The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things: Genre, The Internet & Stories

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Title: The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things: Genre, The Internet & Stories
Creator: Sarah Rees Brennan
Date(s): May 5, 2010
Medium: online
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The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things: Genre, The Internet & Stories is a 2010 essay by Sarah Rees Brennan.

The essay was posted, in part, to the rant by Diana Gabaldon Fan-Fiction and Moral Conundrums.

"Having explained Diana Gabaldon, I will now explain fanfiction!"

The post has 262 comments on six pages.

The Comments

Some Excerpts

So, stories on the internet that are based on people's books. (Or movies. Or TV shows. I don't have either of those things, though.) Apparently I would be so pleased to have fanfiction of my stuff that I said 'go right ahead' twice.

Stories about other people's stories. Well, I've written those. Lots of people who love stories have, I think: it's a really natural thing to do, out of our emotional response of love for that work.

I also wrote fanfiction and put it on the internet from when I was seventeen, because I found Harry Potter fanfiction and I thought it looked like fun, so I decided to write it too. I wrote about my favourite character (Draco Malfoy, see above re: the Edmunds, I can't help myself) and what-if scenarios and turning into rats and fighting crime and any number of romantic entanglements. It was fun: I had fun doing it for many a year. And I made friends who I still love now. Near the end it wasn't much fun because I wanted the time to do other stuff, so I finished up the stories and did other stuff. I also took down the stories, because I wanted to keep this journal and having fanfiction up is a legal grey area, and because the thought of unedited stuff I wrote when I was seventeen floating around forever was a bit horrifying.

Now keeping the same journal and being pretty open about what I used to write has worked out fairly badly for me, all things considered: I get daily hatemail from people telling me how much I suck, how much my book sucks or how much they will never read it. More hate response than fan response. Imagine, if you will, how much it sucks to be told, every day, by strangers, that you suck. For a writer with her very first book hoping kind of tremblingly that people will like it and already completely on edge with nerves, this? A horrorshow to live through, and it made me feel really ambivalent about the stories I wrote.

But that doesn't mean fanfiction is bad, it means that being a professional writer and a writer of fan stuff is complicated. Just because I got knocked over by a car doesn't mean everybody else has to stop crossing the street.

Diana Gabaldon is obviously icked out by seeing other people play with characters she thinks of as hers. That's an emotional response, and it is hers. No way to control it, any more than my baby sister can control being afraid of spiders and becoming a six foot two blurred tower of blond terror whenever she sees them. And since fanfiction is a loving response, knowing the creator of what you love would be bothered by you doing something? I think it's best to respect it bothers her, and not do it. (Note: these are my personal feelings on the topic, and not the ultimate guide for proper behaviour!) And I think - because as I said, it's a loving response - that's what will happen.

I am sad thinking that a writer I like thinks something I did was manky, but a) maybe she will change her mind, she's already re-considering since a ton of people have pointed out it is a loving response and b) even if she still thinks it's a horrible terrible no-good very bad thing forever, well, that's okay. People disagree all the time.

I have seen some people in response to her go 'Oh well, your story had inspirations! Or your story's bad because it is too sexy! Or because it's romance! Or because it's fantasy!'

I don't think fanfiction is bad. I don't think any particular genre is bad.

I think it's always kind of sketch to say to someone 'This is bad, because.' Anyone in the world can say 'I didn't enjoy this, because.' Or even just "I didn't enjoy this" - emotional responses are valid! But why tell someone that something they love, something they enjoy doing, is bad?

Unless they're hurting someone, it's not.

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