The Fine Points of Fan Fiction
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The Fine Points of Fan Fiction |
| Commentator: | Cynthia Crossen |
| Date(s): | July 23, 2012 |
| Venue: | online, Wall Street Journal |
| Fandom: | |
| External Links: | The Fine Points of Fan Fiction/WebCite |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
The Fine Points of Fan Fiction is a 2012 article for "Dear Book Lover," the online Wall Street Journal. The author is Cynthia Crossen.
It is the usual write-up of fanfiction, first explaining what it is and then explaining that the practice has been around many, many years. It has the obligatory mention of Fifty Shades of Grey, the go-to little black dress of explanation. The author also quotes some pro authors who are against it, tolerant of it, or applaud it.
An excerpt:
How can you be writing something original if your main character was invented by another writer? But I also remember the jolt of wonder and delight I felt years ago reading Jean Rhys's novel, "Wide Sargasso Sea," when I realized that Antoinette Cosway, the main character, was the girl who would one day marry Mr. Rochester and go mad in his attic at Thornfield. "Wide Sargasso Sea" is a beautiful, original novel. So is Peter Carey's "Jack Maggs," which borrows the character Magwitch from "Great Expectations."George MacDonald Fraser appropriated his popular rascal Harry Paget Flashman from "Tom Brown's School Days," an 1857 novel by Thomas Hughes in which Flashman, a minor character, was described as "a dirty little sniveling, sneaking fellow." In "Lavinia," Ursula LeGuin invented the back story of Aeneas's wife in Virgil's "Aeneid." John Updike told a fuller story about characters from "Hamlet" (and other fictional sources) in his superb novel, "Gertrude and Claudius." In "Mr. Timothy," Louis Bayard catches up with Dickens's Tiny Tim, now 23 years old and living in a brothel. Valerie Martin imagines the life of a maid in the home of Dr. Henry Jekyll in "Mary Reilly." I consider all of these books evidence that fan fiction does not have to be derivative and uninspired.
To Michael Chabon, all fiction is fan fiction. "There is a degree to which…all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction," he writes. "Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us…we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers—should we be lucky enough to find any—some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.