My Own Rage: I'm Choking on It.

[wednes]

Today, Amazon announced Amazon Worlds.
It's their shiny new fanfic platform so "writers" who can't quite get it together to create a milieu, settings, conflicts, arcs, or characters can still make money from their literary masturbation. For the record, I am pro-masturbation. I just don't want to see it online in places where I should be seeing the real thing. Also, fuck fanfic. Fuck it.



I'm not against fanfic, so long as it's for writing practice, and/or relegated to fanfic boards and discussed among fans of the genre. It's very nice that people love their TV shows and whatnot enough to make up their own stories. It's very cute, like adding your own doodles to a coloring book. But these doodles need not find their way into the gift shop at the Louvre...or even the DIA. I also find it a little disheartening when a fanfic writer has fifty kajillion readers while I still don't have a single book with 40 Amazon reviews. But this isn't about me. This is about books.

It's bad enough that scads of self-important douchebags put out a new shitty, unedited book every six weeks and that new readers have to wade through thousands of said shitty books in order to find anything decent. But this? God fucking dammit. Not only that, but it's ALL gonna be self-published, which means that there will be no filter, and little if any editing (not that I have a whole lot of room to talk about editing).
Also, if fanfic is published, how does one distinguish what is actually becoming canon in a given lexicon?

And before someone else asks me if I would be complimented if someone wrote fanfic about Sadie, or Mikey, or any other character of mine--listen up. I'm a mature adult, which means I can refrain from killing you, or even hitting you. But if you steal my characters and do some fucked up shit with them--I will hate you with every fibre of my being. Hate. Honest-to-Zod wishing terrible things on you, lighting black candles in your honor, almost ashamed at my own intensely vitriolic loathing of anyone who would do this where it could be seen by another human being (or sentient being of any other species).

When people talk about their pets as if they are their children, I find that annoying. I'm not Pentelope and JoJo's "mom." That's just dumb IMO.
But my characters? I *am* their creator. They are mine. MINE! And they don't do a goddamn thing unless I say so (are you also noticing that this attitude would not actually be conducive to child rearing?).

Amazon, I've always stuck up for you and your outsourcing ways. And this is how you do me? No...
I'm so sad.
Seriously, I wish this hadn't happened during my menses because I am not taking it well at all. I kinda feel like Writing is over; but that's alarmist isn't it?
Isn't it?



In other writing news, I'm almost half way through reading Oryx and Crake. It's kicking my ass, for sure. What I find most amazing about it is that the writing is lyrical and poetic even though the POV character is not. Because I write mainly in the first-person, I don't do this. I've told myself that it can't be that way--but now that I see that it can, I feel sort of remiss in some way. Like I could have been writing a whole lot better but I wasn't pushing myself, reasoning that the prose had to sound like the character.
Then again, one could argue that the strength of my writing is the raw voices. At any rate, Atwood is inspiring me to try some more 3rd person stuff and to play around with poetic language amid abrasive characters.

Comments

In defense of fanfic

[roane]

By and large, you and I are in agreement on AmazonWorlds. It's a shitty, exploitative way for Amazon and Alloy Entertainment to make money off desperate writers. (Please note the lack of quotemarks--I'll get to that in a moment.)

That said: I write fanfic. A lot of it, almost exclusively. Further, I'll put my writing against a lot of stuff that gets published--hell, come to that, I've BEEN published, if we want to count publication as some sort of writer-cred, which is a sketchy idea anyway. Forgive me for being blunt: you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when it comes to fanfiction. Is a lot of it shit? Oh hell yes. Sturgeon's Law applies to fanfic every bit as much as it applies to the bestseller list.

That said, there are writers writing fanfic who create milieus, settings, conflicts, arcs, and characters so fantastic it makes me want to pull my face off. I would be happy to give you a list of recommendations if you don't believe me. I've read everything from modern-day thrillers to horror to science-fiction to historical romance--all of it fanfic, and all of it better than your average bestseller. So if you think fanfic is all teenaged girls and sexually frustrated women writing self-insert Mary Sue porn so they can write about having sex with Captain Kirk or the Doctor, you couldn't be further from the mark. (Is that out there? Yup. It's a tiny minority, see above re: Sturgeon's Law.)

More than anything else, I am really really bothered by your use of "writers" to describe fanfic writers. A lot of us work every bit as hard as a professional. I personally have written about 125,000 words so far this year, about two-thirds of that fanfic. I have a group of people who edit my stories, which goes beyond just grammatical edits to making suggestions to actually improve the story and the characters. A lot of us don't get paid to write purely because we don't choose to do so.

Then again, a lot of us DO get paid to write. You might be surprised to find out which relatively famous authors read and write fanfic. We are passionate about what we do and about the stories we tell. Fanfiction is a place where people who may not have a voice elsewhere (women, teenagers, outsiders in general) can interact with media that means a lot to us, can talk back. We deconstruct, we take things apart and put them back together again. We dissect sexuality and gender roles--and yeah, a lot of times that means we're writing about sex. We are providing for ourselves what the stories the mainstream is giving us are not providing, and frankly, we're having a lot of fun doing it.

I'm having a really difficult time figuring out why you're so threatened by Amazon Worlds specifically, and fanfiction in general. Writing and publishing is not a zero-sum game. It's not like every person who reads somebody's Vampire Diaries Amazon Worlds piece is one less person who would read your books. The Venn diagram of people who want to pay for Vampire Diaries fanfic and people who want to read A Stabbing for Sadie is most likely two different circles several feet away from each other.

One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Jenkins, a pretty prominent academic who writes a lot about what he calls 'participatory culture': "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."

Here are some other folks who say more intelligent things about fanfic than me: Lev Grossman, in Time magazine, The Boy Who Lived Forever, and here's a link to a conversation on Tumblr on the evils of paying for fanfic: "Yeah, paying for fanfic is a bad habit, man. I have to admit, I’ve been really irresponsible that way. My first fanfic purchase was probably the omnibus Collected Works of Mark Twain that I saved my allowance for at age ten, full as it is of medieval religious RPF (Joan of Arc, King Arthur). That’s not counting, of course, the Elizabethan fanfic that my parents, being Shakespeare buffs, purchased for me before I had any money of my own. Coincidentally my favorite Shakespeare was also medieval RPF (Richard III), though I was partial, as well, to his Holinshed fic (Macbeth) and his Plutarch fic (Antony and Cleopatra). On the other hand, I found his Ovid fic Romeo & Juliet massively overrated, although there was some good dancing in the 1950s fanvid AU West Side Story."

Fanfiction has been around since people started telling stories to each other. It's as valid an expression of human creativity as people who bake using recipes, who knit using patterns, who sit around on their back porch and play other people's songs on their guitar. And just the same way those people are actual no-scare-quotes-needed bakers, knitters, and musicians, fanfic writers are just that: writers.

Re: In defense of fanfic

[wednes]

You are not the first person to express these sentiments. I know a chick who writes Harry Potter fanfic. She's a good writer, and she posts to a board that does have some quality control. Like I said, I'm sure it's good writing practice, and a fun thing to do with fellow fans. I also think most people agree that creating compelling well-rounded characters is one of the most difficult aspects of fiction writing. So having the majority of characters already written for you makes it considerably easier--which I imagine frees you up to concentrate on other aspects, again making it a good learning tool.

I can't get over the idea that it's cheating to steal someone else's settings and characters . I do recognize that I have a hostile attitude toward fanfic (such as putting Writers in quotes--when I know full well that anyone who writes anything is a writer), and a fair amount of it comes from how galling I find it that someone can take someone else's characters and parlay that into thousands of readers with no marketing whatsoever. It makes those of us who've spent years marketing our asses off look like chumps. So yeah, I recognize that a lot of my attitude about it is straight up bitterness. Publishing is a kind of validation if only to say that someone in publishing (wide variance, for sure) thought enough of your work to spend money and time bringing it to the people. To me, it feels like the only reason to do that with fanfic is to make money. I like money, but I don't like beloved characters becoming a commodity--that attitude has been fucking up the movie industry for years, and now it's moving on to books. But then, only one of my published novels was NOT done for NaNoWriMo, so plenty of writers would say I have no business taking such a stance.

My understanding is that you put your own original work aside to write fanfic. If I were going to presume, I'd guess that you chose something easier, that you found more inspiring, and with more immediate gratification. I was pretty stoked to think I'd eventually learn what The Exile's Daughter is all about. But I don't get to...not anytime soon anyway. On a purely selfish level, I find that to be a drag. But obviously, it's also none of my beeswax.

It is true that I've only read a couple dozen fanfic stories--most of which were Harry Potter slash (and was loaded with rape and pedo stuff), or Criminal Minds fan scripts--some of which were actually better than the writing the show gave us last season. So I certainly don't know as much about the genre as someone who actually participates in it. Come to think of it, I read a set of stories called "The Other TARDIS" a few years back on LJ. The TARDIS was the only aspect that was lifted, and they were damn good.

When it comes to movies and TV, I often fall into the camp of "Why repackage classics for a new audience when you can come up with something new? And why not just bring people to the classics." Fanfic feels the same way to me. If talented people want to write work they can share and sell, why skip over the most vital part of creating fiction--the actual inventing of things that didn't exist before you made them? As I was just joking to H, if you want to base a career on an income stream on somebody else's work--become a publisher, not a writer.

And while my attitude in re: fanfic is indeed shitty, condescending and largely based on my own issues (hence the cut--as I imagine my feelings on this are not new news to you)--it was not my intention to imply personal insult to people who did. If it felt like I was doing that, I sincerely apologize.

Re: In defense of fanfic

[roane]

The thing is, fanfic IS creating things that didn't exist before. No one is just retelling plots with no changes whatsoever. Hell, in my particular fandom (BBC Sherlock), we're all writing fanfic that's based on fanfic--because what BBC Sherlock does is essentially what all fanfic writers do: taking familiar characters/settings and twisting them and telling new stories.

The whole notion of prizing originality in all things above anything else is a very very new idea culturally speaking, from around the 18th century. Prior to that, nobody cared if your story was original, what counted was how well you told it. I really strongly recommend that you read this post, I'm done explaining why fanfic is okay. People have been rewriting and remixing and borrowing from each other's stories from the very beginning. People win Pulitzer Prizes for fanfiction: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is Shakespeare fic, and March by Geraldine Brooks is Little Women fic. So what's the difference between that and what I post on An Archive of Our Own? Smiley and Brooks are considered 'literary' authors, so their fanfic gets tagged as literature, and mine gets tagged as laziness.

Fanfic isn't just about lazily putting things online in order to get readers. It's a community of people. It's a dialogue. Yeah, I won't lie: I'm relatively popular in my fandom and get a pretty good number of hits and comments, but I'd do it anyway. Lots of writers get no attention at all, and they keep going anyway. I'm sorry if your marketing efforts aren't producing the same results, but you know what, that isn't the fault of any fanfic writers.

It's not that I've 'given up' on original stuff. Writing fanfiction gives me most of what I wanted out of writing, which was never money. I am working on original stuff, but it's secondary for me. If it sells when I finish it, awesome. If not, I still have what I want out of writing and telling stories.

And hey, if you want to read The Exile's Daughter, I'd be happy to send it to you. ;)

Re: In defense of fanfic

[wednes]

I would love to read it.
Feel free to forward it to wednes (at) wednesdayleefriday dot com