Steal, schmeal

Meta
Title:	Steal, schmeal
Creator:	carenejeans
Date(s):	February 8, 2005
Medium:	LiveJournal post
Fandom:
Topic:
External Links:	Steal, schmeal, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Steal, schmeal is a 2005 essay by carenejeans.

The post has 37 comments.

Some Topics Discussed

• remix/redux
• original fiction
• fandom as a gift culture
• much fannish exuberance

Excerpt from the Essay

I've been thinking lately about fanfiction vs. that whole cult wrapped up in a thing inside a straightjacket called Original Fiction.

Because numero uno: original fiction doesn't really exist. It just... doesn't. The entire history of human creative endeavor is at bottom riffing and stealing.

But to zoom in narrowly on fanfiction -- to slash -- I think I really fell in love with it because it's such a big, exuberant celebration of the Twice Told Tale. Never mind "textual poaching" Lifting from canon is just the beginning.

I love the way there are a thousand and one "first time stories" in every fandom. The same story elements and plots lifted from canon, the same pivotal scenes, the same two characters discovering their passion for each other again and again. The same story.

Except not!

I love the way cliches are press-ganged into the service of deviously original derivative fiction. After a while all of the stock situations and plotlines are used. And then they're overused. And then they're -- made into challenges, Fuh-Q-Fests and lyric wheels.

Yeah, people grumble. "I'm sick of cave-in fic," they say. "Soul-bonding, meh," "putting Duncan and Methos in a Canadian shack is pointless."

Of course it's pointless! That's the point! The point isn't to write The Great Insert Country Here Novel! The point is to write great smut.

Somebody always grumbles. Ignore them.

But the -- the fannish egging on to write great smut is to die for. Everywhere you turn people are cheerfully and with intent corrupting each other into the joys of writing and viding and art. They start up challenges. They set up drabble and fic communities with weekly prompts for the Muses. They stand up in their LJs and cry "write hand-job porn for me!"

People write fic for birthday presents. They make icons for friends just discovering a fandom. They dedicate vids to people who've inspired them. They write fic and make icons and vids for friends just because they're friends -- but share it with everybody, and how cool is that?

And the betas? Just -- guh.

So. In fanfic we have the same -- but different! -- stories being written and rewritten and written again, for fun, for gifts, for the sake of the story. The Remix idea is just the most obvious way fandom lets writers (and readers) revel in imitation, revision and alteration. Take someone's story and rewrite it -- okay, this is what fanfic does, so maybe it doesn't sound all that unusual.

But there's the other half of the challenge -- to let someone take your story and do with it what they will. I hate to use the "s" word, but this strikes me as subversive. It's novel, anyway. We're told -- if we're to write original fiction -- that stories are fixed, owned, sacrosanct. Because they come from our inner souls or something. Don't mess with stuff that comes from our inner souls.

But you know what? You can't really write original fiction until you stand up and admit you're a thief. I'm a writer and I steal. Muahahahahaha! Yes! Otherwise you know what happens? You write your little stories about your little elves and vampires and princesses in spaceships and your Epic Quests and Timeless Romances and Great Battles and you hug them to your chest and cry "mine mine mine!" and what happens?

People look at you like you're an idiot is what. Because you know, you are.

On the other hand, any old good writer -- and there are a lot more of them around than is generally credited -- can take a stock character, like a vampire, and write -- a great vampire story, by god. And even great literature, sometimes.

Fanfic's lesson is to just write the damn story. It's derivative. Check. The characters don't belong to me. Check. I'm stealing from a story about a hero, a quirky sidekick, a grizzled mentor-figure, an on-and-off romantic interest, and perhaps a dog. Fantasy elements extra. Check, check, check.

Oh, and I have this great idea that's been written four thousand, eight hundred and twenty six times.

Check.

Some Comments to the Essay

olympia m: wow

I wish I had your enthusiasm!

But, oh, that's a nice, positive lesson to be learned from fanfiction. And it's easy to forget that.

ellen fremedon: My porn comes from my Inner Soul! (My Inner Soul is a thieving little pervert.)

kannaophelia : I never, ever, ever get sick of first-time stories. Especially first kiss stories. The same characters, over and over, discovering their feelings in different ways, and everyone writing with the same idea that they have those feelings... Blissful.

devohoneybee: great post! I think of fanfic as more like storytelling than literature: you expect a storyteller to keep telling you stories about familiar characters, even the SAME stories over again, maybe with variations. You don't take a storyteller to task for being "unoriginal"! It's about entering and re-entering that dreamworld, over and over again

mosca: Thank you for reminding me about some of the good things in fandom; I was starting to forget. I agree that all of fiction is retelling, in one way or another: I can't think how many literary novels I've read that have had the same basic plot, same "serious literary novel" style, same thematic goals. One of the wonderful things about fanfic writers (and vidders, etc.) that we own up to and use our tendency to recycle and retell. We're exploring the nature of retelling rather than fighting the idea that we even do it.

dswdiane: I like the post, Carene, and I take some exception to the comment immediately before this one. No offense [mosca], but I think great story telling is what creates great literature. "The Odessey" is a hell of a great story. For that matter, the Coen Brother's remake of the Odessey as "Brother Where Art Thou" is a great story. "King Lear" rocks at a story. Hell, Kurosawa's remake of Lear as "Ran" rocks as a story. Oh. my. Kurosawa was doing like Shakespeare fanfic. The Coen brothers are doing like Homer fanfic. *blink.* In movie form, of course. And I do guess that the copyrights have sorta expired.

eucritta: Great post!

Here's what I love best about fanfic: it's like the glory days of pulp fiction all over again. I used to dream about turning a corner some day and there it'd be, the newstand of my dreams, umpteen-hundred tales of demons, monsters and mad scientists, spicy tales, fast tales, occult and defective and hard-boiled detectives, baroque fantasies, schmaltzy romances and rockets on the range. And all of the above, cross-fertilised and grafted, swapped, borrowed and shamelessly stolen.

And here it is, in fanfic archives.