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Joined: 11/10/2012
Posts: 11
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So, I'm curious as to what people here think of fan fiction. Granted, the world has already been created for you but if that is all you've taken then how far away are you from a "legitimate" story?
I can use an example I've done on another site. I play an online game called World of Warcraft. The game creators have created a world, several key characters, and a rich lore and history.
Now, I created new characters and a new storyline. In the story I followed their set lore and interacted with their characters.
So now where do you all stand on the legitimacy of this as writing? Love to hear your feedback on this.
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Joined: 8/13/2011
Posts: 272
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For me, it varies across the spectrum, as you might imagine. I think Fan-fic's at its best when the writer's using the setting to go somewhere else with it. So stuff like 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality' is really good, as it's being used to illustrate rational thinking techniques as much as it's being used to tell a story in the Harry Potter universe.
The really useful thing for a writer working with fan-fic is that a lot of the heavy lifting's already done. With worlds, characters and relationships already established, it's a lot easier to hit the ground running with your writing. This makes it a lot easier for inexperienced writers to get to hard parts of writing while being sure they've got the gubbins under the car in the right place.
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Joined: 10/20/2011
Posts: 350
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I write fanfiction so I am one to defend it. Yes, a lot of the hard work is already done. But it's a great way to hone one's craft. You have to figure out how to capture your favorite character so the other fans will recognize him and in the process, learn about characterization. And it goes on and on.
Nowadays, it seems more people just use fanfiction in hopes of getting an instant audience for their work. Which is a shame because good fanfiction is sometimes even better than the source material.
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Joined: 4/30/2011
Posts: 662
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While I have never been one to write fan fiction because it's not satisfying for me, it is a good way for inexperienced writers to hone the storytelling portion of writing. The fact that people publish it with just a few changed names here and there is the wrong part. It's borderline plagiarism. The thing people forget is that fan fiction is not their original work.
But in some countries, fan fiction is legitimately published. In Japan, there is a genre called dojinshi (probably spelled that wrong) which is published fan fiction. Even here in America we have a form of it. Take novel series based off franchises of video games, TV series, or movies. While those writers are commissioned by the companies and license holders, the characters and world still aren't theirs.
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Joined: 11/10/2012
Posts: 11
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Interesting ideas so far. I think that if a company hires you to write about their particular game, TV, or movie that's not really a bad thing. Again, I have to go back to the only game I know and say that Blizzard does indeed hire people to write about their game. Yes, it's a pre-defined world but what the writers are doing is creating lore. I understand this isn't the same as creating your own world but it is a stepping stone to not only learning how to create worlds, but also into the publishing world.
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Joined: 11/28/2012
Posts: 1
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I reckon its legit. Its a good starting place. Its like painting - initially you copy someone elses work in order to be able to do your own. For example, if a person was to recreate the Mona Lisa from scratch, sure s/he wouldn't be able to claim it their own, but it'd still be an amazing feat! Fanfiction is similar. I started with assassin's creed as you know and then wrote In Sheep's Clothes. the AC fanfic will never get published... well, at least not unless Ubisoft publish it for me, but In Sheep's Clothes has that potential.
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Joined: 6/13/2012
Posts: 13
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The best stories are those you want to immerse yourself in. Fan fiction is just that, whether its well written or not, whether its legitimate or not. I can personally say that I've written a lot of fan fiction, mostly in the Star Wars universe and specifically for the game Knights of the Old Republic (the original game and its sequel, not that awful multi-player online game they stuck us with instead of fixing KotR 2 or making a KotR 3). I'm still writing it and find it a good way to work out a lot of issues such as; handling a large cast of characters, how to keep a character consistent throughout a story arc, editing out "oh but this would be so cool!" moments, and pacing.
The other main reason I like fan fiction is because it keeps people writing, and that's the important part.
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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I'm not into fan fiction either as a reader or as a writer, but of course it's legitimate writing. You just have to make sure how you define legitimate. Writing is first and foremost an act of self-expression, and if a person writes for no other reason, then any form of writing must be considered legitimate. Writing is secondarily an entertainment form, so if you share what you write and it entertains others, how could that be illegitimate? The only way fan fiction fails the legitimacy test is if you place it in the context of writing as a commercial product. Since you have no legal right to publish and profit from your fan fiction, you can never be a "professional" at it. (If you sell a movie or book tie-in to the entity that has the rights to that property, it's no longer fan fiction.)
But the lack of commercial opportunity doesn't have anything to do with true legitimacy. Almost none of Kafka's works were published in his lifetime, and he requested that his manuscripts be destroyed upon his death. Does his failure to financially capitalize on his work render it less legitimate?
As for the idea that the world is already built for those who write fan fiction -- doesn't the same thing apply for those who write historical fiction and mainstream mysteries and anything else set in "the real world?"
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Joined: 11/10/2012
Posts: 11
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I never thought of it that way Herb...very good points about the legitimacy of fan fiction. Thanks for the reply.
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Joined: 3/17/2011
Posts: 88
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Hey all,
I'm gonna come out and say it. No, it ain't (generally) legitimate because (as far as I've seen, ymmv) fan-fiction is born of the wrong urge. The right urge would be that you have a story to tell and generally that desire is strongest when it's your very own story; when the muses have visited you in the wee hours and planted a crazy idea in your skull.
Fan-fiction generally comes out of a desire to *participate* in a story, y'know, as a fan. That's why it's called *fan* fiction. You want to be part of this big cool thing out there. You don't want to improve on that big cool thing--how could you?--you don't want to supplant that big cool thing with an even cooler thing of your own, you just want to extend the legend and the legacy of that big cool thing because that big good thing is just so dang cool!
What makes this the wrong urge is that being an artist requires a robust ego. Robust. The kind of ego that's not gonna be content with writing footnotes on somebody else's history. The kind of ego that will be able to digest a favorite writer's work and let it influence/inform/inspire them without plagiarizing the other writer's soul.
I would go so far as to say a lot of genre fiction that gets written is essentially genre-fan fiction. It's not that the author has a story they're burning to tell that happens to fall into one or another genre, but rather that they want to *participate* in their favorite genre. They treat "SciFi" as a big sandbox they want to play in. They don't bring anything particularly original or thought provoking to the table, just FTL, aliens, single biome planets, etc. and call it good.
I'm not saying there isn't a market for this sort of thing, that would be contrary to fact. And I'm not saying it isn't good practice because any writing, any writing at all, is good practice. I'm saying, as an artist, you owe it to yourself, to your ego, not to settle for decorating someone else's cake. Challenge yourself to bake an even better cake than they could have imagined.
-Kevin
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Joined: 6/28/2011
Posts: 188
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Great post, Kevin. I keep re-reading it, and every time, I change my mind about whether I agree with you or disagree!
Your point about people treating SciFi as a sandbox describes an awful lot of writers I've met and interacted with online. But at the same time, it also describes me as an adolescent, when I was old enough to know I wanted to do something creative with my life, but not old enough to have anything of importance to say in my writing. I treated writing as a form of play for a very long time -- until I realized that in all of the works I enjoyed most, something more lurked under the entertaining surface level of the story. As I came to understand how writers added deeper levels to their work, and as I racked up the life experience needed to envision depths of my own, I started finding stories to tell, as opposed to just moving the playground equipment around.
So while I agree that the sandbox approach is inherently limited, I guess I would still make the case that it can be a legitimate part of the growth process every writer has to go through. And because of the inherently noncommercial nature of fan fiction, I think it can in some cases indicate a self-awareness on the author's part that he or she isn't yet ready to step up to the full challenge of writing from scratch.
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Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 608
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Kevin makes some very good points, hammered home with brio and unflinching certitude. In the main I find I agree with him. And yet . . .
What are we to say about established writers who take on the story-telling duties involved in creating new tales of others' creations? Harlan Ellison writing Batman comics or Star Trek television episodes, Orson Scott Card writing for Superman, the European artist Moebius doing a Galactus/Silver Surfer graphic novel? Does it cease to be "fan fiction" as soon as you're paid handsomely for it?
More provocatively still, Shakespeare appropriated others’ plots outright and simply re-wrote and altered as he wished. The question of plagiarism aside (he’s guilty as charged) isn’t this an example of genius-level fan-fic? Or how about all those Bronze and early Iron Age Middle Eastern writers cranking out new “divinely inspired” texts for the library that would one day be known as “The Holy Bible”?
The boundaries between the realms of “fan fic” and “legitimate fiction” (whatever the hell that latter category is) are muddied, mutable and ever in flux, it would seem.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Hi gang -
I think it's important to establish the difference between fan-fiction, ie, the unlicensed and unsanctioned use of characters or storylines in one writer's intellectual property for non-commercial purposes versus shared-world writing, which is always licensed to the writer by the IP holder.
Example: Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan-fiction. E.L. James took the Edward and Bella characters and put them into an original story. Yes, this was fanfiction, but it was also mostly original writing. When she decided to self-publish the book, she scrubbed all references to Twilight characters and place names, because she did not have authorization to use Stephanie Meyer's characters or world.
On the other hand, Troy Denning writes Star Wars adult fiction based on story arcs created by the in-house editorial team at the LucasBooks division of LucasFilm. Star Wars books may contain characters from the original trilogy, or they may contain new characters, but the Star Wars world is a shared one and licensed to publishers like Del Rey, Scholastic and Dark Horse in order to help create the Star Wars expanded universe. Writers are paid by LucasBooks to participate in the shared world. This is the same for the Halo Books, Star Trek Books, etc.
There is also a subgenre of fanfic called slash fic, which is primarily erotic, and generally involves pairing up ("shipping") two characters that the writer really wants to see have sex. A lot of slash fic is m/m for some reason.
I think fanfiction for personal, non-commercial use is actually good practice for writers. Fanfic writers often know how to write very quickly, and how to take criticism well, because the fanfic communities are fairly outspoken when they dislike where a story is going.
YMMV.
Cheers!
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Joined: 10/20/2011
Posts: 350
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"There is also a subgenre of fanfic called slash fic, which is primarily erotic, and generally involves pairing up ('shipping') two characters that the writer really wants to see have sex. A lot of slash fic is m/m for some reason."
Having been a part of the fanfiction community so long, I feel like I should clarify. "Shipping" is not exclusive to slashfic but is found throughout many fanfictions. Slashfic is only same sex pairing and the term "slash" is usually reserved for m/m pairings. It comes from the Star Trek fandom from the Kirk/Spock pairing. For f/f pairings, the term femmeslash is usually used.
And if you want to avoid erotic fanfiction, don't click on anything marked "lemon." "Lime" too just to be on the safe side.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Alexandria
Thanks for clarifying! =)
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Joined: 10/20/2011
Posts: 350
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Colleen,
You're welcome. Once again, I've been involved in fanfiction for some time now. If anyone has any questions, I'll try to answer them.
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