that standard there's nothing creative in the commercial fanfics, er, Tie In Novels. Sure, some of them might well qualify as Uncreative Stuff. But others are very creative, and in some ways writing in someone else's universe is MORE demanding, because it comes with constraints that your own stuff won't. (Timothy Zahn's contributions to the Star Wars universe were pretty creative within those constraints, IMCGO, and few people have accused Zahn of being UNABLE to write stuff on his own.

The most amusing part of Robin Hobb's rant is the last section, where she basically says "here, write your fanfic, change the names, and publish it!" Yes, really. She changes the order -- i.e., she says to change the names and all before you write it -- but in essence, magically, by taking the exact same characters you would write in your fic, and the exact same situations, and changing the names, she's telling you that suddenly it becomes worthy, creative fiction.

Think about that. I go to write a fanfic about, say, Stargate. This is (quoting Robin again) "UNWORTHY OF ME". So instead, I change the names of the main characters -- Jack becomes John, Daniel becomes Darrin, Samantha becomes Sylvia, and instead of "Stargate" I make it a network of "Portals", and make a different name for the godlike race they're fighting, and suddenly it's Worthy and Creative? Unless I change a lot more than that, I might not even avoid a C&D from Sci-Fi.

The bottom line? An awful lot of stuff published *IS* fanfic. We published authors just filed the serial numbers off better than the average ficcer, and maybe do more crossover fics than they do. Maybe that just makes the average ficcer more HONEST than the authors who take a holier-than-thou position on the subject.

Comments

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I doublechecked my tags and found a post that told me it was the same Robin Hobb rant from sometime last year that I'd already blogged about. Apparently, someone recently discovered it (I think I saw something about it on Whedonesque) and now it's all over the place again. But it helped me find a writer blog I didn't know about (the one I linked to today), so that was cool.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[amberdine.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's okay with Ms. Hobb if people imagine things about her characters? What if they make up stories and don't write them down? Write the stories down but not show anyone?

I don't have any interest in writing or reading fanfic, but anyone was ever that into any of my characters: cool!

I think someone is a bit of a control freak.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Funny thing is, I'm not much of a Tim Zahn fan. I mean, I've read and enjoyed the Cobra trillogy and the first couple or three Warstrider novels, but his Star Wars novels have been... I dunnow... I just never got into them. On the other hand I really like Brian Daley's Han Solo trillogy and I pull them out every few years to reread.

[howardtayler.livejournal.com]

The biggest gift I'm given by my fans is when they tell me about how I've captured huge chunks of their imagination. They discuss what my characters, my technologies, my universe would look like in certain situations. And they put at least as much thought into it as I do.

That's a huge amount of trust they're placing in me. And I respect that. If they want to write fanfics, there are a few rules I ask them to abide by (credit me for the Universe, disclaim me for the writing, don't sell it for money) and that's it.

Maybe I'll magically become more anal about this once my first book is out, but I kind of doubt it.

--Howard

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

"Hello, everyone. I'm Sinanju, and...I write fanfic."

The idea that fanfic is a crime against the original writer (except, sometimes, in a very technical sense) is a load of crap. If someone cares about your characters or world enough to go to the effort of writing a fanfic, I'd say you achieved your goal as a writer! You've engaged those readers--and very strongly. Isn't that what you hoped to achieve? (Unless it's an anti-fanfic; I confess that I got my start as a fanfic writer doing those. Inconsistent characterizations, convenient bouts of amnesia and rampant stupidity often drove me to write something more palatable for my own amusement.)

As for fanfic sullying your identity...I am aware that paper zines exist, but I've seldom seen them. I read 99.9% of all the fanfic I read online, where it isn't about to be confused with an actual novel or--even more preposterously--confused with a tv show or movie. I very rarely see fics that don't bear prominent disclaimers identifying the source of the original works on which the fic is based.

I like crossover fic. I've (bought and) gotten hooked on original works that I never would have read/watched if I hadn't run into those characters in a fanfic. Fanfic gained the original writer/producers a customer; it emphatically did not COST them one.

[brooksmoses]

It's sort of interesting comparing this to papersky's views on fanfiction and the like -- or, more accurately, my misrememberances of her views; on reviewing of what I could find on Google Groups, I think I'm probably taking her views on the LOTR movies and extrapolating them. So I'll stop attributing this to her, aside from noting the inspiration.

There's a very distinct sense in which fan fiction is an identity theft -- not the identity of the author (as you say, certainly not!), but that of the characters and of the world. Within the context of the fan-fiction, there is someone who is purporting to be the character in question, but almost certainly they are not, or are at least a warped version of same.

This may not matter outside the context of the fan fiction, in the real world. It certainly does not, in my opinion, matter anywhere near enough to merit legal protection against it. But I think it's still a reasonable position to say, "The idea of having my characters doing things that are contrary to how I understand their character is something that's deeply emotionally disturbing to me, and I so would very much rather that people didn't write fanfiction with things I created."

And I think that, if an author has expressed such an opinion, even if they've surrounded it with legalistic bluster that I disagree with, it's still discourteous to ignore such preferences if one knows of them.

(There are a very few authors that I'd choose to be discourteous to, perhaps. But that would turn writing the fanfic into an act of active discourteousness rather than fanfic for its own sake, and that's quite a different thing.)

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that was her at Dragon-Con a few years ago, saying that the Baen Free Library was somehow hurting authors and publishers that didn't choose to make some of their works available free of charge. :-P

[kengr]

While the MPAA & co are confusing thijngs with regards to copyright, fanfic usually infringes on the "derivative works" right that is one of the many rights lumped together as copyright.

Basically, if you wouldn't have written it if the other work hadn't existed, it's a derivative work. And this *may* infringe.

Fanfic can also clash with another right I can't recal the proper name for, but that basically amounts to "artistic integrity". Thatr's what lets an author stop someone from turning his work into a porno flick or the like (and if a certain director hadn't bought the filn rights, would have let Virginia Heinlein stop "Starship Troopers" from being released under that name).

In essence, if the work would damage the marketability of yourt work or twist is severely out of shape, you can try suing.

Of course, Parody is exempt. If you can afford to defend yourself.

BTW, Bujold's first book "The Warrior's Apprentice" is supposed to have been a fan-fic that she was encouraged to file the serial numbers off of.

By the way...

[count-zeroor.livejournal.com]

The article you talk about got mentioned on Whedonesque, a Joss Whedon site that frequented by The Boss. Joss doesn't weigh in on this particular post though, but it still bears reading. Also, there is mention by posters of The Grantsville Gazette, and how its existance helps defeat her arguement.

As it is, I am semi-guilty of writing possibly bad fan-fic. A friend and I wrote an ultra-Mary Sue Crossover fan fic series when we were in High School. The series featured most of the major members members of the school's anime club and crossed over with a lot of other anime series. Lime from Saber Marionette J and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII (although he was played as a parody of bishounen pretty-boys - being followed around by a horde of fan-girls and excessively vein about his hair) were among the cross-over characters who played major roles. It started out, mostly, as a bunch of gag stories, but when I came in I kind of introduced an story arc to each season, basically going down to:

Season 1: Jerry Fallwell (or, to be more accurate, a caracture thereof) decides to declare a war on Anime, and chooses to start with our Anime Club. Fallwell is portrayed as a bumbling not-so-brilliant evil mastermind ala Dr. Forrester from MST3K. Ultimatly, he is repulsed, and his patron decides to take charge. The two "original" charcters of this season were Guido and Vinnie, two mobsters from a New York Mafia family, who were attached to us after Fallwell tried to join/take over the Mob (a task which he didn't quite understand the scope of) through subterfuge, and was almost clipped by being fitted for cement boots and dumped in the East River. We arrived and in the confusion Fallwell ended up in the East River anyway but was rescued. None of us, however, knew that, and through a reasoning I don't quite remember, one of the members of the Anime Club (who shall referred to as "Brian"), became a Made Guy, and Guido and Vinnie were made subordinate to him.

Season 2: The next season we introduced perhaps wour third original character, Lord Kylar Daas, galactic warlord, who was out to conquer Earth primarly because it was in his arc of advance. Daas was actually competant, and, although we didn't actually have any art of him, I imagined him as looking like Cats from Zero Wing without the cybernetics (that would wait for season 3). This season moved the Anime Club's base of operation from the school's theater to one of the school's modular buildings (as it did in real life), and added an vast under-ground base of operations, which housed all of our mechs and space craft. This season also had the anime club actually nearing defeat, and culumnated to the club being "publically outed", and a vast assault on Daas's hidden base on the moon (a slight nod to the one of the few bits I actually liked about the original Power Ranger - Rita's base on, presumably, the moon), with forces from all the across the world, in Battlemechs and with an infantry assault of the main base (in a nod to "Space: Above and Beyond", the infantry were carried into the base in the semi-drop ships from that series).

Season 3: Never really happened, but would have involved the formation of SG-42, which the Anime Club would have been placed in charge of, based out of Daas's old moon base, using a Stargate which he had in his control, which seemingly connected to an enterly different network. Would have included crossovers to The Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, and further crossovers to Saber Marionette J. The original characters for this season would have included three SAS squads attached lead by Sergents (sp) Winkyn, Blinkyn and Nod.

And the point of this is - over the three years of writing that series (and trying to put out one "issue" per month for the Anime Club), I would like to think my prose writing style improved greatly. While I haven't written any more fanfic quite yet (though I have a few ideas bounsing around in my head), I think I am a better writer, and better at plotting out, well, plot lines, because of it.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Personally, I mostly agree with Robin (though I'll say fanfic is okay so long as it's kept private). And I'll point out that you skimmed the first sentence where she admits to being irrational on the subject (in fact, she prefers people use this link to emphasize the point), and that she uses the term "fanfic" to just mean works by writers who don't have permission to use the setting/characters.

It's her opinions (note the complete lack of legal bluster), you're entitled to find it ludicrous. I myself laughed long and hard at this claim that fanfic helps to teach writers how to stay in character.

As for fanfic as promotion, didn't you (Sea Wasp) claim elsewhere that there's no such thing as bad publicity? I bet more people have heard of Robin because of this rant than would have from fanfic.

Finally, for every reasonably intelligent person like Wasp who criticizes her, five people like Sarah show up in her personal newsgroup. And that's the face of fanfiction she sees.

[shana.livejournal.com]

Well since my character is going to be canon...

[kjn]

Heh. I guess I can say that I'm guilty of provoking this particular rant.

Back when Robin Hobb was GoH at Fantastika 2001 in Stockholm, I conceived of the idea of having the programme item "Writers and their electronic fans", with me, Robin Hobb and Robert Rankin (who didn't show up for this particular item, for reasons I won't go into here). Late in the conversation, I'd reached the end of my prepared list of questions, and asked about fanfic.

To her credit, she kept calm, but she certainly made her feelings known ("I hate it. I absolutely hate it"). One way and another, this little tidbit ended up in several con reports, and spawned a large discussion on the discussion board she had at the time, so after a month or so she promised to write up something more coherent and lasting.

Also, a note of order about Lois Bujold. While it's true that the first germ of Shards of Honor was a fanfic, it basically only extended to the first few chapters of the book, ie the trek over net-yet-Sergyar.