The Four-Leafed Clover of Fanfiction

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Title:	The Four-Leafed Clover of Fanfiction
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	November 1, 2013
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	The Four-Leafed Clover of Fanfiction page 1; page 2
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The Four-Leafed Clover of Fanfiction is a 2013 essay by Merlin Missy.

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• this essay contains many practical hints and advice about how to be a better writer, emphasis on fanwriting, the four-leaf clover is used as a metaphor: "talent, skill, effort, and audience" plus the added layer of luck
• the eye-rolling, predictable complaints about fan fiction one can find all over the internet
• Sturgeon's Law
• a jab at Lee Goldberg
• some people are better at writing than others, are born to tell stories
• sometimes posting to the internet in a hasty manner makes fanwriters lazy, why improve when everyone gives only fabulous, non-critical feedback
• reading feedback for other stories can teach you what not to do in your own
• writing drabbles can teach you economy of language
• do your research, such as studying anatomy "so as to avoid Stretchy the Wonder Penis"

From the Essay

Dr. Merlin recently ran across yet another rant on Why Fanfic Sucks. The main points of the argument were: a) it's all porn, b) it's all badly written porn, c) it's WRONG, d) you should make your own characters, and e) when I become a rich and famous writer, I intend to be horrified at what fanfic writers are going to do to the characters I haven't written yet (but it'll be PORN! Slashy slashy wrong gay PORN!).

In short, it's the same rant Dr. Merlin has seen on websites denouncing fanfic ever since she started surfing the web. This argument has been made by fans, by non-fans, even by ostensibly legitimate authors (including He Who Writes Diagnosis Murder Tie-In Novels That Are Totally Not Derivative or Fanficlike In Any Way Dammit). And as always, Dr. Merlin asked herself why anti-fanfic ranters don't go complain about someone else's hobby for a change. But anyway.

The first thing to keep in mind when coming across an anti-fanfiction rant is not to get angry and spew across the blog of the ranter. They have their opinion, you have yours. If yours agrees with mine, that fanfic rocks, then you and I will gladly hang out over here in our little corner and ignore the others. Our corner's prettier anyway.

The second thing to remember, and this you may wish to point out, is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of anything is crap. That means if the ranter only ever read one fanfic, there's a 9 out of 10 chance that it, as the saying goes, sucked dead bunnies through a twisty straw. You should be able to put yourself in the ranter's shoes. If your only exposure to an entire genre was representative of its worst example, you too would think the rest was also made of smelly excrement, and you would be annoyed by people who kept trying to wave it under your nose, trying to convince you otherwise.

The third thing to remember is that the ranter has forgotten the four leaves of the clover of good fanfiction (or more broadly, good fiction). You, dear reader, ought to know them as well before you delve into more fanfiction, either as reader or writer, and perhaps the ranter could benefit from this knowledge as well. Good fanfic, which is to say fanfic that is considered to be good by one's fandom peers, is a matter of talent, skill, effort, and audience. The ranter in question may or may not have a grasp on the first three, but has almost certainly not realized that the last applies most of all.

Profic has a major disadvantage to fanfic that the professional writers (at least, the ones who didn't start out as fanfic writers) often don't want to admit. Profic writers are at the mercy of their audience. Publishers buy books, stories and poems that they think will sell to enough people to make the printing costs and author payments worthwhile. (See "The Writer in the Mirror" if you run into publishers who want you to help subsidize those costs. Keyword = vanity.) Fanfiction is also a matter of finding an audience, but your ability to be published is not limited to being able to locate that audience first, nor must you adhere to a word count unless you wish to do so. The audience is the fourth leaf in our fanfiction clover, because it's often a matter of luck as much as anything else.