posted 06-13-2001 12:36 AM               

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I admit, like other members of fandom, I often use fan fiction writers as my "At least I'm not that bad" benchmark.

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Huh. I've always admired fanfic writers, but I think it's for some of the same reasons Dave gets put off sometimes: I find it a very daunting task to enter a universe that someone else has very carefully constructed and tamper with that universe, even if it means breaking reality off into a new branch and creating an entirely new universe. That's really one of the most beautiful things about human creativity -- its ability to constantly spawn and respawn itself -- but it's also one of the scariest, because with it comes a lot of responsibility. I'd love to be able to do that sort of thing without fear.

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these writers DO create the kind of community we aim for -- one that values self-expression, colalboration and mutual critique. And in the long run, that's probably what matters.

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Right freakin' on, Dave. Couldn't have said it better myself.

posted 06-13-2001 12:51 AM               

Here's an example. There's someone on Usenet who was a very passionate fan of the character of Dick Grayson, particularly in his Nightwing persona from the late 80s and early 90s. She was less thrilled with the mid-to-late 90s changes in the character that brought him back into the Batman mythos, had him leave the Titans and break up with his longtime love interest Starfire. (I'll pause while Pattie retches here.) I read a fanfic by this person; it was a multi part story that was supposedly about Nightwing winding up in an alternate reality and having to solve some mystery with the help of his counterparts from those Earths. Well, needless to say, on the alternate Earth Nightwing and Starfire were still together, and Nightwing had a solid relationship with Batman, and all (or almost all) of the Titans were still close friends, and the 'regular' Nightwing spent the whole time engaged in this melodramatic internal monologue about all that had gone with his life, and why had he made the decisions he had made in his life, etc., etc. Another example: I've seen B5 fanfic whose entire point was to try and establish a sexual relationship between Sinclair and Delenn, because this particular fan loved Sinclair, liked Delenn and disliked Sheridan. The story itself, the plot, the dialogue, the mystery, whatever, all become secondary to the writer establishing The Way Things Should Be. That's what I don't like about fanfic.

posted 06-13-2001 01:47 AM               

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Writing that's structurally unsound (poor grammar or whatever) just drives me nuts

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Maybe those mentor/editor people Pattie mentioned should deal with this better. I get annoyed by bad writing on the Web, which is more frequent than horse droppings in Amish country, but I'm beginning to realize that it's rapidly becoming the norm, so I'd better learn to deal with it. Heck, if we didn't have bad writing, we'd still be speaking Old English. (Sorta.)

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The bad fanfic I'm talking about just seems like the wrong tool. If a person thinks a character should be handled a different way, just say so. Write a lengthy article or analysis or whatever to get your point across.

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Unfortunately, not everyone is capable of writing critically. In fact, most people aren't, I'd say. I encourage people to express their ideas in whatever way they can.

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But if you try to turn those character insights into fiction, but you don't do so in the form of a compelling story, I'm going to be so distracted by the clumsiness of your writing that I'm going to miss your point entirely.

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posted 06-13-2001 01:54 AM               

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Originally posted by Kevin Ott:
Unfortunately, not everyone is capable of writing critically. In fact, most people aren't, I'd say. I encourage people to express their ideas in whatever way they can.Ay, there's the rub.

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True enough. But trying to make a point subtly, through fiction, is something that seems to me like it would be harder than just coming out and saying it, unless you're Grant Morrison. (I mean, Roger Ebert is a fairly intelligent critic, but he's also the guy that wrote Valley of the Dolls.) So, purely from the communications/idea-sharing standpoint, why make it harder on yourself?

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So does the responsibility lie with the writer to make his work more intelligible or with the reader to have more patience? As a writer (I know -- that sounds so snobbish, doesn't it?), I'd say the oenus falls on the person with the pen in his hand; that's what editing and revision is for. But then again, I always demand a sensitive, fairly open-minded audience that's willing to learn new things about the world and themselves.

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posted 06-16-2001 10:05 PM               

Ray Thinks Too Much about Fan-Fic: Part One
“Fans spin in circles.”

Pattie has presented a scholarly and researched definition for fan fiction, but an academic approach to the phenomenon described in her essay still requires a wee bit more hairsplitting…and far be it from an English major to want to argue semantics.

Basically, what I am suggesting is isolating two different elements of Jenkins' term fan fiction. The term "fan fic" apply to written material in which the writer appropriates another author's fictional setting and/or characters.

But a distinct quality Pattie describes is the communal aspect of "fan fiction" which I want to argue isn't really specific to fan fiction at all...therefore I proposed the idea of "ring fiction"...fiction produced for a circle of individuals with the intention of playing on that circle's collaborative nature.

Originally, I posted this mini-treatise where I tried to link the idea of "ring fiction" to what English majors call "manuscript culture." Back in the primordial days of technology, when geese ruled the earth and man wrote with quill pens, the idea of people forming close circles of friends with common interests and posting handwritten copies of their latest material to each other for perusal wasn't all that rare.

My conjecture is that though people writing by hand moved at a slower pace, a lot of what Jenkins saw going on with Star Trek fans was probably going on with underground satirical poets of the 17th Century...and stretches throughout history. (Actually, one might even make a comparison between the often burlesque rhymes and the often eroticized tales that the quasi-public, quasi-private dissemination seems to encourage).

Most people writing ring fiction today are really just writing for a handful of people, but know full well that at any moment they could get a random e-mail from some Norwegian fourteen year old telling them how the last installment of Tribbles in Heat totally revolutionized the minds of Scandinavian beam-me babies. And, of course, an author in manuscript culture knew that other people could rewrite or even print his or her own work without permission.

Keeping this in mind has to change how we write…and though I am all against creating generalized assumptions about modes of writing simply because of the medium, I think it can prove productive to look for trends. But, as Pattie rightly observes, this could put TINN right in the same school as Trekkie past times, in terms of how we allow our writing to be shaped by the knowledge of our primary audience of friends and acquaintances attached to our more “public” display on the Web.

Thus, rather than creating an entirely new system of textual interactions for humans, the Web is really just re-injecting life into a long dormant tradition of sharing creative work among a more intimate circle of interested readers. In other words…this is not news.

But using the term "ring fiction" allows us to tie select examples of Jenkins' "fan fiction" to a wider canon of communal literature. Plus, I'm sure there are works which we would consider "fan fic" because of their setting and mode of authorship, but which lack any regard for a community's interaction in its composition.

posted 06-16-2001 10:11 PM               

Dave, you can put me on Discussion Board probation if you want.

;P

Ray Thinks Too Much about Fan-Fic: Part Two
“When the skit hits the fan.”

Okay, so my first ramble was all about how what is so special about Jenkins’s definition of fan-fic isn’t the fan part but the community part, and then I blabbed on and on about how that really isn’t anything new to us literary early modernists. But now I want to tackle the fan part and show why that’s really nothing new and why it probably gets a short-changed.

Why do I cringe whenever I hear the phrase “fan-fic?”

Is it because I think if you’re going to write a 300 page book why not write something you can own?

Is it because playing with another person’s creation is like borrowing their kids for the weekend without asking?

Is it the thought of overweight pimply women in Spock shirts hacking out tawdry serials of intergalactic naughtiness in 28 installments?

Maybe.

But to address the first two question first, what’s the deal with ownership, anyway?

Sounds like it’s time to over-simplify my studies and embarrass my teachers.

Basically, our concept of “authorship” is a product of the Romantic period (that’s the 19th Century for those who thought I was talking about books with bumpy covers). Guys like Wordsworth and Byron were writing epic poems that gabbed on and on about themselves. Authors were becoming characters themselves, and as in the case of Byron, were suddenly capable of actually making money off of their books. Two hundred years earlier, guys like Shakespeare might make a little bit of money selling the rights to a printed edition…though you mostly just hoped the noble to which you dedicated it REALLY liked it and gave you the early modern equivalent of a artist’s grant.

(I'm not using this pedantic teacherly tone because I don't think you guys don't know any of this...I'm just hoping one of my students types my name into Google, gets this board as a link and maybe learns something.)

So our modern aged print-boys were pretty territorial about who owned what…but before that, there wasn’t as much interest…meaning boys like Will were free to rape and pillage whatever work of literature came their way. It also meant, if the Globe’s clown showed up to rehearsal with a funny skit to add into act IV, it wasn’t going to bother anyone much if he just threw it in there.

Today, we might call it an “adaptation” and be polite enough to acknowledge our sources. But world literature for the past few millenium has just been a matter of “I like that story…I like that story a lot…but I’d like that story a lot better if I wrote it.”
Anyone who has sat through Homer’s Illiad and the Odyssey (assuming Homer is in fact Homer) and Virgil’s Aeneid knows what I’m talking about.

Virgil hears the Greek story, decides it would work much better as a Roman story…and voila, classical fan fiction.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, that nutty Italian Dante goes ahead and steals characters from both of them…HELL, he steals Virgil himself!
In terms of the appropriation of another person’s creative work, fan-fiction has produced some of the most crucial works of world literature.

Now, the question remains is what do we do with our poor sci-fi fan who has just e-mailed part 29 of my life as a Starfleet Slut to all her little sci-fi friends?
I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to realize Virgil she is not.

But so what?

Even if her stuff is “bad” (by whatever system you wish to judge art bad), even if she never makes a dime off of her efforts, even it is never read, she has none the less generated a literary artifact capable of steeped in both contemporary culture and personal expression (sometimes all too unfortunately).

And, really, what would be so bad with a little free market in imaginary constructs?

Besides, we are all ultimately stealing from each other anyway. At least fan-fic is a little more open about its influences…more open than the Romans were when they rewrote all those fun Greek myths into Roman ones.

It seems to me that the only real difference between what we generally label “fan-fic” and the work of any professional staff or freelance writer, is that the writer of fan-fic does it for free. We all know there are the rare gems of fan material that beats the pants off of the pros…and we all know there is fan material that is just taking up server space.

posted 06-16-2001 10:16 PM               

Just one more post and I'll shut up...promise.

I had heard Tom Clancy had wanted to write a script for a Magnum PI movie...then I stumbled upon this little piece from an interview that I'd thought I'd share with you all because it seemed relevant:

Amazon.com: Willem Dafoe played Mr. Clark in Clear and Present Danger. If you had to pick someone to play John Clark now, who would it be and why?

Clancy: Actually, I sketched the Clark character with all the mannerisms of Tom Selleck in Magnum. And so Tom's always been sort of my image for John Clark.

from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/feature/5632/002-2555660-4992817

posted 06-17-2001 12:06 AM               

As to your comments on 'ring fiction' -- I just did a quick search at WebRing, and here's the directory of writing-related webrings in Yahoo!'s directory. It's rather large. So it does seem that fan fiction communities are just a subset of a larger group of writing communities. I wonder if Jenkins and the other researchers of fan fiction found any defining characteristics that distinguish the subgroup from 'amateur'-writing-circles in general.

posted 09-23-2001 11:02 AM               

That said, I would be interested to see Dean Stockwell trying to explain the reflection in the mirror.