It's Only Fan Fiction
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| Title: | It's Only Fan Fiction |
| Creator: | Mary Jean Holmes |
| Date(s): | May 6, 2002 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | It's Only Fan Fiction (Wayback, scroll down past the coding for the story text) |
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It's Only Fan Fiction is a 2002 essay by Mary Jean Holmes.
Some Topics Discussed
- tensions between old-school science fiction writers and media writers
- tie-in books vs fanfic
- Sturgeon's Law
- slash as out-of-character and too pervasive
- the ease of publishing online and how fanfic suffers because of the lack of a gatekeeper
Some Excerpts
Sturgeon's Law states: "Ninety percent of EVERYTHING is crap." In the case of fan fiction, I would even be willing to extend that a bit and say that between ninety-five and ninety-eight percent of it is crap.
Of course it is, because between ninety-five and ninety-eight percent of fan writers have no real training or ambition to become a dedicated author. They are writing strictly for fun, or to participate creatively in something that interests them, or because they have a crush on an actor or a character and are using this means to express that passion. There's nothing wrong with this (not unless the person doing it boldly declares that they're going to be a writer someday, and then adopts the attitude that all they produce is perfect, written in stone. Those are invariably the would-be writers who have the most to learn, those who have already closed their minds to learning anything new. But I digress).
But the derogatory notion some people hold that "it's only fanfic...." This lumps all writers of fanfic into a pool of opinion that clearly believes all fanfic is crap, that no good fan writers exist. The good ones, after all, must be the ones who are getting paid money for writing licensed fiction books, right?
Wrong. There are just as many bad professional writers out there as there are bad fan writers. The only real difference is that because someone is actually paying the pros, the standards tend to be higher (tend to, not necessarily are. In the realm of licensed material, correct spelling and grammar, decent plots, and accurate characterization appear to be commodities that are used sparingly). If those same standards were applied to fanfic and the stories that did not measure up were obliterated, about ninety percent would disappear. This does not automatically make professionally published books good, nor does it automatically make all fan fiction bad.
This is not a new notion, this idea that people who write fanfic do so because they can't write anything "better," oh, no. In the early 1980s, I ran afoul of the book versus media war that sprang up in science fiction circles when fans of print SF were appalled to find their hallowed meeting places (be they local SF clubs or conventions) overrun by hordes of new fans whose introduction to science fiction came solely through movies and television, primarily Star Wars. In doing SF writers a favor by bringing the genre into the mainstream and thus making all SF books potentially more marketable, Star Wars, to the hidebound minds of the strictly book-tradition fans, also brought with it the scourge of hundreds of media fans who hadn't yet read their sacred tomes, didn't know Asimov from Ellison, and could care less. Not that media fans were unknown before that time. Trekkies had been around for more than a decade, but because Star Trek was a TV show discovered by many book fans, the comparatively small lunatic fringe of Trekkies could be smiled upon and tolerated much as members of a family accept the amusing antics of Weird Old Uncle Willie at family gatherings. Crazy, but harmless.
But then came Star Wars and literally thousands of new fans, and suddenly, to the unsuspecting Old Guard, the world just wasn't the same any more. To make matters worse, soon after the unwashed media hordes arrived, along came the media fanzines, stepping on the toes of the old established fanzines. Bad enough that these monstrosities were filled with things about movies and television, but gone were the long-winded reviews of books published years before, the self-serving pontification in columns written by the Big Name Fans, interviews, convention reports, in-jokes, and the other flotsam and jetsam of life in SF as put forth by the Trufans. In its place was -- gasp, wheeze, gag -- fan fiction. Not the ever-so-artful poetry or tastefully brief short stories selected for the honor of publication in the latest issue because the editor and his friends all believed their pick was destined to become the next best-selling pro. No, these were stories written by people who did it just for fun, and who didn't even have the common decency to come up with everything on their own; they felt some sick need to steal the work of someone else and use it as the basis for their work because they clearly had no originality.
I was in the midst of attempting to sell my first novel when this wave hit; at the same time, I also began to twiddle with writing fanfic, largely to settle a bet. I became infuriated with the SF fan community when people I had known for years started accusing me of "prostituting my art" because I was "wasting my time" writing fanfic when, in their opinions, I should be spending my time working solely on books for which I could get paid.
Excuse me, but isn't prostitution when you get paid for it?
Which -- contrary to the popular belief of the fan writers who do churn out tons and tons of garbage -- is not a dirty word. There falls to all fan writers one duty that those who don't care or want to have things their own way blithely ignore and try to justify by calling it "free speech": the duty to treat the material you are borrowing with respect, and to allow the characters who are not your own the dignity with which they were created, something which holds true even for overtly comic characters. If a professional screenwriter were to take a beloved figure of someone else's creation -- Batman, for instance -- and treat him the way most fan writers treat the characters they borrow, most moviegoers would be outraged. The fans would pan it, call it badly written camp, completely unfaithful to the original, an insult to the intelligence of the viewers, particular those to whom the characters have been long beloved. The more the director and actors try to shoehorn in their personal preferences and visions and stray away from things that even the newest of fans knows and accepts as the heart of what makes these characters and stories work, the more the final product is reviled and rejected by intelligent audiences -- and rightly so.
Some of these same fans will complain when they see things beloved by them treated with disrespect because of some screenwriter or director's warped "vision" -- yet they will then turn around and impose, in fan fiction, their own warped visions onto other people's work. Suddenly, everyone is crying and weeping and suffering terrible emotional pain because the fan writer gets off on angst. Then the same characters -- normally strong, fit, intelligent -- are getting into terrible accidents, being clobbered badly by everything that comes along, from monsters to purse-wielding old ladies, and then mothered back to health by their oh-so-close friends, amid many tears, because the fan writer's new fancy is hurt/comfort. Slash becomes the newest passion of the fan writer, and now, all men are gays in the closet, just waiting for the right person to come along and free them; women are some aberration of nature that were fine for begetting heirs or having a momentary dalliance, but true love, of course, will always be discovered with another man.
The advent of the Internet hasn't helped the cause of the dedicated fan writer. Now, it's so easy for anyone with a computer to produce a piece of junk and post it -- unedited and often without benefit of basic proofreading or even spell-checking -- the cyberwaves are becoming clogged with floods of dreadful fan writing. There's nothing to stop it, anymore. When fanfic could only be disseminated in printed zines, there was at least some barrier to publication: you either had to convince the editor to take your story, or had to come up with the money to have it printed yourself. Just like in the real world of professionals. Granted, a lot of fan editors would take anything thrown at them, but most did have some kind of standards, and for the writers, simply going through the effort of producing a readable manuscript, finding an editor, and mailing it to them was enough of a barrier to keep most of the worst from ever seeing the light of day.
Not so with e-publishing. Now, you can whomp up a couple of paragraphs of bad writing, call it a story, trot on over to fanfiction.net, and hey presto! There it is, up where the whole world can see it. Oh, FF.N has added a few restrictions and now won't accept that kind of fanfic? No problem! Go run a quick search of the net, and you'll find someone who will. Often a couple of dozen someones who will. There's no winnowing process left, anymore. The chaff is being ground up right along with the wheat, and the consumers are being offered a product that is mostly inedible; finding the parts that are takes a lot of work, and many times proves fruitless. Finding a single story worth reading in a genre where thousands are being presented is daunting, if not nigh onto impossible.
When I write fanfic, all I have in mind is telling a good story that fits within what I am able to perceive of the base universe, where it is, where it's been, and where it's going. I want to give the readers the things they know and love, but I also don't want to run in place, keeping the characters locked into a perpetual TV incarnation, where they end the story exactly where they began it, in terms of the larger plot and character development. I need to find the creator's voice, and ways to harmonize with it without completely drowning it out, because if there is nothing of me in the stories I write, then they aren't worth writing. Which, perhaps, is why the best fan produced derivate fiction is often better than the best professionally produced derivate fiction. The fans are free to let their own voices creep into the whole, to say, "this is where I can envision this universe going." The licensed pros quite frequently are not; thus their writing often becomes stale and predictable and even boring very quickly. Only writers who are in the field strictly for the money don't care about such things. They'll sign the contract, write the book to someone else's specs, and take the money without a backward glance. The good fan writers care more than that. The lack of a paycheck does not make what they write bad. For some, it actually elevates the art.
Of course, the opposite also hold true for the bad fan writers. The ones who are writing simply to please their own obsessions and fetishes often, quite boldly, proclaim, "This is what I want to write and I don't care what anyone else thinks." The operative term being that they don't care. Is the story at all suitable to the characters and the universe? Who cares? Are little things like grammar and spelling being checked? Who cares? Are they forcing their particular skewed view of life into a place and onto characters where it doesn't belong? Who cares? By their own admission, they do not, and so the quality of their work suffers. It's garbage -- ah, but don't you dare call it garbage to their faces, or you will be accused of flaming, not to mention all manner of other aberrant behavior. You will be called a stickler, narrowminded, bigoted, homophobic, cruel, twisted -- all for pointing out things that if the author really cared about anything but their own brand of fun would have resulted in a better story all around.
So how is a writer who is dedicated both to the art of writing and to giving a faithful rendering of the genre in which they're working supposed to survive in this sort of climate? How do you find the wherewithal to produce anything when on one side, you have a plethora of sub-genre addicts who aren't interested in your work unless it skews into their favorite weirdness, and on the other, you're denigrated by supposed fans who think the "official" stamp of approval is the only possible guarantee of quality?