I've been thinking a lot about fan-fic and slash-fic lately.
Now, it's really difficult to write a post about fan-fic and slash-fic without defining the terms for the readers who aren't familiar with either. And it's really difficult to accurately define these terms because they mean different things for different people. So I'm going to try to define what the terms mean to me, but with the advance warning that I tend to define these terms more loosely and more broadly than many other people do. And, it's worth noting: I don't own the terms and I'm not the definitive guide for using them. So there's that!
But having said that, I use the term fan-fic to refer to stories written by fans of an existing fictional work. The fan-fic work utilizes some or all of the existing work's pre-established characters, world building, and possibly story arcs. I use the term slash-fic to refer to "fan-fic that contains romantic pairings between existing characters that is not directly supported by the established work", but it's important to note that a large body of slash-fic requires changing or modifying a character's established sexuality in order to make the pairing work.
Based on these very broad definitions, I've loved fan-fic for years. Some of my favorite novels are new retellings of old fairy tales or modern rewrites of Shakespearean plays. My favorite Greek plays are the ones that took pre-existing myths and reworked them into new interpretations. I've seen "The Divine Comedy" described in jest as "history's first recorded self-insert fan-fic", but by golly I like that Dante gets to meet Virgil and be Best Friends Forever. Fan-fic has always seemed to me to be a great platform for breathing modern concerns and issues into relevant older pieces, as well as for filling in plot holes or extrapolating what happens after The End.
Slash-fic, on the other hand, I've had a more changeable relationship with, and for that I blame Sherlock Holmes. You see, I like Sherlock Holmes stories, although I think I liked them more when I was a child and the logic trains seemed more clear-cut and less authorially-mandated. But I like them nonetheless, and I especially like that Sherlock Holmes is portrayed, in my opinion, as a rare asexual character in a genre that more often than not seems to center around the hero getting The Girl (if not lots and lots of girls) as a prize at the end of every solved mystery.
But Sherlock Holmes is also one of the most famous literary characters I can think of who is also regularly the subject of slash-fic romance with his sometimes live-in roommate Watson, despite Holmes' (in my opinion) carefully portrayed asexuality and Watson's romantic devotion to his wife. And if you'd asked me a few months ago what I thought about the tendency to slash-pair Holmes/Watson, I would have said it really isn't my thing. But then Melissa McEwan said something that made me reconsider my position.
A few days after I very badly communicated in a Slacktiverse thread that non-canon pairings weren't really my thing because of this hang-up I have with Sherlock Holmes, Melissa McEwan posted on her blog a trailer for the upcoming movie "The Hobbit". And because Shakesville is a feminist blog with a heavily female readership, a delightful conversation sprung up about Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" epic and the relative lack of female characters therein. In the ensuing discussion, I confessed that as a child I had accidentally read hobbit Merry and elf Legolas as females, because I had assumed that someone in an epic adventuring party needed to be female. I also offered that I had been so upset on the realization that there were no women in the LOTR adventuring party that I wrote a truly execrable fan-fic about "Gandalf's daughter". I pointed out that this character I had written was a silly and one-dimensional device intended simply to follow the party around and provide a 'hook' for me to sink into the narrative. Melissa responded by saying:
It doesn't sound silly to me.
It sounds like building a room of one's own (so to speak, and with all due respect to Ms. Woolf) within a literary space.
If feminism is learning the cultural architecture to build rooms of one's own wherever one finds the need, and I believe that it is, then creating a character for an author who couldn't be arsed to create one for you is an act of feminism, not silliness.
"Creating a character for an author who couldn't be arsed to create one for you is an act of feminism." I'd never seen it that way before, and now that it had been said, I couldn't see it any other way.
We live in a world where popular fiction, if it wants to avoid being shoved into the "issues" section, frequently presents a world of monochromatic characters in hetero-normative relationships. Female characters, no matter how "strong" or competent, are more often than not shoved aside in favor of male protagonist pie. Minority characters -- people of color, people with disabilities, people with body fat -- are included rarely, if at all, and almost never as main characters and almost always with glowing neon "issue" signs over their heads. Non-neurotypical characters, including people with multiplicity, are rarely included and almost inevitably whodunit. QUILTBAG characters are frequently silenced or absent altogether.
Of the 100+ books I read last year, only two of them even mentioned gays and lesbians, let alone the other letters in the alphabet soup. One of those books was a non-fiction book with the word 'gay' in the title. The other was a history book about U.S. presidents. The last fictional book I read with a bisexual character was Steig Larsson's "The Millenium Trilogy", and the bisexual female protagonist largely prefers men. I cannot remember reading a fictional book with undecided, intersex, transgender, or asexual characters that wasn't explicitly an "issue" book. I can't remember recently watching a movie or television show with QUILTBAG characters where the issue wasn't largely included to drive ratings or to serve in place of actual characterization except maybe, maybe, True Blood's Lafayette. Who, in addition to being gay, is also a drug dealer and a prostitute (and a perfect example of why television writers need to read up on Wicca before throwing it into a show with Vampires and Werewolves and Fairies as though all of those things is just like the others). Well-adjusted, happy QUILTBAG characters seem to be as rare in mainstream fiction as unicorns.
If creating a character with an identity similar to yours, for an author who couldn't (for whatever reason, because I fully recognize that It's Very Complicated) create one for you, is an act of positive subversion, does it matter if the character is a new one a la Gandalf's Daughter or a new interpretation of an existing one a la Sherlock Holmes?
I'm not sure that it does matter, at least as far as fan-fic goes. Possibly the full power and finance of Hollywood does not need to be directed into turning Hamlet gay for a Hamlet/Horatio pairing, or Mary Bennet lesbian for a Mary Bennet/Charlotte Lucas interpretation, or Odysseus transgender and his classic odyssey through space-time reinterpreted as a modern odyssey through self-identification. With great power comes great responsibility, and with the power that big-budget movie makers wield to create definitive renditions of text, possibly they have a greater responsibility to cleave to the author's perceived intent.
But fan-fic is written largely by the powerless and shared widely among those who are not looking to permanently change the original work. The goal of fan-fic is almost always to enjoy and savor the original piece, but with a few tweaks here and there to make the story more approachable for the fan and their readers. And with that in mind, I now have to think that fan-fic and slash-fic can be positive acts, acts that take an existing work and say, "I know you couldn't include a person of my gender, a person with body fat, a person of color, a person who identifies as QUILTBAG, a person of my religion, or a person of non-neurotypicalness in your narrative. But I love your narrative enough that I'm going to write a fan-fic to fix that for me. And I'll share it with anyone else who has the same needs as I."
I now think that can be a good thing, a positive subversive act meant to signal to the larger world that we -- the non-white, the non-male, the non-heterosexual, the non-neurotypical, the non-body conforming -- are here and we are not going away any time soon. I think it can be an act that signals that we are not only building rooms of our own in new houses that we build from scratch, but we are also building additions to the older, existing houses that we've been given to inhabit.
It's More Complicated Than That, of course. Fan writers aren't always automatically on the side of angels, and things become more muddied when the author of the original work is still alive and the work is still under copyright. (This is one of many reasons why the examples in this post are all works in the public domain.) There's the question of author intent to consider, and how much that author's intent should weigh on the interpretation of the work in question. There's the question of how the fan-fic is written, and whether the newly added elements are 'merely' subversive or actively harmful. (As with, for example, fan-fic that portrays intensely triggering, disturbing, or illegal elements.) Like almost every issue there are shades of gray, and reasonable people are going to disagree here and there.
But considering all that, and purely as my personal opinion, I think that when crafted with love and respect and when shared with the intent to expand and embrace, fan-fic and slash-fic can be positive subversive acts. And I am mostly in favor of that.
--Ana Mardoll
The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.
@chris-the-cynic:
I hope you'll forgive me for quoting myself, but I really can't think of a better response to your question about that post of Fred's than my comment on the previous page:
Posted by: hapax | Feb 19, 2012 at 09:51 PM
@chris the cynic: I was going to talk about Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid, but I think a more useful thing might be to simply think about it in terms of copyright. There was none. Everything was public domain the moment it was out there.
Everything wasn't public domain in the sense that anyone could write about whatever they liked. What "got published" was limited not only by patronage (what did you live on unless you were already wealthy) but by restrictions imposed by the powers that be of the time.
People back in those days faced the possibility of exile (see Ovid) or prison or death if they angered those in power.
So, the three I just mentioned have lives that overlapped, but they were able to use each others works the way that I could use their works today if I wanted to even though I couldn't do the same thing with, say, J.K. Rowling's work.
That does make a difference. Say someone my age has a brilliant idea for a story set at Hogwarts. Say Rowling doesn't particularly want to have anyone else writing such stories. That person will never be able to make commercial use of that story. Say that exact same person with that exact same idea had been born 100 years later.
J K Rowling was living in penury until she published her work. Yes, she could probably live quite well for the rest of her life if she never made another cent from the Potter books -- but most authors make far less. And the small amount of money they receive in the form of advances and royalties will be diminished if publishers cannot fully realize the value of the work.
An author's work is their capital, their nest egg, their investment for old age. Maybe someone will come up, some day, with a different system that properly recompenses artists for their work but for the moment we either go back to have the wealthy plutocrats decide what stories are available to us (which means the silencing of the voices of those who do not please the powers that be) or we continue with system we have.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 19, 2012 at 10:07 PM
I also wanted to say that I don't imagine that there are really that many people who think a fan version of something is "more real" than the canon version. I just don't think it matters much if they do.
I feel the same way about authorial intent with fanfic as I do for any other work: if I can't tell from the text itself, it doesn't matter to me. So if I can't tell from reading a particular fic if the author intended to replace canon or to supplement canon, how can I judge whether it's an "acceptable" fanwork or not? And even if they explicitly say that they intend to replace canon (not "this is an alternate-universe Harry Potter" but "this is the real Harry Potter because I have just as much right as JK Rowling to say what's real Potter and what's not"), I can still enjoy the fic without agreeing with the author.
Given that Intent is Not Magic, I'm not sure how the ethics of an action are dependent on the intent behind it, if the action itself is unchanged either way.
Posted by: burgundy | Feb 19, 2012 at 10:33 PM
MercuryBlue, you are so right about the current state of copyright.
What I'd like to try is something like a perpetual copyright of one (and ONLY one) item by a corporation - for something like 5 percent of the annual income from the use of it (accounts to be audited by an independent agency or auditor), and on the use of the item ending the copyright would revert to whatever status it would have had at that date without the perpetual status. Everything else would have ordinary copyright - which ought to be something like 40 years, no renewals. So, Disney, say, could get a perpetual copyright on one mouse, but nothing else, for as long as it uses that mouse in its business....
Posted by: P J Evans | Feb 19, 2012 at 10:55 PM
What I was saying is that critique and fanwork are different sorts of enterprises.
Can't really agree with that.
An awful lot of my fanfic has been written for one of three reasons:
1) To critique the original text.
2) To critique someone else's perspective on the text.
3) To critique someone else's fanfic.
I've written stories trying to illustrate my reasons for thinking, for instance, that Willow's character arc is consistent - comparing her actions in season 2 to her actions in season 6; or arguing that the Watchers Council would not kill off a disabled Slayer, despite popular fan opinions to that effect; or trying to demonstrate how the plot of Angel season 4 is analogous to Othello; or pointing out how Angel's interactions with Buffy have been shaped by his interactions with Darla; or getting totally sick of the entire world writing Buffy/Spike in a way I dislike and trying to write it in a way that demonstrates my issues with their fics; or arguing that "the" Slayer is Kendra rather than Buffy, until season 6 when Faith and Buffy are suddenly both the official Slayer...
I've tried writing non-fictional discussions of some of these as well - but somehow, my fic writing always seems to work better than my argumentative writing, and people can see much more what I mean when I say it with fic.
Critique and fanworks are, for me, so intertwined that I can't tell where one starts and the other stops.
Posted by: Deird, who has opinions | Feb 19, 2012 at 10:57 PM
Apologies if this posts twice, Typepad is being weird.
Burgundy: We know, from Supernatural 5x20, that Brady introduced Sam to Jess and later killed Jess.
We do? Well, if you say so.
We don't have a hell of a lot else to go with when trying to figure out what of significance happened during Sam's Stanford years. My attempt to figure all that out and write it down and share with the class, that's my attempt to overwrite the story fragments we were given with something I like better?
Seriously?
Well, isn't it? You think there ought to be more to the story, so you're adding onto/overwriting what the author actually said?
Again, I don't know Supernatural, I don't know if there is an "author," per se, or if that gap was an intentional artistic effect, or whether it's one of those things that the writers of a community project expect to be filled in by the fans.
When you say, "share it with the class," what class? A private writing exercise? A limited-readership writer's group? A publicly accessible web page? That makes a difference, too.
And even publicly-accessible writers' exercises may have their place. I came across a site once that was dedicated to the proposition "If Somebody Else Had Written Lord of the Rings..." There were some extremely clever pastiches showing genuine appreciation of both sources of material, Tolkien and whichever other author was being parodied.
But I'm sorry if I came across as saying that all fan-fic is always unethical. I'm neither a writer nor what's usually meant by a fan, I don't think, so maybe I just don't have the right mindset. Maybe I'm confusing "I don't really see the point" with "this seems questionable."
But in the case of a unified work with a single known author, is it always okay to transform that work not to say anything about the work itself, but to add onto or modify it to suit another artistic idea? I'm still not sure about that. It probably depends. Mixed feelings.
chris the cynic: Are the Iliad and Odyssey deliberate distortions of other people's works? I suppose they are, in a sense, but that's not how we generally approach them. We make note of the fact that they were reworkings of earlier oral traditions, but we don't call them distortions.
Shall have to think about this, but, as you say yourself, they were based on oral traditions, by definition common property. I have no issues with a contemporary author rewriting a tale out of Grimm or Perrault, and changing or reinterpreting the heck out of it.
But we're pretty far removed from that kind of oral storytelling tradition (folk revivals and urban folklore notwithstanding). The kinds of stories I'm talking about here are the ones identified with a particular author, who's working not primarily from the oral tradition but from the last several centuries of development of the art of the novel.
So maybe that's where our disconnect is. Maybe we're not in fact so far from the storytelling tradition, maybe Supernatural and other such fandoms are actually closer to that kind of community creation, multiple-author and ongoing and variable by place and audience. That works for me, but I don't think that Harry Potter, or Sherlock Holmes, or even Pride and Prejudice, are suited to that kind of treatment. I thing they're finished, unique works of art that ought to be considered on the basis of what they actually are.
Druga sits and basks in the sun, watching the sand sparkle.
See, that's me! And I'll be taken aback if the sparkling sands are suddenly half-covered with hapax's boat pond, fond as I am of hapax.
And that's as far as I've managed to catch up. Good night!
Posted by: Amaryllis | Feb 19, 2012 at 11:22 PM
Amaryllis, I think you meant to address MercuryBlue, who wrote the bit you quoted. That seems like a niggling thing to correct, but I didn't want you to think I was ignoring you, if you saw that I posted other comments but didn't address yours.
Posted by: burgundy | Feb 19, 2012 at 11:58 PM
Shall have to think about this, but, as you say yourself, they were based on oral traditions, by definition common property. I have no issues with a contemporary author rewriting a tale out of Grimm or Perrault, and changing or reinterpreting the heck out of it.
But we're pretty far removed from that kind of oral storytelling tradition (folk revivals and urban folklore notwithstanding). The kinds of stories I'm talking about here are the ones identified with a particular author, who's working not primarily from the oral tradition but from the last several centuries of development of the art of the novel.
I don't see so much of a difference between one and the other, honestly.
(From a legal perspective there probably is - but that's not what I'm talking about.)
Posted by: Deird, who reinterprets modern story traditions | Feb 20, 2012 at 12:02 AM
To quote Henry Jenkins:
"Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk."
The first time I saw that quote I sat up and said Yes! That's me! That describes what my tribe does. Like Deird says, for me crit and fanworks are deeply intertwined. When I write, I write because something nagged at me and inspired me about the text--what, for example, might it take for Character A and Character B to reconcile? what things might not be sufficient to make them forgive one another, in light of what we know about them from the text? And it's just so much easier sometimes to just write that out as a story.
Sturgeon's Law applies, of course: "Of course 90% of [this endeavour] is crud. 90% of everything is crud." But it is possible to surround yourself with excellent writers, such that 60% of what you read is great, and the rest merely mediocre. Which is on par with any published work.
There is a great respect for canon--the original works of the author--in virtually every part of fandom I've ever been in, and I've been involved with fanfiction for fifteen years. Of hapax's list of reasons why one might fic, the ONLY one I have never seen is the last--putting a fanwriter's work on the same level as the original author. There's a big distinction, always, between what we do (fun, stimulating, enjoyable, sometimes adopted by other authors as something to be further adapted) and the Really Truly Canon.
Related to this is the concept of "fanon," though, where a group of fans (from two or three friends up to as big a group as most of the viewers of a TV show) have generally-accepted ideas about the world or the characters that were invented by fans, not the author. It's usually well-known to people in a fandom which of the current ideas floating around are fanon, and part of the process of becoming active in a fandom is sussing out what's in the text, what's from interviews and such, and what's just a popular idea right now. But all the fans I know are very clear that they are not JK Rowling or JMS or Joss Whedon, and that our stuff is at least one level less authoritative than the canon.
As far as subversive or not: I will say that in fanfiction, I have an entire literary tradition--not merely a book here or there or the odd special-interest TV episode--where being gay or bisexual is completely normal and unstrange. It is such a goddamned relief sometimes to just read stories about people who love the way I love or to have discussions (via essays or fic) with people who are willing to entertain same-sex affection as just as valid as opposite-sex. So yes, I think the genre in itself can be subversive.
Posted by: Nenya | Feb 20, 2012 at 06:34 AM
Meant to stick this in there somewhere as well: I don't really draw a moral distinction between writing fanfiction for the works of a single author as opposed to something like comic books or TV shows, which are shared worlds already. But I do find myself engaging in a fanfiction way with the multiply-authored works. And the more I hear from the author, the less likely I am to fic, for some reason. Basically, Star Trek and something like Kit's writings live in two different sections of my head, and I'm far more inclined to fic about the former.
Though I expect Izzy is one of those people who's had many late-night discussions of how she imagines the fandom surrounding her works would develop, if she was ever published. And now she has been. :D
Posted by: Nenya | Feb 20, 2012 at 06:37 AM
@Nenya: Hee! Dude, if I find a Simon/Alex slash community, I'll know I've *really* made it, contracts and so forth aside. ;) (NPL does appear in a couple of TVTropes entries, which is thrilling, though I think it got in on nepotism.)
So the boat pond analogy for me doesn't quite work: if you fill a sandbox with water, you're preventing people from playing with the sand. I mean, yeah, they could drain the water and it'd be fine later, but the water's there now, which makes the sandcastle sort of hard.
Whereas you can read smutty Holmes/Watson slash and I can read A Study In Scarlet and neither one gets in the way of the other. We can do it at the same time, even. It's like whatshisname said when asked if the movie adaptations had ruined his books: no, they're all right there. And while I've *seen* people claim that their fanfic is the real true interpretation, the community in general tends to roll their eyes at these people.
So fanfic, for me, comes down to the fact that I don't see a lot of harm in it, and so why not do something if it's fun? But...well, if someone you respect asks you not to do something, you probably shouldn't demand their reasons. If someone you don't respect asks, you can ignore them, but you shouldn't then expect them to respond well.
Posted by: Izzy | Feb 20, 2012 at 08:23 AM
Amaryllis, I think you meant to address MercuryBlue, who wrote the bit you quoted.
This is true. Apologies to both Burgundy and MercuryBlue; I shouldn't try to post when I'm so tired.
Deird: I don't see so much of a difference between one and the other, honestly.
(From a legal perspective there probably is - but that's not what I'm talking about.)
I wasn't talking about legal issues either, although question of copyright may come into it. Respect for an author's known wishes may also be a factor.
But I don't seem to be explaining what I do mean particularly well. hapax's sandbox analogy seems to come pretty close, for me. I'll have to think some more about it.
But Izzy: So the boat pond analogy for me doesn't quite work: if you fill a sandbox with water, you're preventing people from playing with the sand. I mean, yeah, they could drain the water and it'd be fine later, but the water's there now, which makes the sandcastle sort of hard.
Whereas you can read smutty Holmes/Watson slash and I can read A Study In Scarlet and neither one gets in the way of the other. We can do it at the same time, even.
To belabor the analogy farther, it's more like, hapax has walled off one corner of the sandbox and filled it with water, while another corner remains original sparkling sand. You and I are happy in our respective corners, even at the same time.
But the sandbox itself has been changed. I might not even notice, over here in my corner. Alice might not even notice, over there designing her new and improved sandbox. But the gang who've been playing boats in the watery corner will never see the sandbox in the same way again. You can't unread what you've read, even if you decide that you prefer sandcastles to toy boats after all.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? Probably not, mixed feelings, it depends, etc.
It's hard to argue with Nenya:
I will say that in fanfiction, I have an entire literary tradition--not merely a book here or there or the odd special-interest TV episode--where being gay or bisexual is completely normal and unstrange. It is such a goddamned relief sometimes to just read stories about people who love the way I love or to have discussions (via essays or fic) with people who are willing to entertain same-sex affection as just as valid as opposite-sex.
That makes sense. I'd just like to see more of it in original mainstream works. But who am I to tell those who've been marginalized by the mainstream not to take what they can get?
But, but, but... still dithering.
Posted by: Amaryllis | Feb 20, 2012 at 09:34 AM
@hapax, first off I somehow managed to read the entire post you quoted except for the two paragraphs that you felt summed up your point. I definitely read up to "But I think it goes a bit far to call this "subversive," to be frank," And I definitely read, "But then..." to the end.
Not quite sure how that happened. The only thing I can think of is that maybe I lost my place, remembered there was a "but" involved, and picked up at the wrong "but". Regardless, when I reread your posts before making my own, I didn't leave the second page and so never read that until you said it.
So it's a very good thing that you quoted yourself.
Second, thank you for saying that about Edith and Ben, it means a lot.
Third, I'm still not entirely sure that I understand how you're classifying things. The way you're addressing the subject it sounds like there must be a clear dividing line between fan fiction and criticism. I'm not sure I see the division between fan fiction and (non-imaginative) criticism, I definitely don't see it between fan fiction and imaginative criticism.
For the first, when one uses the materials available in the text, and only the materials available in the text, there is often a fair deal of addressing what is excluded from the text and what is implied by the text. This is especially the case if one or both of those happen to be interesting (whether in a good or bad way.) For exclusion it can take the form of "should". This should have happened, this should have been said, given the number of characters and the lack of apparent confounding variables we would expect that at least X of them should be something other than cis and straight, logically the result of Y action should have been Z. And in every should statement is the implication of a story, the more detail the should statement is in, the closer to a story it becomes. I'm not sure there really is a clear division when it stops being calling out an omission and starts being proposing a way to fill it, even though the first would fall under criticism and the second under fan fiction.
For implication it already is a story, it's already a story that appears to be indicated by the original text, but by expanding on that, even if you only do so by explicitly pointing out that the implication exists, you are in effect expanding on the original work, the more detail you go into with the implication the closer you come to hole filling fiction, and I'm not really sure where one begins and the other ends.
As for the difference between imaginative criticism and fan fiction, I'm even more hazy there because they're both stories already. Is the question intent? If a fan had written Fred's writing's I linked to because he or she really loved Left Behind but saw some serious deficiencies in the way the initial response to the Rapture was handled and wanted to fix them, would that shift it over into fan fiction?
What if some bit of fiction is somewhere between, its style flowing from both harsh criticism of and love for the original work, where does that put it? If something expands and points out deficiencies at the same time, where does it fall?
I see a lot of potential gray areas, but from what you've said I get the impression you don't.
-
All of that said, I wouldn't consider what I do criticism, imaginative or otherwise. I'm not sure what I'd call it. Definitely not fan fiction either, since I'm not a fan. Derivative work for sure.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 20, 2012 at 10:31 AM
But who am I to tell those who've been marginalized by the mainstream not to take what they can get?
I am not touching the fan fiction discussion with a bargepole, but I think it's worth pointing out that in literature, 'mainstream' has more than one meaning. It can, for instance, mean 'literary stuff that's not as difficult as Joyce' - and in that category, the voices of marginalised people are actually heard a fair amount. Fiction that's largely focused on a character's inner life and/or relationship to the world lends itself very well to the experiences of marginalised people. Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, Jeanette Winterson ... those are just off the top of my head, and they're all major literary stars who speak from the experiences of their particular sexuality and nationality and get both critical acclaim and commercial success doing it.
In a way, fiction lends itself very well to people speaking from the margins: unlike many other art forms, you don't need expensive technology, access to theatres or concert halls, or formal training. You just need a pen and paper, and hopefully access to a computer to type up at some point. It's a difficult form, but it's not an expensive one.
Popular fiction faces a different problem, I think, which is the issue of comfort zones. Someone reading a 'literary' novel more or less expects their comfort zones to be tested, or at least is aware that it's one of the things the book may choose to do: if it does it well, it's likely to be better thought of as a result. Popular fiction, on the other hand, is usually bought to relax with; having your assumptions challenged is not what you buy it for. Of course, if your comfort zone is 'being queer/non-white is normal' then that's a different issue.
On the other hand, I don't believe that popular authors specifically write to avoid challenging: I think people just write the way they're comfortable with. But I used to work at a company that published popular fiction, and if the authors made assumptions - which was easy to do, because being egalitarian takes up plot space - then finding ways to challenge them could be tricky...
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:01 AM
Popping nose in from work (holiday, what's that?) to point out that lots of fanfiction is for TV and movie canons, and it's a lot harder to hear the marginalized voices in TV and movies.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:05 AM
Critique and fanworks are, for me, so intertwined that I can't tell where one starts and the other stops.
I'm in this same boat, fwiw.
I've written all of, iirc, 4 fan works. (Or, rather, many fan works but for 4 domains.)
1. Narnia fan work (a poem! lost in a computer crash!) written from Susan's POV discussing how used she feels by Aslan/Narnia and how she never wants to return. This was written in response to the sometimes-theory that Susan can still "re-become" a Friend of Narnia, and my abhorrence to the very suggestion.
2. FF7 fan work inputting in a new female Ancient, raised by Shinra in much the same way Sephiroth was. I was sick and tired of the OTHER female Ancient getting fridged halfway into the game and watching everything from the ghostly sidelines. Grr.
3. Star Wars fan work... oh so much... almost all of it from a "gray jedi" perspective, which takes a more moderate tack than the Original Crispy Recipe Jedi and hopes to expose some of the dangers of an order that shuns all emotional connections as potentially dangerous.
4. Tolkien fan work with the insertion of a female character who does stuff and isn't being victimized by Wormtongue. Nuf said on that.
All of these were fan fics in their own right. All of them were specifically written to address points of the original where I felt there were problems needing redress. So I can't really split "criticism" from "fan fic". They seem like overlapping Venn circle to me...
Posted by: AnaMardoll | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:20 AM
Popping nose in from work (holiday, what's that?) to point out that lots of fanfiction is for TV and movie canons, and it's a lot harder to hear the marginalized voices in TV and movies.
Didn't say it wasn't. I was pointing out that 'mainstream' is a word with multiple meanings when one talks about fiction, and talking about books because the example Amaryllis quoted was a series of books, to wit, the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:48 AM
@mmy,
Everything wasn't public domain in the sense that anyone could write about whatever they liked. What "got published" was limited not only by patronage (what did you live on unless you were already wealthy) but by restrictions imposed by the powers that be of the time.
People back in those days faced the possibility of exile (see Ovid) or prison or death if they angered those in power.
Oh, definitely. There was a reason that the Romans made use of figured speech.
For anyone who doesn't know what figured speech is, this is a massive oversimplification but basically it is an answer to the question, "How can I call that asshole an asshole without him realizing I'm calling him an asshole? Because if he does realize that's what I'm doing he'll have me killed." You write with layers of meaning in hopes you can say what you want without getting into trouble for it.
Like I said, I'm not pining for the days of the Roman Empire.
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@Amaryllis
Shall have to think about this, but, as you say yourself, they were based on oral traditions, by definition common property.
That is true, because if they weren't common property then they wouldn't exist. You can't really have an oral tradition if you have to wait until a generation after the first storyteller is dead before you can repeat their story. It's one of the reminders of how different things were.
Or, for a different reminder of how different it was, forget about using other people's works as the building blocks for your own, think about taking them verbatim. If that hadn't been a completely reasonable thing to do then Homer wouldn't survive at all. What survives is a result of people saying, "I just heard Homer tell the most amazing story, let me repeat it word for word." (Note that they probably didn't actually manage to do it word for word, and even after something gets written down transmission is far from perfect.)
My guess would be that the only time you'd get something like that today would be with spoken jokes, rumors and urban legends.
Anyway, I'm definitely not saying we should go back to that because it would pretty much ruin all authors everywhere. I'm mostly more interested in it from the perspective of the question of the appropriateness of taking other people's works when you just consider the taking in itself.
That definitely applies to fan fiction today. It's also something that is, at least in theory, context independent so if there is one answer (and there might not be) it should apply equally to the past as it does the present.
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Completely changing gears here, what do people think about something like The Three Musketeers?
That's something with a single author, it's not based on an oral tradition, it's basically like any original novel written today in those respects.
Every one of the movies (Wikipedia lists 39, assuming I counted right) is fan fiction* Nothing more. Nothing less. But it's fan fiction of something not under copyright, so it gets to be professional fan fiction.
It's probably the fan fiction that I've encountered most in my life. Not sure how many versions I've seen, but there have been plenty. Some of them I've seen again and again. Interestingly, what I've never actually encountered is the original work. I haven't read Dumas's version. Perhaps if I did I would think that only he can write d'Artagnan, but at the moment I don't.
What do other people think about it?
Dumas isn't around, so there's no question about his fiances or his life, but the question of who should (or should not) tell d'Artagnan's story still remains.
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* Or parody or what I guess we're calling "foe fiction". What I've seen seems to fall in the "fan" category and in all cases we still have the same questions about the author's control over the work.
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I shouldn't try to post when I'm so tired.
That's something I seem to have a hard time learning as well.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:53 AM
@ chris the cynic: also Jane Austen. Not just the innumerable film adaptations (and modernizations like Clueless), but also the published books - a few minutes on Amazon shows me several books that expand on Pride and Prejudice, or show things from other characters' points of view (e.g. Mr Darcy's Diary. And then there are the Jane Austen mysteries, which are basically RPF. My father owns a lot of these books, because he loves Jane Austen and likes to spend time with her characters, and he seems to enjoy seeing what other people imagine for them.
This is what I mean when I talk about authority, and who gets to tell stories. Are these more legitimate than unpublished fic, because someone thought to submit them and someone else thought they were worth publishing? Certainly, they're no closer to Jane Austen or what she thought about the characters.
Peter Beagle wrote a wonderful Holmes story called "Mr. Sigerson," which I like more than most of the "real" Holmes stories because I like Beagle more as an author. It was originally published in a collection of Holmes stories - basically, published fanfic. Are those authors allowed to make stuff up about Holmes, and other people are not? Should they never have published the anthology in the first place? Is it a function of how close something is to canon, so that writing a story about Holmes (under an assumed name) taking a job as a violinist in an obscure Eastern European orchestra is more acceptable than writing a story about Holmes having sex?
Posted by: burgundy | Feb 20, 2012 at 12:10 PM
@chris the cynic: There was a reason that the Romans made use of figured speech
Indeed, but again remember that those who were able to survive using figured speech had to have something else they were providing in return for their dinner. Or else they had to be wealthy enough to be able to pay for their own dinner. The range of voices heard was vanishingly narrow.
Or, for a different reminder of how different it was, forget about using other people's works as the building blocks for your own, think about taking them verbatim. If that hadn't been a completely reasonable thing to do then Homer wouldn't survive at all. What survives is a result of people saying, "I just heard Homer tell the most amazing story, let me repeat it word for word." (Note that they probably didn't actually manage to do it word for word, and even after something gets written down transmission is far from perfect.)
I feel like I keep on going back to this over and over again. The "classics" didn't get created/survive because the common folk all pitched in to give free dinners to these brave voices of diversity -- the classics were created and survived because they expressed the culture, political, social and religious range of opinions among the elite. The individual bards might not have been members of that elite but they existed only because they work pleased the powers that be. To speak otherwise is to romanticize the past.
Also, in response to many people. Setting aside an overly broad use of the word "fanfic" I think one can make a clear distinction between revisiting/adapting works that are not only long out of copyright (if they were even in copyright as well as works that have already firmly established themselves in the consciousness of our culture AND adapting works that are still in copyright, which are still fluid in the public mind and whose authors feel silenced, constrained and sometime limited by these adaptations.
Is it a function of how close something is to canon, so that writing a story about Holmes (under an assumed name) taking a job as a violinist in an obscure Eastern European orchestra is more acceptable than writing a story about Holmes having sex?
Given the fact that Conan Doyle was so shot of Holmes that he (CD) attempted to kill off the character and only continued to write Holmes stories under a sort of financial/market duress -- I think we can safely say that Conan Doyle would far rather one did neither.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 20, 2012 at 05:25 PM
Given the fact that Conan Doyle was so shot of Holmes that he (CD) attempted to kill off the character and only continued to write Holmes stories under a sort of financial/market duress -- I think we can safely say that Conan Doyle would far rather one did neither.
I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption.
Doyle was sick of writing about Holmes himself. That doesn't mean that he cared one way or the other about what other people wrote about Holmes.
Given that he went back to writing Holmes out of economic need, and despite disliking it, if he could have had some other way to make money off that name it might have pleased him.
If Doyle were writing now, he would have the initial rights to Holmes, but he could sell television and movie rights and make money without having to do the writing himself. So "professional fanfiction" in the form of spin-off stories by other authors, television specials and movies might be just what he would like best.
Or perhaps something like what Eric Flint does with the Grantville Gazette and the "Ring of Fire" universe, cultivating a fanfiction community and publishing anthologies with the royalties split between the original writer and the fanfic writers.
Posted by: Ursula L | Feb 20, 2012 at 05:44 PM
Indeed, but again remember that those who were able to survive using figured speech had to have something else they were providing in return for their dinner. Or else they had to be wealthy enough to be able to pay for their own dinner. The range of voices heard was vanishingly narrow.
I'm confused. Are you saying this because you think that I don't know that?
Or do you think that what I've written isn't clear enough on this point so it should be called out explicitly in case someone else should be misled?
Or... what?
I've read your post several times now, and you quoted me in it twice, but what follows those quotes doesn't seem to me to be a response to anything I actually said.
I could see how I might be one of the "many people" you respond to later, especially in light of me bringing up The Three Musketeers, but I'm having a much harder time seeing how the stuff that actually appears to be specifically in response to me follows from what I have written.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 20, 2012 at 05:47 PM
@chris the cynic: [mmy]Indeed, but again remember that those who were able to survive using figured speech had to have something else they were providing in return for their dinner. Or else they had to be wealthy enough to be able to pay for their own dinner. The range of voices heard was vanishingly narrow.
[chris] I'm confused. Are you saying this because you think that I don't know that?
Or do you think that what I've written isn't clear enough on this point so it should be called out explicitly in case someone else should be misled?
Or... what?
I've read your post several times now, and you quoted me in it twice, but what follows those quotes doesn't seem to me to be a response to anything I actually said.
Okay, I think we are talking at cross purposes. Someone says something like "well, back in the days before copyright the only people who ever got to say anything that ever got heard was the few who were in the pay of the powers that be -- so what the hell was so wonderful and diverse about that system"
And you respond with a comment like "yes, that was why they used figured speech."
Which is totally missing the point I am making.
Back in mists of antiquity when people could borrow/appropriate anyone else's ideas -- well the only people who were making a living from doing so were those who echoed the will and attitudes of the kyriarchy. It doesn't make any difference if they made cute sly little double statements. The art that survived was sanctioned art.
And yes, I know that you said you aren't pining to go back to Roman days -- but by picking a few bright lustrous gems from millennia of human existence and describe how robust or useful or wonderful it was is to ignore that on the whole it was dreadful. Terrible. It silenced people. It meant that the rich and the powerful could pass of as their own thoughts the thoughts of others. We have no idea how many ideas withered on the vine because of that system and I don't like seeing it romanticized.
As for the stuff at the end, it was a response to a lot of people. And yes, I do know what some of the writers of the time thought about "fan fic" because they faced it. Conon Doyle made his living off writing Holmes stories and later in his life he became a seriously involved in spiritualism. And since his reputation (his ability to do his other work) was based in large part from his Holmes fiction I think that there is a very good case that he would have cared. I think he deserves, at least, the presumption.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 20, 2012 at 06:19 PM
Setting aside an overly broad use of the word "fanfic" I think one can make a clear distinction between revisiting/adapting works that are not only long out of copyright (if they were even in copyright as well as works that have already firmly established themselves in the consciousness of our culture AND adapting works that are still in copyright, which are still fluid in the public mind and whose authors feel silenced, constrained and sometime limited by these adaptations.
Of course one can make such a distinction. This is where $$$ comes into play. If it's public domain, I can profit off it without worrying about what the original creator thinks. If it's not public domain, I can only profit off it if the original creator (or the company that paid the original creator) permits me to.
My (hypothetically) creating Benighted fanworks does not silence Kit in any way. She's got a publisher as well as a blog. I only have a blog. And nobody's compelling Kit to consume my hypothetical Benighted fanwork, and it is the height of gauche to bring fanworks to the attention of anybody involved in the creation of the canon (this includes actors as well as writers; DO NOT CROSS THE STREAMS). If Kit wants to know whether somebody's fanworked Benighted, she's got Google and knows how to use it.
Benighted's a standalone far's I know, so I'm at an utter loss for how Benighted fanworks that Kit hasn't consumed could possibly constrain or limit Kit in any way.
Series--TV, books, movies, what have you--those I can see being affected by fanworks that predate parts of the series. (I mentioned that Supernatural's creators are amused by writing fandom into the series.) But again, the creator has to consume or at least know about the fanwork for zir creative process to be affected by it, and nothing is compelling the creator to find, let alone consume, the fanwork. Unless someone's going to argue that fan reaction should affect the creative process and therefore creators are compelled to keep up with fan reactions (fanworks included), but frankly I think that's stupid. Kit's creative process is Kit's creative process, not mine, and my opinion of Kit's work-in-progress shouldn't dictate any part of Kit's creative process. Kit is of course free to take my opinion into account, but she is equally free to ignore me, just as the creators of serial works are equally free to acknowledge or ignore their consumers' opinions, and consequently I'm still at a loss for how fanworks constrain or limit canon creators.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 20, 2012 at 06:51 PM
MercuryBlue --
Kit is a member of this community, and is presumably reading this thread, but has also repeatedly stated that she does not comfortable -- or even safe -- speaking about fanfiction.
I think it is very unkind and rather presumptuous to call Kit and her works out specifically by name and title, and pronounce authoritatively on how she should feel about fanworks using her writing, and how it must affect her creative process (not to mention her livelihood), knowing that she will not be able to respond if she disagrees.
Posted by: hapax | Feb 20, 2012 at 07:02 PM
Shit. Sorry.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 20, 2012 at 07:14 PM
I think it is best practices not to mention/call out any living author in this discussion. If an author wishes to visit this blog (and if we can verify that it is actually "them") then they are free to share their opinions.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 20, 2012 at 07:22 PM
Okay, I think we are talking at cross purposes. Someone says something like "well, back in the days before copyright the only people who ever got to say anything that ever got heard was the few who were in the pay of the powers that be -- so what the hell was so wonderful and diverse about that system"
And you respond with a comment like "yes, that was why they used figured speech."
Which is totally missing the point I am making.
I'm not sure I really follow that either. The fact that people had to resort to hiding their true meaning for fear of death seems, to me, to support your point rather than miss it. Unless I'm still missing your point.
I pointed out that the only way the few people with the power to speak were able to express their dissent without being killed for it was to hide their meaning, I'm not sure how that's romanticizing the time. The mere fact that they had to so much as consider using figured speech in the first place is a damning indictment of the lack of free speech. (Though given some of the other things they did, far from the worst human rights violation.)
It seemed to me like I was agreeing with you. If you hadn't already pointed to Ovid, I might have followed my, "Oh, definitely," by instead pointing out Ovid's exile since it was already on my mind.
Back in mists of antiquity when people could borrow/appropriate anyone else's ideas -- well the only people who were making a living from doing so were those who echoed the will and attitudes of the kyriarchy. It doesn't make any difference if they made cute sly little double statements. The art that survived was sanctioned art.
I have pretty much the same reaction here. What you say is true. I agree. I personally would go further. Then again, I felt like I already did.
It didn't just have to be sanctioned at the time. Most of the stuff that was sanctioned at the time doesn't survive. Everything that survives was repeatedly approved by the existing kyriarchy, across a wide range of time and multiple cultures. Multiple power structures, pretty much none of them nice, had to like a work for it to make it to us. The silencing involved goes way beyond the culture in which the work was created. People who were not silenced by their own culture were silenced by later cultures which is why works that we know existed at one point in time don't exist anymore.
Everything that is here today is a result of repeatedly being approved by those who silenced the things that are not here. Well, almost. Deserts are pretty good at preserving things that were stuck in a cave and forgotten about, and sometimes we find something that was erased so that the paper could be reused for something else, and there are other things like that. But for the most part, getting here requires multiple silencing entities to approve of a work.
Of the people who weren't approved of, we have some graffiti and not a lot else. Most people were silenced by their own culture, most of those who weren't were silenced by later cultures. The story of how works from the classical world come to us is almost entire the story of how some things were chosen not to be silenced while the rest were silenced. With the exception of some cases of accidental preservation, everything we have was approved by those in power again and again and again.
But I feel like I've already said this, in much fewer words, on page 2. So it's entirely possible that I'm still missing your point.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 20, 2012 at 07:37 PM
@chris the cynic: I guess I am basically seeing a past in which women, non-citizens and slaves didn't get a chance to do much of anything at all. They may have had ideas but you know they probably weren't allowed to speak most of the time and they weren't talk to read or orate or sing and they were punished for spending any time not being of service.
So, yes you have have been speaking about the drawbacks but the very fact that people keep returning to that time and telling us about how ideas were able to flourish anyway seems to plaster over the fact that most people died young after living short lives of penury and work and never had a chance to take part. So why are we even bringing it up except for as an example of something so horrible that it makes the present copyright regime look like a slice of paradise.
(BTW, most of the graffiti I have seen translated is crude and pornographic. One of those things that doesn't seem to change.)
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 20, 2012 at 07:46 PM
the very fact that people keep returning to that time and telling us about how ideas were able to flourish anyway seems to plaster over the fact that most people died young after living short lives of penury and work and never had a chance to take part. So why are we even bringing it up except for as an example of something so horrible that it makes the present copyright regime look like a slice of paradise.
There are definitely people who agree with you. The administration at my university has been trying to kill off the classics department for years. (The fact that it's both cheap and turning a profit, which sort of defuses the usual justifications, is the only thing that's kept from being done away with thus far. The attempts to do away with it continue anyway though. They even seem to be becoming more forceful.)
And your objections are part of why I hesitated to talk about it in the first place.
I guess what I would say is that looking at the past is one of the only ways we can look at other ways things have been outside of hypotheticals.
They were, as I said before, ethnocentric misogynistic slave holding imperialists. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from looking at them nor does it mean that everything they did was wrong. We haven't sworn off running water and central heating just because the Romans used them, for example. We still use those things today, just with less slave labor involved.
If we started having writers make their living based on a system of patronage in which there was no copyright law that would be terrible for a variety of reasons, but looking at an example where that was done in the past does show us some of the ways that things are different when any writer can take any other writer's work and make of them what they will (within the limits inherent to a system of patronage) without having to wait for copyright to expire.
most of the graffiti I have seen translated is crude and pornographic.
I've never specifically studied graffiti but from what I have seen that seems like a pretty good description.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 20, 2012 at 08:32 PM
@chris the cynic:
But is it even meaningful to so completely divorce one aspect (any writer can take any other writer's work and make of them what they will ) of a historical art-producing system from others (the limits inherent to a system of patronage))?
The good Lord knows that I'm no economic determinist, but reading your comments makes phrases like "aristocratic ownership of the means of production" immediately leap to mind, and nobody wants to see that.
(Me resorting to Marxist terminology, that is, although I imagine few of us want to see any return to a feudalist or slave society, either)
But the whole point of copyright is that those who produce art own the art produced.
I'm certainly no fan of our current system of copyright, which is far too dominated by the interests of corporate middlemen at the expense of individual artists. I see us as heading towards a "corporate" patronage system, which I agree is no big improvement over more ancient systems based on class.
The production of good art, I would argue, is fostered by a vigorous effort to maintain its mixed "capitalist-socialist" roots. It is NOT best served by a "communal" model, where the art produced belongs to everybody and nobody.
That may be a good method for mass-producing wheat or widgets -- I'll leave that debate for others. But the only way I can see it applicable to the production of art is if the greatest value is placed on sheer quantity, and not quality and variety.
Posted by: hapax | Feb 20, 2012 at 09:18 PM
Speaking of Doyle and Holmes fanfiction, I have to mention a glorious, glorious Holmes fanfic - The Adventure of the Two Collaborators written by Doyle's friend J.M. Barrie (whose name might be recognized). A crackfic mixed with RPF from the lifetime of the author - unmatched entertainment.
Posted by: Kirala | Feb 20, 2012 at 10:20 PM
This seems to go rather too far on the side of suggesting that all works which once existed but no longer do no longer do due to active suppression and destruction of those works, at least from my point of view. Neglect or simple ignorance surely have done in a number of works; I'm reminded of many works, even some very popular ones, from the beginning of the century which are almost impossible to find now (I believe mmy has talked about this). It's hard to argue that there has been any active suppression of those works, and while passive suppression might account for some fraction, surely it's mostly a matter of the works being mostly popular at the beginning of the century and seeing few reprints; thus, over time, they've rotted away or been recycled or trashed or whatever, and few if any copies remain.
I suppose you could call that silencing, but that seems like a misuse of the term. Every copy of a book moldering away to useless in someone or other's attic because no one's really interested in them just doesn't seem like the same thing as dismissing female writers or killing people who write things you don't like or whatever.
Maybe it's just because I'm a scientist sort of person, but the word silencing in relation to intellectual work kind of rubs me the wrong way in the first place. Many people for whom it's not really true use it...a lot. I suppose it's really my problem that it gets my hackles up, though.
Posted by: truth is life | Feb 20, 2012 at 11:21 PM
@MercuryBlue - I specifically said I wasn't touching the fan fiction issue. If that doesn't stop you citing me as an invisible ally and declaring that you know what would or wouldn't constrain me, you have no respect for me. Never mind my copyright; you have no respect for my humanity.
And I'm going to say something else: the reason I said I wasn't touching the fan fiction issue was because I knew I'd be bullied if I said anything that failed to support fan fiction. I could tell you how it would affect me, but you'd attack me for it and so would others.
There is an increasing anti-intellectualism on this blog when it comes to fiction: people who differ from the fan party line get accused and shouted down, and even suggested that they be driven off. I have consequently silenced myself. Now you're speaking for me as if I'm not even there.
I am extremely angry.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 01:54 AM
Going way back to a comment about taking various members of the Fellowship for female: I have preserved my love of Tolkien by keeping in mind that according to Tolkien himself, Legolas being female would change nothing whatsoever except one syllable of Legolas Thranduiliel's name.
Changing horses, when I think of fanfic etiquette, I think of storytelling. I might want to hear more about a character the storyteller only gave a scene or two; I might have caught a serious inconsistency in plot or characterization and be busy trying to rationalize it because I like the story overall; I might be fidgeting around while the storyteller is sipping hir tea, waiting for hir to get on with the next installment already, come onnnnn; I might have been struck by the setting and be curious to know what else might be going on in the storyteller's sub-creation; I might be annoyed by assumptions the storyteller appears to have made; and any of these might inspire me to tell my own story. However, it would be extremely bad manners to do this within earshot of the storyteller hirself. The storyteller should be respected. Now, what I do after I leave a coin in the storyteller's bowl and go home for tea with friends--that's my business and my friends' business if I choose.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | Feb 21, 2012 at 04:31 AM
after I leave a coin in the storyteller's bowl
So basically I and others like me are beggars to be tipped out of the charity of patrons?
Gee, thanks. What a charming image.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 04:57 AM
It occurs to me that calling a work of fiction someone's baby might also work as an extended metaphor. When the work is relatively young, the parents need to be given a great deal of control and deserve every chance to shape its life as they see fit. When the work is mature and has its own character established, it can start interacting with others outside parental control. YMMV on the dividing line between infancy and maturity, but it would surely differ greatly with different works. Similarly, at a certain point it might be healthy to allow others to play with it and eventually even reproduce with it. Artistically, I don't know where the line ought to be drawn (which is why I tend to go with the artist's wishes when the artist is alive), but financially... actually, I hate thinking about fair financial compensation. It gets me hot around the collar about the difference in salary between a social worker and a high-profile CEO. I know which one's bowl I'd be throwing coins into - the one whose work I actually appreciate and value.
Posted by: Kirala | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:42 AM
I know which one's bowl I'd be throwing coins into - the one whose work I actually appreciate and value.
You don't have to throw coins into a CEO's bowl. That's the point: the law makes it such that they don't need a bowl.
Again, seriously, the image of writers as beggars who should just take their tips, shut up and move on? And you wonder why I recused myself until MercuryBlue dragged me into it?
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:55 AM
Kit, I repeat: Shit. Sorry.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 21, 2012 at 07:02 AM
Kit, I repeat
What, so now I'm in the wrong because I said something myself when you'd already decided that you'd said enough on the subject?
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 07:03 AM
Kit: I think it's worth pointing out that in literature, 'mainstream' has more than one meaning. It can, for instance, mean 'literary stuff that's not as difficult as Joyce' - and in that category, the voices of marginalised people are actually heard a fair amount.
That's true, of course, and thank goodness.
But would it be fair to say that they are, they have to be, writing from the experience of being marginalized? And would it be fair to say -- I don't read fanfic or slash, so I'm asking, not telling -- that some of its fans find in it a community where people like themselves aren't marginalized? Where "my way of loving," for instance, is taken for granted or even presumed as default? Almost an alternate universe of its own?
Just out of curiosity, I did a rough and completely unscientific survey of the fiction on my shelves that was published within the last sixty years. So this would be not everything I've read, but what I happen to own, whether I sought it out and paid full price for it, was given it, picked it up at the second-hand store or the book swap-- so it's not my "best of" collection, just my collection. Anyway, most of them had women characters, even main protagonists. Some, maybe one-third, included people of color. Only a handful included non-hetero sexuality. And only two had non-neurotypical protagonists.
So what does this tell me? Not much, except that I should probably make more of an effort, go read some Sarah Waters or something. But also that it does take intentionally to broaden the mainstream.
the example Amaryllis quoted was a series of books, to wit, the Sherlock Holmes stories.
I think I cited three things-- Holmes, Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter. One of these things is not like the others, I guess, in that it still has a living author whose wishes should be respected. But all of them have crossed the boundary between literary fiction, no matter how mainstream, and pop culture. Not always to their good.
Take, for instance, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I abominated. And you know what I hated about it? It wasn't the zombies.
I mean, P&P is about young women navigating a dangerous territory, and having to so within very strict constraints. I could imagine a parody version where the dangers were embodied as the walking undead, the zombies as the symbol of the social or even literal death that could follow a false move by a young woman of good family and no money. But P&P&Z wasn't that book, and the people in it shared little with Austen's characters but their names. Even when the dialogue was lifted straight from the original, it'd be tweaked, in matters that had nothing to do with zombies, to where "Mr Bennet would NEVER say that, no matter how many zombies were crawling in the back garden!"
So was that just a failure of technique? A bad parody? Or was the book never meant to say anything about P&P, or about Austen's world, or about our responses to that world two hundred years later? Was it just "take one popular thing, take another popular thing, stir and hope for double popularity?"
Forgive me if that's too muddled; written in a hurry before work and with a whole new cold in the head coming on. It's been one minor illness after another around here.
Posted by: Amaryllis | Feb 21, 2012 at 07:22 AM
But would it be fair to say that they are, they have to be, writing from the experience of being marginalized?
Varies from author to author, of course, but I'd say that most literary authors have the sense to limit themselves to subjects on which they can speak with authority. Which isn't necessarily marginalisation - Amy Tan, for instance, (who's 'mainstream' but whether she's 'literary' is another question that frankly I'm not that interested in, I just like her books) writes less about facing racism in America than about the tensions between a Chinese background and an American peers, and generally the Chinese element is at least as problematic as the American.
So I wouldn't say they are necessarily about 'being marginalised'; that's too simple. It's more that such writers often write about being a particular kind of person from the inside, and that happens to be a kind of person who often does get marginalised. But whether that marginalisation happens in their books or not is another question entirely. A good writer of that kind tends to write about selfhood, and it's hard to do that when you focus exclusively on the experience of being marginalised because that means your story revolves around people more powerful than yourself. (I wouldn't call this an ironclad rule, though; I'd say Nervous Conditions might be a good counter-example.)
Do read Sarah Waters, though; she's tremendously entertaining as well as good. Try Fingersmith. :-)
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 07:35 AM
Hmm, Amaryllis writing about her bookshelves prompted me to take a look at mine.
A lot of them I haven't actually read - spouse's taste runs more to spies and adventure than mine - but I was interested to note that what I suspect dramatically ups the non-white character proportion are the Flashman books.
Posted by: Julie paradox | Feb 21, 2012 at 08:04 AM
@Julie paradox: Amaryllis writing about her bookshelves prompted me to take a look at mine.
Looking at mine is rather complex since we have multiple libraries in our house. [Areas of reading that I focus on are in my library, areas spouse focuses on are in hir library. Which is in a different room.]
From where I sit I can see four walls of books. The authors of the "academic works" wall are actually the most diverse (authors with different gender orientations/interests, authors who identify as male, female, trans man, trans woman, authors who are POC, authors from different economic classes and different cultures).
The wall of mysteries / thrillers has authors both male and female, although because many of them wrote decades ago I know less about their sexual orientations (academics tend to tell you about themselves so you can put their work in context). That wall also has a number of books written in a language other than English.[1]
The wall of "mainstream" literature is more diverse than the mysteries and less diverse than the academics. Again, there are books in more than one language and even more than the mysteries, books from different times as well as different social, political, economic and ideological contexts.
The fourth wall is science fiction/fantasy and the authors on that wall are notably less diverse than the authors of the books on the other three walls.
[1] I don't tend to read heavy political/economic theory in language other than English although I sometimes own the original as well as the translation so that I can check up on the translation.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 21, 2012 at 08:26 AM
@mmy - that's interesting. Do you have a theory as to why that is?
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 08:49 AM
Kit -
If I have said anything in a way that felt hostile or marginalizing to you, I truly apologize. I have been trying to speak only from my own perspective, and to make room for other people's disparate feelings, and if I have not been successful in that, then I'm sorry.
If my beliefs themselves, and the stating thereof, are distressing to you, I regret that, but I can't really apologize, because that's a discussion that flows directly from the article as published. I don't know, and it's not my business to know, what process TBAT went through in greenlighting this piece. I don't know, and it's not my business to know, if you have been dreading its publication, because you anticipated that it would put you in a painful and impossible position.
But if that, or something like it, is actually the case, then I very much admire your integrity. There are people who would veto publishing something that made them feel that way. I appreciate that, though it seems that all the individual members of TBAT are at least ambivalent about certain kinds of fanfic, TBAT as an entity made space for this conversation.
I won't be able to even look at any replies for the next 9 or 10 hours, and I feel a little bad about posting and running. It seems like not acting in good faith, somehow. And I worry a bit that I might have said something wrong, and made things worse. But I really wanted to say it, especially the bit about my respect for TBAT's approach to publication.
Posted by: burgundy | Feb 21, 2012 at 09:03 AM
@mmy: I did a quick survey by what I remembered about the books' characters. Now I wish I was at home to do a survey by author: do I really have as many women writers as I think I do?
(Also, my original survey was based on my shelves which include "mainstream" or "literary" fiction, whatever you want to call it, and science-fiction/fantasy. Most of the mysteries are downstairs on another shelf and were not included, but I don't think they'd up the diversity quotient.)
Do read Sarah Waters, though; she's tremendously entertaining as well as good. Try Fingersmith. :-)
* creates another entry on The List *
* back to work *
Posted by: Amaryllis | Feb 21, 2012 at 09:04 AM
If my beliefs themselves, and the stating thereof, are distressing to you, I regret that, but I can't really apologize
What the hell? Did I ask you to apologise for your beliefs?
You know what I'm really tired of? People accusing me of persecuting them if I say anything about fiction that they don't agree with. People declaring that I'm calling their beliefs worthless if I go so far as to say they don't reflect my personal experience. People saying I'm rule-making when I say that their rules don't work for me. People bullying me under the impression they're defending the little guy against the man.
And making a weird sort-of apology in which you imply that I'm objecting to your beliefs when all I've bloody said is that MercuryBlue had no business dragging me in and that I'm tired of getting attacked when I fail to conform to fan dogma is just more of the same.
Yes, I was dreading this conversation. Yes, it turned out the way I was expecting - though the implication that I was choosing to refuse to grow after I'd made a mere two posts was faster than I'd anticipated. And yes, I signed off on it because, as we told the atheists who called us disgusting misogynist names, we do not censor for opinions.
Now if you can just acknowledge that without implying that I'm an intolerant person who can't stand to see opinions she disagrees with being expressed in public, I might believe you when you say you respect my integrity.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 09:35 AM
I don't have anything substantial to add to the fanfiction conversation, but this caught my eye. Can I play Amaryllis for a moment?
[[Kirala: It occurs to me that calling a work of fiction someone's baby might also work as an extended metaphor.]]
(Context here: Bradstreet's friends published her book of poetry without her permission.)
The Author to Her Book
Anne Bradstreet
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
The visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could.
I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet;
In better dress to trim thee was my mind,
But nought save homespun cloth i' th' house I find.
In this array 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam.
In critic's hands beware thou dost not come,
And take thy way where yet thou art not known;
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door.
Posted by: sarah | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:19 AM
Did I get spam-trapped?
Posted by: sarah | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:21 AM
@sarah: Did I get spam-trapped?
Yup, trapped and now rescued.
Posted by: The Board Administration Team | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:30 AM
Thanks!
Posted by: sarah | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:35 AM
@Kit Whitfield: @mmy - that's interesting. Do you have a theory as to why that [the differing ranges of diversity among different sections of my library] is?
I have some ideas:
1) my academic books reflect my studies. Since I spent (by the FSM, decades) studying issues of class, ethnicity, language, culture and ideology in relationship to the dominant media of different times (in particular looking at their power to socialize) it makes sense that my academic books reflect a great deal of diversity.
2) "mainstream" literature. My collection varies from books that my mother and grandmother bought [for themselves and at a time when they had to do without to afford a book] to books I bought. I often read for pleasure but I as part of my studies I also consciously read books written in different times by a wide range of people as a way of understanding the social and cultural mores of different times/places/people and that skews my collection. In addition to that I read a lot of books that are out of print, published in limited editions at a time when the only way for the "other" to be heard over the din of popular culture was in their poorly recompensed fiction.
3) mysteries -- again my area of interest is not best-sellers (although Agatha Christie certainly was) it is looking for the books that were published/talked about in earlier times. Mysteries were not "taken seriously" in the 1920s, for example, so they offered an opportunity for many divergent and not necessarily mainstream and respected voices to be heard. This also means, I warn you, that I have read brain-hurtingly bad books. Many of them. Books so badly written that they make Left Behind look like a deftly edited series.
4) sciene fiction/fantasy -- much of my collection dates back from before the time I read books mindfully as part of my research. Thus much of the collection reflects the realities of what was published and widely distributed in the late 60s through the 80s. Since most of the books I wanted to read were quickly out of print the collection actually skews earlier (to the 40s and 50s and 60s) as I picked them up at used book stores.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:49 AM
"after I leave a coin in the storyteller's bowl
So basically I and others like me are beggars to be tipped out of the charity of patrons?
Gee, thanks. What a charming image. "
Perhaps my metaphor was not clear? The storyteller has hir rightful spot in the marketplace. The storyteller is paid with money and treated with courtesy by the audience. The audience gives respect to the storyteller by waiting until they are no longer in the storyteller's presence to tell their own versions if so moved.
Or was the storyteller's corner in the public square just another Victorian fantasy of Ye Olden Dayes?
Posted by: Jenny Islander | Feb 21, 2012 at 11:22 AM
@Jenny Islander: your metaphor was clear. It also annoyed me, because this image of writers like we were features in a Ren Fair is about as appealing as Hugh Hefner's image of women as cute little bunnies. It's a lot easier to objectify people when your image of them is fantastical.
Also, publishing anything on the Internet is putting it in everybody's presence; that's what 'publish' means, to make publish. But that's another discussion.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 11:35 AM
'make public', not 'make publish'. Darn.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 11:38 AM
MMY wrote: I guess I am basically seeing a past in which women, non-citizens and slaves didn't get a chance to do much of anything at all. They may have had ideas but you know they probably weren't allowed to speak most of the time and they weren't talk to read or orate or sing and they were punished for spending any time not being of service.
So, yes you have have been speaking about the drawbacks but the very fact that people keep returning to that time and telling us about how ideas were able to flourish anyway seems to plaster over the fact that most people died young after living short lives of penury and work and never had a chance to take part. So why are we even bringing it up except for as an example of something so horrible that it makes the present copyright regime look like a slice of paradise.
Just because the literate upper class did not choose to record the stories of the non-literate lower classes doesn't mean that those people didn't have their own worlds of story and song. I can't think of any human society that doesn't have a tradition of story and song, and to imagine that slaves in ancient societies lived without stories and songs is to dehumanize them in a profound way.
If you look at more recent slave societies, such as the US South in the first half of the 1800s, you see that the slave population developed a rich tradition of song and story. I see no reason to believe that other slave societies didn't develop similar traditions.
Song and story are ideal art forms for the oppressed. They cost nothing to make. You can carry them with you, in your mind, even if everything else is taken from you. They can't be stolen by those who oppress you - at the most they can be copied, but they can't be taken away from you. You don't need formal training to make up a story, or retell a story you've heard, or to sing a traditional song and develop your own variations.
You can sing while you work, and tell stories on winter nights around your hearth-fire. They can provide an escape - if you look at 19th century documentation, you see that white masters assumed that slaves sang as they worked because they were happy, but a closer look shows that slave sang as they worked to distract themselves from their unhappy lives. Singing as you work can also have practical benefits, such as helping one maintain a steady pattern for repetitive activities.
You also see stories, such as the "Br'er Rabbit" tales, which involved weaker animals tricking and making fools of more powerful predators, a way for slaves to mock those more powerful than them in a symbolic way which they couldn't be punished for. Stories and song could also be used to share forbidden information, such as songs about "following the drinking gourd" sharing information about how you could use the night sky to guide a journey north into freedom.
And even the youngest and weakest could participate, even if only by listening to and enjoying the songs and stories of their parents and caretakers. Even a child who died young of disease and deprivation would be loved by its parents, and they could sing songs as they held their child, tell the child stories, and otherwise enrich their child's life through these most essentially human arts.
We have the written records of ancient slave-owners. But what they knew of the lives of their slaves wasn't the full truth of those lives.
Their slaves were still human, and they could manipulate, conceal and lie as needed to improve their lives. Again, it profoundly dehumanizes the slave community to imagine that they behaved as their owners wanted them to be, without resisting or considering what they wanted for themselves. These were human beings, not programmed computers.
So the slave-owner might dismiss the songs they heard slaves singing as "crude" and not worth recording, and they might not know the stories slaves told each other in the evenings when work was done.
The disconnect between the lives of slaves and the knowledge that slave-owners had of those lives was probably even more significant in the ancient world than it was in the pre-Emancipation US South. In the ancient world, aristocrats lived in cities, and their estates were worked by slaves, supervised by various middlemen. Some slaves worked in the city homes of aristocrats, but even then, many would have had little contact with the aristocrats, being assigned jobs like tending fires in the baths, cooking, etc. Even those slaves whose assigned work involved direct contact with aristocrats (such as those who served food at banquets) would have times away from the aristocrats, such as their own meal times. (Because what aristocrat would have their slave share a meal with them?) There were spaces that slaves occupied where aristocrats had little reason to go. And those are the spaces where the culture of the slaves would flourish, unseen and unrecorded.
There was certainly an "upstairs/downstairs" cultural divide, but the contempt that the people "upstairs" had for the people who did real work "downstairs" had and has little to do with the reality of the humanity of the people "downstairs."
Posted by: Ursula L | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:09 PM
MMY wrote: I guess I am basically seeing a past in which women, non-citizens and slaves didn't get a chance to do much of anything at all. They may have had ideas but you know they probably weren't allowed to speak most of the time and they weren't talk to read or orate or sing and they were punished for spending any time not being of service.
So, yes you have have been speaking about the drawbacks but the very fact that people keep returning to that time and telling us about how ideas were able to flourish anyway seems to plaster over the fact that most people died young after living short lives of penury and work and never had a chance to take part. So why are we even bringing it up except for as an example of something so horrible that it makes the present copyright regime look like a slice of paradise.
Just because the literate upper class did not choose to record the stories of the non-literate lower classes doesn't mean that those people didn't have their own worlds of story and song. I can't think of any human society that doesn't have a tradition of story and song, and to imagine that slaves in ancient societies lived without stories and songs is to dehumanize them in a profound way.
If you look at more recent slave societies, such as the US South in the first half of the 1800s, you see that the slave population developed a rich tradition of song and story. I see no reason to believe that other slave societies didn't develop similar traditions.
Song and story are ideal art forms for the oppressed. They cost nothing to make. You can carry them with you, in your mind, even if everything else is taken from you. They can't be stolen by those who oppress you - at the most they can be copied, but they can't be taken away from you. You don't need formal training to make up a story, or retell a story you've heard, or to sing a traditional song and develop your own variations.
You can sing while you work, and tell stories on winter nights around your hearth-fire. They can provide an escape - if you look at 19th century documentation, you see that white masters assumed that slaves sang as they worked because they were happy, but a closer look shows that slave sang as they worked to distract themselves from their unhappy lives. Singing as you work can also have practical benefits, such as helping one maintain a steady pattern for repetitive activities.
You also see stories, such as the "Br'er Rabbit" tales, which involved weaker animals tricking and making fools of more powerful predators, a way for slaves to mock those more powerful than them in a symbolic way which they couldn't be punished for. Stories and song could also be used to share forbidden information, such as songs about "following the drinking gourd" sharing information about how you could use the night sky to guide a journey north into freedom.
And even the youngest and weakest could participate, even if only by listening to and enjoying the songs and stories of their parents and caretakers. Even a child who died young of disease and deprivation would be loved by its parents, and they could sing songs as they held their child, tell the child stories, and otherwise enrich their child's life through these most essentially human arts.
We have the written records of ancient slave-owners. But what they knew of the lives of their slaves wasn't the full truth of those lives.
Their slaves were still human, and they could manipulate, conceal and lie as needed to improve their lives. Again, it profoundly dehumanizes the slave community to imagine that they behaved as their owners wanted them to be, without resisting or considering what they wanted for themselves. These were human beings, not programmed computers.
So the slave-owner might dismiss the songs they heard slaves singing as "crude" and not worth recording, and they might not know the stories slaves told each other in the evenings when work was done.
The disconnect between the lives of slaves and the knowledge that slave-owners had of those lives was probably even more significant in the ancient world than it was in the pre-Emancipation US South. In the ancient world, aristocrats lived in cities, and their estates were worked by slaves, supervised by various middlemen. Some slaves worked in the city homes of aristocrats, but even then, many would have had little contact with the aristocrats, being assigned jobs like tending fires in the baths, cooking, etc. Even those slaves whose assigned work involved direct contact with aristocrats (such as those who served food at banquets) would have times away from the aristocrats, such as their own meal times. (Because what aristocrat would have their slave share a meal with them?) There were spaces that slaves occupied where aristocrats had little reason to go. And those are the spaces where the culture of the slaves would flourish, unseen and unrecorded.
There was certainly an "upstairs/downstairs" cultural divide, but the contempt that the people "upstairs" had for the people who did real work "downstairs" had and has little to do with the reality of the humanity of the people "downstairs."
Posted by: Ursula L | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:11 PM
I don't really "get" the impulse to fan-fic, but this article is helping me. I still think it's a problematic thing to do to the works of a living author, but I'm closer to understanding the impulse.
I do think that a society needs to own its myths, and that this creates a problem when all the myths are still in copyright. I don't think the best solution is to ignore copyright, though. I think it's better to find older myths, and to take more modern works as fiction. I'm not sure how feasible that is, though.
***
I read gay sex/romance stories online. I was once half-way through the first chapter of one when it became apparent it was Pride and Prejudice. It was moved to New York, and Elizabeth and Jane were now male cousins, instead of sisters. I persisted for a while, but it was becoming harder and harder to read without laughing, so I stopped. And that's the entirety of my experience with amateur fan fic. (I've read some of Neil Gaiman's professional fan fic, and Eoin Colfer's And Another Thing.)
TRiG.
Posted by: Timothy (TRiG) | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:12 PM
I just posted a rather long comment, but don't see it. Am I caught in the spam trap?
Posted by: Ursula L | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:12 PM
Can I play Amaryllis for a moment?
Well, it's not like I have a monopoly! ;)
Which reminds me, is it Tuesday yet?
Must check, later.
Posted by: Amaryllis | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:40 PM
@Ursula L: I just posted a rather long comment, but don't see it. Am I caught in the spam trap?
There were two comments from you in the spam trap. It has been extra-hungry today -- you are second person in a short time who has been caught in there.
Posted by: The Board Administration Team | Feb 21, 2012 at 12:58 PM
@Ursula L - I don't disagree with anything you say and it's a good point, but I don't think it's a refutation of Mmy's central argument. If I have this right, she was bringing up the subject of silenced slaves as an argument against the assertion that the Greek tradition of common myths was one that should be a model for today. She was basically saying 'Let's not be sentimental about how wonderful and free that culture was.'
It seems perfectly likely that the worse-off people did have their own art. But since it's not recorded, there's no way of knowing whether it partook of traditional myths or invented completely new ideas, so it doesn't prove much either way. :-)
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 01:10 PM
@Amaryllis: It is Tuesday, and I actually posted a poem on time. :)
Posted by: sarah | Feb 21, 2012 at 01:15 PM
I think I've been working on writing this post for the past
fourseven**** hours, and it definitely seems to make less sense the longer I spend on it, so sorry for that.-
I see us as heading towards a "corporate" patronage system, which I agree is no big improvement over more ancient systems based on class.
I thought we were already there. It is a very different system of patronage from the one in ancient Rome, and every time I've used the term patronage in previous posts I was talking about the Roman system, but I think that publishing today is a patronage system. (Which means that really I should have gone into more detail originally about what the Roman system of patronage was like, and I'm sorry for not doing that when I first brought it up.)
As the means of production changes I think we can see that changing to an extent (self publishing is a real thing now, there's such a thing as interdependent film festivals) but pretty much every form of fiction I come into contact with got there because it had a corporate patron. The exceptions are almost all things that I didn't have to pay for.
If I see a movie in theaters I know that it had a corporate patron like a Disney, or a Fox or at least a Lion's Gate. If I see a book in a bookstore I can be pretty sure that it had a corporate patron like a a Random House or a... I'm glad I double checked that because I was about to name a company that's part of Random House. So let's go with Penguin as a second example.
I keep on hearing about how self publishing of books and the widespread availability of increasingly good cameras and effects technology will change things so that one doesn't need a corporate patron, but from where I sit it still looks like having a corporate patron is the way to go.
Of course, there are upsides to a system of patronage, and interestingly it seems to me like the major upside is exactly the same as the major downside. The down side is that the patrons serve as gatekeepers. The upside is that the patrons serve as gatekeepers.
So on the downside is anything that publishers won't publish won't get published, but on the upside if something does get published it means that it meets the publisher's standards. If the publisher's standards are similar to your own standards you know that, regardless of whether or not you'll actually like the book, it is at least produced to the standard you desire. Thus sticking with the things publisher's approve means not slogging through things that fall below that standard. Every time the publish something it comes with the implicit promise, "This is something good enough to be published."
I mean no disrespect to the self published, but I do tend to think that if someone gets a publishing company to support them it means a lot and is worthy of respect. (Though there are some published authors that occasionally make me doubt this.)
That may be a good method for mass-producing wheat or widgets -- I'll leave that debate for others. But the only way I can see it applicable to the production of art is if the greatest value is placed on sheer quantity, and not quality and variety.
I was going to say that there's never been a time when people produced art by placing value on quantity rather than quality, but there probably was.
What I've been talking about definitely isn't about quantity. ako's Children of the Goats is one of the most powerful works of fiction I have ever read. Just thinking about it can bring me to tears. Perhaps if it were (finished and then) published it would become widespread and maybe then it would inspire someone else, and they'd write something even better.
And after looking at some information about copyright law I'm now not sure that Children of the Goats couldn't be published. It seems to be very much like The Wind Done Gone in what it's doing, and The Wind Done Gone could be published. That also brings up distinctions I wasn't even thinking about. Since I'm not ako and thus can't speak to ako's process, I was instead going to substitute my own experience with writing Edith and Ben. But, unlike Children of the Goats, Edith and Ben is not like The Wind Done Gone. (Edith and Ben isn't Twilight as told from a different perspective, if it were there'd be no space for Edith or Ben because their roles would be occupied by Edward and Bella.)
So there are complexities at work here that I really don't understand. Like, for example, what "transformative" means in this context.
Anyway what I was going to say when I finished with that is that within the bounds of non-commercial fan fiction we do have the possibility for a similar speed of inspiration and turn around. Though it's also worth pointing out that when mmy said that I was "picking a few bright lustrous gems" she was right. The people I brought up were considered the very best professional authors in their day, and they were working off of other people's work. Not just the work of long dead people (though they definitely did that too) but also off the work that had been done a few years prior. The result was a centuries long conversation in poetic fiction which was often rather brilliant. (Have we said enough that it was all built on a culture that routinely ground people into the ground and silenced even more of them? Because if we haven't, let it be said.)
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a lot of the best professional authors of our day write fan fiction. I'm not entirely sure if they can. At first I was going to say that there should be nothing making it more difficult for them to do than it is for me, but that's not really true. They can't offer it for sale, of course, so that would mean they'd have to offer it for free if it were made public, and depending on the exact type of fan fiction, that could amount to a free version of the story from a professional author, and in the presence of that people who would otherwise buy the original might just go with the free one, and in that case you'd be disrupting the market for the original work, in which case my limited understanding of copyright law says it's not acceptable.
So maybe professional authors can't write fan fiction of works under copyright. I don't know. What I do know is that I haven't heard a lot about them doing it.
And it could be its better that way. Maybe if they did it would mean losing much better original works. Maybe none of them would want to anyway. (Though out doubt that because authors are such a diverse group I don't think it's possible to paint them all with the same brush.) Maybe everything is just perfect the way it is.
I will say that I don't think a brilliant author writing their version of an existing work is quite the same as placing the greatest value on sheer quantity rather than quality and variety.
-
This seems to go rather too far on the side of suggesting that all works which once existed but no longer do no longer do due to active suppression and destruction of those works, at least from my point of view.
If I gave that impression I'm sorry. I didn't mean to.
When someone asks, "What should I preserve?" they're also asking, "What should I allow do disappear?" It isn't active silencing on the same level as something like a book burning, but it is making it so that, in the end, only those things you approve of survive.
I also think it's worth distinguishing between times when some things were preserved and others were not, and times when pretty much nothing was preserved and what survived was left to random chance. For thousands of years people took an active roll in preserving things like Homer. It wasn't the result of chance. It was the result of a choice, "What should I preserve? Homer."
It's also worth noting that a lot of the silencing going on in the Roman Empire itself was more passive than active. Even when it comes to slaves, who were very much oppressed, the reason we don't have their voices isn't an active campaign of suppressing those voices. As far as I know there was no attempt to prevent slaves from writing. Rome was very comfortable with highly literate slaves, whom they often did give some spending money to and did allow some free time. It's entirely possible that some of them did write.
But if I were saving up my money in hopes that I could use it to buy my freedom, I'm not sure that I'd be willing to spend much of it on writing supplies. And I'm not sure I'd be using my free time to write poetry. And even if I did I very much doubt I could compete with the people who wrote it for a living. And even if I could, where would I find someone who wanted to pay for, copy, and distribute my work?
And that's where the silencing really comes in. Not active suppression and destruction of voices that aren't approved of, but in withholding from them the resources necessary to be heard. If you can't afford to take time to write, then you can't write. If, once you've written something, you can't distribute it, then it won't be heard. And if, once it's distributed, it isn't preserved then it won't last.
Withhold any of these things and the effect is to silence people.
We can point to examples like Ovid being sent into exile or Statius being afraid he'd end up dead if he came out and said, "Domitian sucks," but the vast majority of the silencing mmy was talking about was less active than that. When looking at Ovid and Statius we're looking at people who already have a platform to speak, and most people never made it that far. Instead of actively suppressing those people's voices those in power simply didn't bother to support them, and the result was the exact same thing.
That was the same way so many works were lost after creation. People didn't throw them in a fire, they just didn't bother preserving them. Maybe someone can find an exception to the first thing I'm about to say, I'm sure someone can find an exception to the second, but in general if a work wasn't actively supported in its own time it probably didn't get made and definitely didn't get distributed, and if a work wasn't actively supported afterward it didn't get preserved and thus doesn't survive to this day.
Silencing isn't just about active means, it's also about withholding support.
If you need a patron for your voice to be heard, and you can't get a patron, then you are silenced. Even if the reason you can't get a patron isn't an active attempt to suppress you. If you need preservation for your work to survive** and no one particularly feels like preserving it, you are silenced. It doesn't require anything active.
The Romans, as far as I know, never tried to suppress female authors. They just didn't support them very much which had the effect of suppressing them. Of those who became writers anyway, and some did***, we have almost nothing of their works surviving to this day. Again, as far as I know, no one tried to suppress it. They simply didn't do the active work of preserving it which had the same effect.
I think most silencing isn't active. Instead things are set up in a way that people's voice cannot be heard without support, and then that support is not given.
No one makes it entirely on their own, so to silence people all that's really needed is to prevent them from getting the help they need to make it. If you're the only one who can give them that help, you need not do anything active to silence them, ignoring them is sufficient. (If you really want to be an ass about it, tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.)
It's only when someone already has a voice, as in the case of someone like Ovid, that active means are required to suppress their viewpoint. In Rome, and Greece before it, most people never had a chance to have a voice in the first place.
-
I guess that the entire point of this section is that I don't think neglect is an excuse. Neglect is what means we have almost none of the works of Roman women that were produced, it is also the reason that there were so few of those works in the first place.
The reason that so few Roman women became writers was because they weren't considered worth it. The reason that even fewer of their writings survive to this day is that those writings weren't considered worth it either. I really don't see one as less silencing than the other. The first is definitely worse for the women themselves, because it plays a role in their lifetime, but from the standpoint of looking back, the women who didn't write for lack of support in her own time and the woman who wrote but wasn't preserved for lack of support in later years both have their voices equally silenced.
So I'm not really content to let the copyists, who actively worked to preserve the writings of males while letting the writings of females be lost, off the hook. Yes what they did wasn't active. Yes it was neglect. But the same can be said of those who were responsible for so few women writing things in the first place. The Romans didn't actively try to prevent women from writing, they just didn't provide women with any of the resources that would be helpful. (In many other areas the misogyny was much more active.)
If one has the resources to let people be writers and only provides them to men, that is silencing women. If one has the resources to preserve people's writings and only uses them on works written by men, that is silencing women.*****
That's my view, at any rate.
-
* Possible exception being someone like Epictetus who appears to have started his life as a slave, but even then it wasn't until after he was freed, exiled, and finally opened a school that someone bothered to write down his words. If they really were his words.
** And you do, there's a reason our oldest surviving manuscript of Homer is from the 10th century CE when Homer likely worked in the 8th century BCE. For stuff to last a long time it needs people actively working to keep it alive.
*** Privilege helped. If you happened to be the mother or an emperor or friends with a relative of someone sponsoring a writing circle that would help.
**** It was four when I wrote that it's just been more than two hours since then, but some of that was spent being distracted by music in styles unlike their own. (For example, the Imperial March in the style of Beethoven.) I think I was going to make an analogy but it never did work out. Still don't really like how the post is, but at some point I have to just post it and move on.
Except another hour passed since I wrote that, and I still don't like the post. I give up.
***** I can think of possible exceptions (e.g. if, through no fault of your own, you only have access to male writers; if the job is divided along gender lines and someone else is helping women while you help men) but they don't apply. There clearly were women who wanted to be writers, and women in positions to be writers without outside help definitely wrote things that could have been preserved.
It is simply the case that the effort wasn't expended on either front.
Posted by: chris the cynic | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:12 PM
I'm busy, and also not sure what I could possibly say to make things better with Kit, but I do have to note this:
So maybe professional authors can't write fan fiction of works under copyright. I don't know. What I do know is that I haven't heard a lot about them doing it.
Naomi Novik does.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:35 PM
So maybe professional authors can't write fan fiction of works under copyright. I don't know. What I do know is that I haven't heard a lot about them doing it.
I don't have a survey, but as a professional author, here's an individual perspective: there are lots of reasons I wouldn't do it.
If an amateur wrote fan fiction based on my work (which doesn't lend itself to fan fiction, I think, but let's suppose for the sake of argument), I'd almost certainly turn a blind eye. I don't think I'd be dead pleased, but I wouldn't think it worth the trouble, expense and inevitable hate campaign that would result if I tried to do anything about it. Fans can be extremely nasty about that kind of thing, and I can't be the only author who wouldn't feel like sticking my head on the block for the sake of squishing a hobbyist.
On the other hand, if a professional author wrote fan fiction based on my work and distributed it for free, I'd cease and desist the hell out of them, and I'd be pretty bloody angry. An amateur hobbyist isn't much threat; a fellow professional is.
Likewise, I wouldn't publish fan fiction based on another author's work. I'd consider it completely unprofessional: I depend on copyright for my livelihood and that means respecting other people's. I'm even generally careful when talking about books online to phrase any 'The author might have done this differently' statements in language that wouldn't make a story. I feel that doing otherwise would be a breach of professional ethics.
That said, I don't write fan fiction - and I'd be prepared to speculate that a fair proportion of professional authors don't either. It's what other people have said: I wouldn't be writing the other person's characters, I'd be writing my own characters and calling them by the names of someone else's, and that'd leave me feeling unsatisfied.
But aside from the reasons you mention - which are good reasons - no, I don't think most professional authors would write and distribute fan fiction. You don't do that to colleagues and you can expect them to get pretty pissed off if you do, and anyway you may not want to.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:43 PM
I'm busy, and also not sure what I could possibly say to make things better with Kit, but I do have to note this
Right. So you can't take the time to actually ask me what might make things better, but you can take the time for some Naomi Novik fandom?
I see. Nice to know where your priorities lie.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:44 PM
It depends on if you count tie-in novels and such as fanfiction. While tie-in writers do have permission from an author/the author's heirs/the author's company, they are still using other people's characters and universes, which is enough for some to call that fanfiction. A lot of writers write those -- see the large expanded universes for Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, etc. Also, novelizations of movies and video games could be considered fanfiction by the same standards.
Posted by: ZMiles | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:47 PM
(And all this talk of professional Sherlock Holmes fanfiction is reminding me of my favorite one, Stephen King's "The Doctor's Case." Spoilers for discussion of the premise:
Ubyzrf naq Jngfba ner pnyyrq gb fbyir n ybpxrq ebbz zlfgrel. Hasbeghangryl, gur ivpgvz bjarq frireny pngf naq Ubyzrf vf urnivyl nyyretvp, fb vg'f hc gb Jngfba gb fbyir gur pnfr -- naq ur qbrf! Jvgu synve naq fglyr nf jryy. Irel jryy gubhtug bhg, jvgu n tbbq, fbyvq zlfgrel gung gur ernqre pna npghnyyl svther bhg sbe gurzfryirf vs gurl'er cnlvat nggragvba. Naq gur Yrfgenqr/Ubyzrf eryngvbafuvc vf qbar cresrpgyl. )
Posted by: ZMiles | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:55 PM
I don't know that I would write fanfic these days. I did some in my youth, but not a lot. Just doesn't seem to be where my brain goes: the stuff I did write usually involved my own characters, and thus got pretty damn Mary Sue pretty damn fast. If I did, I definitely wouldn't publish it under my pen name, as I do not need to open that particular can of worms.
For myself...like I said, I'd be pretty pleased by it for the most part (though Sturgeon's Law guarantees that there'd be a few eyeroll-inducing stories where my heroines became nervous virgin Prairie Muffins or my heroes became overprotective alpha asshats), and I wouldn't care particularly who was responsible. My publishers and/or their lawyers might feel differently, though; I really have no idea.
Posted by: Izzy | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:56 PM
Kit: So asking wouldn't piss you off even more? Good to know. What can I say to make things better?
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 21, 2012 at 02:59 PM
The people I brought up were considered the very best professional authors in their day, and they were working off of other people's work. Not just the work of long dead people (though they definitely did that too) but also off the work that had been done a few years prior. The result was a centuries long conversation in poetic fiction which was often rather brilliant.
@chris the cynic --
Okay, I must have completely lost your point, because you don't think that happens NOW?
Forget reworking of archetypal tales and tropes, forget authors that are in the public domain (like Jane Austen and A. Conan Doyle), have you read Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy? Have you read the interviews in which he states it is a direct response to Lewis's NARNIA books?
Or, heckopete, have you read Grossman's THE MAGICIANS and THE MAGICIAN KING? Are they in any way *not* a "conversation" -- for that matter, a by-God screaming argument -- with J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis?
Has there been even a whisper of a suit for copyright violation?
Do we really have to force authors to hand over the keys to every detail of their characters, worlds, and plots, in order to foster this kind of literary "conversation"? Or do you really think that this conversation would become "more brilliant" by turning it into the equivalent of the 4chan forums?
Posted by: hapax | Feb 21, 2012 at 03:18 PM
Actually, there was a copyright suit over "THE WIND DONE GONE," (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone#Legal_controversy), which was based on "GONE WITH THE WIND". So 'based on' works can be sued by the estates of the original authors.
Posted by: ZMiles | Feb 21, 2012 at 03:43 PM
@ZMiles: If your reference to The Wind Done Gone court case was to counter hapax about copyright violations -- zie was referring to a number of cases in which the authors had explicitly or implicitly acknowledge the material they were responding to.
The The Wind Done Gone court case is complicated by the fact that the material drawn on is "dear to the heart" of many Americans and also the question not only as whether TWDG leaned heavily/overly heavily on the original book but also the way in which it was done. The case was settled with the agreement that the phrase "an unauthorized parody" was added to the front of TWDG and a donation was made to Morehouse College. Randall (the author of TWDG) retained all normal legal and financial author's rights.
The testy question was whether it strayed over the line between parody and copyright violation is not as simple to answer as one might imagine. I have read both and understand why it was a more difficult case than many copyright cases.
It did, however, end with Randall being cleared and retaining the authorial rights over TWDG.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 21, 2012 at 03:57 PM
Yes, ZMiles.
And Mitchell's heirs dropped the case in exchange for a token charitable contribution, when it became quite clear that they would lose.
Note that Alice Randall *did* publish THE WIND DONE GONE (it was a bestseller, in fact) and retained all rights (including to transformative works) to her book.
Posted by: hapax | Feb 21, 2012 at 03:59 PM
@Mmy -- jinx padlock!
Posted by: hapax | Feb 21, 2012 at 04:00 PM
Kit: So asking wouldn't piss you off even more? Good to know. What can I say to make things better?
Considering how unwarranted your attack was, and that you then swung by without any acknowledgement to me except that you didn't feel like addressing the issue because it would be difficult but that shouldn't stop you having fun chatting about fan fiction ... well, I don't think I owe it to you to feed you lines. I think you should come up with an answer that owns what you did and said and takes proper responsibility for it. Otherwise that's just me doing the work, and I'm the one who got turned into an effigy here. It's on you to fix this.
And that means not using me, either as an effigy or as a prompter. My whole problem with what you did was that you acted like you didn't have to think for a minute about me except as some kind of symbol you could objectify. Maybe if you stopped doing that you might come up with something.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 21, 2012 at 04:48 PM
Kit, what the hell?
MercuryBlue apologised the moment someone pointed out what the problem was, then apologised again. Then, when she made another comment you complained that she hadn't taken the time to ask you how to fix this - so she DID. And you instantly said you shouldn't be asking her.
WHAT THE HELL.
Your latest comment is reminding me of nothing so much as the comments you were getting from Ruby recently - in which you asked her, repeatedly, what you could do for her and she said it wasn't her job to tell you but you needed to fix it all anyway. This, quite rightly, pissed you off. And now you're doing it yourself.
Posted by: Deird, who is appalled | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:09 PM
Correction:
"And you instantly said you shouldn't be asking her." should be "And you instantly said she shouldn't be asking you."
Posted by: Deird, who makes typos | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:10 PM
Deird, calm down please?
I'll be back, at some point after tonight's test, with a better apology, once I can figure out how to word it so as to damp the flames instead of fanning them. Please do not take any non-apology-containing comments from me between now and then as indication that I am not working on the apology.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:14 PM
@Deird: MercuryBlue apologised the moment someone pointed out what the problem was, then apologised again.
Lots of other things have been posted in between so I pulled out the posts in question. ....saying
Shit. Sorry.
followed by
I repeat: Shit. Sorry
followed by
I'm busy, and also not sure what I could possibly say to make things better with Kit,
followed by
So asking wouldn't piss you off even more? Good to know. What can I say to make things better?
comes across as a "not getting what the problem was" apology. Yup, I am sure MercuryBlue is sorry that Kit is angry but I think it would help a lot if Kit had a sense that MercuryBlue understood why Kit was angry.
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:26 PM
*sighs*
I'm in a bad mood today. And am likely to yell at people. So I think, for the sake of everyone's blood pressure, I'll leave this thread and come back to the site in a couple of days, when I'm in a better mood.
Posted by: Deird, who is PMSing | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:45 PM
I may be establishing a bit of a reputation here as the person who's geeky about copyright licenses, but these things do matter.
Free licensing began with software, particularly the GNU movement and the FSF. Then they were applied to the documentation that accompanied software. And then to general information (Wikipedia was originally largely under GNU FDL, which is intended for documentation). And it just continued spreading. The Creative Commons organisation produces a wide range of licenses to suit different situations (Wikipedia has moved to CC BY-SA). Open licenses of various forms are now used for software, for documentation, for music, for opinion pieces, for fiction.
So Alice can build her sandbox by writing a couple of short stories, some character descriptions, a bit of the history of her fictional world, and perhaps a couple of maps, and release the lot under, let's say, CC BY-SA-NC. Now there's plenty of room for hapax's boat pond.
***
Let's talk about software again. Firefox is a very decent browser. And the name is trademarked and protected. There are very strict rules about how to use the Firefox logos. You are perfectly legally entitled to take Firefox and change it, but you cannot call the result Firefox. So if you want to fix a bug in Firefox, you're probably better off to contribute that fix back to Mozilla.
On the other hand, if you want to make changes to Firefox that the Mozilla Project isn't happy with, that's fine too. You can make those changes, and release your modified version for others to use, as long as you call it something else*.
Ditto the World English Bible, a translation which is dedicated to the public domain but has a trademarked name.
That's one way for Alice to manage the integrity of her sandbox. She did, after all, release it under a SA license, which means that hapax's modified version has to be under the same license. So she's free to borrow hapax's work just as hapax was free to borrow hers. If Alice so chooses, the boat pond can become a canonical part of the sandbox, or it might not.
How anyone gets any money out of this is another question, but it might be fun. I'm just saying that this sort of thing is legally feasible, and there are ways for creators of content to protect their rights while creating shared open cultural works.
Also, if this is the sort of thing you want to do, don't just say something about people being free to use your stuff. The copyright law is complex. And "use your stuff" is an ill-defined term. Creative Commons have a bunch of different licenses, and a license-picker tool. Use it.
TRiG.
* Debian calls it Iceweasel.
Posted by: Timothy (TRiG) | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:56 PM
Didn't come across that way to me. The way I read shit was as "Yikes! How did I do that?!", which is pretty much the opposite of "not getting it". But I could be reading it wrong.
TRiG.
Posted by: Timothy (TRiG) | Feb 21, 2012 at 05:59 PM
I agree with Timothy (TRiG).
This is Kish, btw. I'm changing my screen name.
Posted by: Beroli | Feb 21, 2012 at 06:21 PM
Wow, I'm a little scared to walk into this minefield, but I feel I should. _Legally_, distributing fanfic is simply not permissible except for the few authors who allow it. (Although if no one makes money from it, there's really no damages for the copyright holder to sue over.) I feel I have to state that first, because otherwise people would be arguing with my imaginary positions.
However, a few people have gone a bit further here and suggested that it is somehow immoral to 'edit' an author's story, and _that_ I have to take serious issue with. Why? Because receiving fiction is editing a story. All narratives that have 'holes'. And in receiving that narrative, people cannot help but fill in those holes. I was going to list those, but this post was way too long, so instead I will just point to the obvious ones.
In any conflict, there's a bad outcome, and a good outcome. We are supposed to imagine both, even though only one happens. That's actually part of any sort of narrative.
And in almost every work of fiction, characters have motives you have to imagine. There might be exceptions (One Man vs. Nature, like in '127 Hours'), but they are incredibly rare.
If you're reading or watching fiction, and not trying to guess what happens next based on what you know or have guessed, either you or the author is falling down on the job. Fiction is no a single person dictating a universe to us, it is a process the reader participates in via...well...fanfic. It's 'fanfic' that is inside their head, and rather informal, and generally gets thrown away as the actual events or actual motives are revealed happen, but there it is. And at the end of the work, when we are done, there's still stuff floating around in our head that is part of 'the work', but we came up with ourselves.
There is no such thing as a 'unedited narrative' that exists in people's head. Every story in _anyone's_ head but the author's is in some way 'fanfic', consisting of hypothesized motives, unfollowed pathways, unseen actions by others, filled plotholes, and just incorrect recollections.
All fiction is collaborative with the person viewing it. No, I'm not trying to push 'Death of the author', but _all_ fictional works are paint-by-numbers that were given out, except that everyone uses their own version of 'green' and they sometimes misread the numbers. Yes, there's authorial intent, but there's also the actual resulting pictures that every individual comes up with. Both of the original and the interpreted things exist at the same time, and we should not pretend that either of them are the other.
Luckily, the unedited version still exists out there. We're not telling stories by oral traditional.
And the same thing holds true for written fanfic, which is just people writing down the stories and theories that exists in their head, and sharing it with others.
Now, there are understandable concerns about fanfic. (In addition to it actually being illegal.):
Sometimes, the author is worried about fanfic authors suing because of 'stolen ideas', which is a legit worry and has happened before. Which is why I'd really like to see authors actually produce a contract for fanfic writers to sign, stating that they're allowed to produce fanfic as long as it is distributed for free, in return for neither party suing each other suing. I.e., like Paramount does with Star Trek.
Sometimes they worry that the fanfic actually competes with their product, which is usually a somewhat silly worry, as people who read fanfic are _voracious_ readers of the actual works, and will purchase it in any form supplied, often multiple times. They're reading fanfic because they, in essence, ran out of the original. It's worth pointing out that largest fanfic community, by far, is Harry Potter, and that is almost entirely due to pauses in book publishing.
Some of it is worries that some fanfic inappropriate to the audience that the original work is aimed at, and the author is worried about that, and I get that. But a lot of that worry is lack of knowledge about how the fanfic community actually works, as that sort of stuff is pretty hard to stumble upon.
And, yes, there's the moral indignation of authors seeing characters reacting in ways they would not, especially with slash. But, well, that's asserting authors have some sort of moral ownership of characters, which seems rational until you realize that the characters the fanfic writers are messing with are _inside their own heads_, and the author's characters are still safely in the pages of the book where they were left. (That said, I actually have no objection to the idea that creators are able to restrict fanfic, although I think, to some extent, they are shooting themselves in the foot. But I don't want to get into what copyright law 'should' be, as that's a pointless discussion.)
And there's the worry that somehow the alternate interpretation will be confused for the 'true' one...but the fact is, that really doesn't have anything to do with 'fanfic'. That's a _cultural_ issue, and we can sit here and talk about the strange distortions that pop culture has on works of fictions, but it's not fanfic doing that, it's almost the opposite of fanfic...people who _aren't_ paying attention to the original work and repeated the wrong thing over and over. Fanfic writers tend to know what canon actually is.
I mean, since we're talking about Harry Potter slash, and HP fanfic is something I'm pretty familiar with, is there a single idea from HP fanfic that's make it out in the real world? Harry/Draco? Manipulative scheming Dumbledore? Gold digger Ginny? What ideas, exactly, are escaping and screwing it up for other readers? TV Tropes actually has a page called 'Fandom Specific Plot' (I can't link, the spam filter scares me.) about various distortions that are common in specific fanworks. None of them seem to have confused any of the public.
Posted by: DavidTC | Feb 21, 2012 at 06:30 PM
Kit wrote: I don't disagree with anything you say and it's a good point, but I don't think it's a refutation of Mmy's central argument. If I have this right, she was bringing up the subject of silenced slaves as an argument against the assertion that the Greek tradition of common myths was one that should be a model for today. She was basically saying 'Let's not be sentimental about how wonderful and free that culture was.'
It seems perfectly likely that the worse-off people did have their own art. But since it's not recorded, there's no way of knowing whether it partook of traditional myths or invented completely new ideas, so it doesn't prove much either way. :-)
There are ways we can know the shape of what was done, if not the specific details. It involves using the tools of cultural anthropology, rather than literary analysis or historical study of documents. There was a class I took in undergrad that had a rather good book which included discussion of the way story exists in folk culture. I don't have it at hand right now, so I can't give you the title, but I'll try to find it.
But looking back on what I've been writing, I realize that my points have been heavily influenced by that understanding of stories and culture, while much of the rest of the conversation is coming at the issue from the point of view of professional writing and literary analysis.
But I do think understanding things like fanfiction needs to begin with the understanding that everyone tells and retells stories, and makes them over in their own fashion. There are things that people have always done with stories, and fanfiction, retelling favored stories and making up new stories about pre-existing characters, is one of those things.
And, as a culture, I think that the way we handle things like fanfiction needs to be informed by the anthropological knowledge that this is something that is done near-universally by human beings. Having laws and polices that give absolute control to professional writers and the corporations that support professional writers won't work. Neither will throwing everything into the public domain without consideration for the needs of professional writers and for the benefits that come from having professionally produced stories as part of our culture.
An interesting point is that the online fanfiction community is quite aware of this tension, has had considerable discussion about it, and has worked out a sort of ethics about how you treat professional works that you're going to do fanfiction about. If you look at fanfiction archives, you'll see that there is the absolute expectation that professional authors be given credit for their work used. This credit includes attaching the original author's name and the name of the original story to any work. This attention to giving credit to professionals isn't part of the folk-culture of retelling stories, it's a response to the influence of professional writing on our culture. There is also often a specific disclaimer that the fanfiction author does not own the original characters and is not making money off the work. Finally, the fanfiction writer will often specifically praise the original work, and encourage anyone who finds the fanfiction to read the original if they haven't done so already. To the extent that there is a financial interest in fanfiction, it is often the fanfiction writer wishing to promote the original author's work.
Posted by: Ursula L | Feb 21, 2012 at 06:48 PM
Kit: What I tried to say was something along the lines of 'anti-fanworks authors need not be exposed to fanworks', using the first anti-fanworks author to mind as a case in point. I say this as an attempt to explain myself, not to defend myself; because intent is not magic, I have no defense. What I evidently actually said was something along the lines of 'here is a pro-fanworks author', which, since that's a view you don't hold, it's easy to see why you're angry at me for saying it, and I'm sorry I did. I'm sorry also for hurting you.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | Feb 21, 2012 at 07:59 PM
Putting this here since it seems to be the busiest thread currently.
My annual Lenten blog fast is set to begin tomorrow a.m.
I'll 'see' everyone in April!
Posted by: cjmr | Feb 21, 2012 at 08:04 PM
@cjmr: My annual Lenten blog fast is set to begin tomorrow a.m.
I'll 'see' everyone in April!
I'll miss you (mmy waves)
Posted by: Mmy | Feb 21, 2012 at 08:18 PM
is there a single idea from HP fanfic that's make it out in the real world?
Okay. Not touching what the "real world" is with a ten-foot pole.
I have only read a few HP fanfics in part, and only one very short one in its entirety (I *have* tried, but I should confess up front found even those highly recommended to me to be boring and badly written, so I've pretty much given up).
But I cannot tell you how many places have recommended "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (or whatever it's called) as an educational tool for "critical thinking", "skepticism", etc.
I know many people who have read Grossman's THE MAGICIANS who never read a Harry Potter book -- but certainly would not be able to now without being influenced by Grossman's criticism of the original.
My daughter's college roommate is an enthusiastic member of the university's "Quidditch" team, but has never read any of the books (she *has* seen all the movies, which in her opinion "do Quidditch wrong.")
And speaking of the movies -- certainly derivative and transformative works, if authorized by Rowling -- I was thinking about one thing that really bugged me about them last night.
Daniel Radcliffe's eyes aren't green.
Daniel Radcliffe's eyes don't look much like Geraldine Somerville's eyes.
Daniel Radcliffe looks nothing like a young Adrian Rawlins (or Robbie Jarvis, either)
This is not exactly a trivial point.
The color of Harry's eyes is a crucial plot thread carried through all seven books. The similarity of his eyes to his mother's, and his otherwise almost identical appearance to his father, is central to the motivations of other characters in response to him (particularly Snape, but also other characters). It is incredibly important to Harry himself, one of whose primary characteristics is his intense desire to find familial connections, and to create family wherever he can.
The bright green of his eyes was surely not an accidental choice on Rowling's part, since this is an exceedingly vivid and evocative detail, alluded to at least as often as Harry's scar, invoking centuries long association between bright green eyes and "fey-ness" in British folklore. Not to mention all the other associations of "green".
The movies -- especially the last two -- continued to rely upon the plot points that depended upon these details of Harry's appearance that were shown not to be true on the screen.
The degree to which the films were able to pull off this nifty trick of "believe the script rather than your lying eyes" is a tribute to the acting skill of Radcliffe and Rickman, I suppose.
But to the extent that the actors' features have determined THE canonical images of the characters, I wonder how much of this element of the original text will be lost to readers in the future.
Posted by: hapax | Feb 21, 2012 at 09:59 PM
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" (or whatever it's called)
Can people not do this? It's a trivial fact to check. If you don't care enough to check, surely you don't care enough to type out a parenthetical aside about how much you don't care.
Posted by: malpollyon | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:32 PM
Daniel Radcliffe's eyes, and his straight, non-tangled, brown hair, have bugged me ever since the first movie came out.
(I'm finding this discussion fascinating but I'm staying pretty quiet because I don't really have strong feelings one way or the other, although I have read a lot of fanfiction.)
Posted by: Lunch Meat | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:43 PM
The title is "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".
I see that it is attributed on ff.net to "Less Wrong", identified elsewhere as Eliezer Yudkowski.
I apologize for distressing you, malpollyon, and will try not to do so in this manner in the future.
Posted by: hapax | Feb 21, 2012 at 10:50 PM
Thanks hapax. Now if only I was as good at critiquing my own comments as I am others' I'd have asked for that change as gracefully as you provided it.
Posted by: malpollyon | Feb 22, 2012 at 12:27 AM
It's 10 a.m. and I'm doing a Lenten fast from posting on blogs this year, so I'll see everyone after Easter.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | Feb 22, 2012 at 02:05 AM
@Deird: my problem is that MercuryBlue was not giving any indication that she took what she'd done seriously. I wouldn't have said 'I shouldn't have to feed you lines' if her first response had been to ask what she could do to make it better. I would have addressed it, because I would have seen it as a sign of a real desire to make amends rather than to brush the situation off as quickly and with as little thought as possible.
The reason I said it was that she only asked after I pointed out that she might have asked rather than casually announcing that she couldn't be bothered to try and work out what to do to fix the situation, but that she was going to carry on with the discussion she was actually interested in anyway.
In other words, she sent the pretty clear message that she was less interested in dealing with me as a human being than she was in talking about fandom. Which is the same message she sent when she cited me as an invisible ally, or else an invisible effigy of everything she disliked.
I didn't think I should feed her lines because I really couldn't think of anything I could suggest that would address that problem. I wanted her to make at least some effort to see it from my point of view, and the way she was behaving suggested to me very strongly that if I didn't ask her to do the thinking, all I'd get would be lip-service, followed by an expectation that I immediately drop it - which was, after all, the implication of 'I repeat.'
Ruby kept making nebulous accusations of feeling 'unsafe' and refusing to make any suggestions for fixing the problem. I am angry about a specific incident and I am happy to explain why, and the problem can be fixed by an indication that there is an improved respect for my boundaries.
@MercuryBlue ... what you're saying is missing the point. It's not that you were 'hurting' me, or even that you attributed false opinions to me. It's that you completely disrespected a boundary that I stated very clearly on the first page of this discussion. I said I was recusing myself, and I said it because I anticipated being attacked if I tried to explain my real position. (Which is far more complicated than the 'anti-fanworks' position you're attributing to me.)
I said straight out that I felt the need to stay out of this conversation. You brought me up as an example nonetheless. I had the choice to either sacrifice my right to reply when you were using my name and splaining about what I would and wouldn't and should and shouldn't feel, or else get involved in a conversation I wanted no part of. And which, since you yourself advocate boycotting authors whose position on fan fiction you disapprove of, might actually jeopardise my livelihood. This is a very serious business to me, which is why I felt that staying out was the only safe option. But oh no, you dragged me in because you couldn't be bothered to think beyond the first example that came to mind.
That is what I'm pissed off about. That is why I said you needed to make the effort to take responsibility. You dragged me into a very serious situation because you couldn't be bothered to think carefully, and then asked me to tell you what to say so you could avoid thinking again.
You co-opted me regardless of my clearly stated wishes. Not even in the standard fan 'Well, what she doesn't know won't hurt her' way that you were arguing was right and proper, but on a board that I have to read. I had to sit there and watch someone talk like they knew my experience better than I did, which everyone on the board agrees is very bad manners.
What you made clear to me was that you care about your pet subject more than you care about respecting my boundaries, to the point of disrespecting them right in my face and then carrying right on with your pet subject. If this is not how you actually feel, I would like to see some proof of it.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 22, 2012 at 02:25 AM
Kit: I'm really sorry, I think I may have mentioned you in an aside earlier in the thread than MercuryBlue did. So it might be my fault that she was even thinking of you when making her points.
I should have used a different example. I didn't want to drag you into this. I'm sorry.
Posted by: Nenya | Feb 22, 2012 at 02:30 AM
@hapax - on the other hand, I'm fairly sure I remember reading somewhere that J.K. Rowling said that when she saw Radcliffe she had a strong sense of recognition, like she was looking at her son. So some of the details might have been off, but I think she signed off on the general cut of his jib.
I was more distracted by the casting of Alan Rickman myself - partly because he's a very familiar face in Britain and it seemed rather typecasting (he's a very good actor, but he's more versatile than that), but partly because he was a full generation older than the character he was playing; Rickman was sixtyish and Snape is written as an emotionally immature man in his thirties, and the reaction of a man at child-bearing age to a red-headed stepchild is going to be different from a middle-aged man's. But then on the other hand it's basically a film for children and children are much more likely to put anyone over twenty in the general category of 'grown-up', so maybe it doesn't matter.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | Feb 22, 2012 at 02:49 AM