An editor's view of fanfic

[tangofiction]

An interesting blogpost by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who is apparently an editor at Tor (a major Fantasy publisher in the US), about fanfic. The original is here; I'm reposting the text under the cut. The lines at the end refer to a controversy where a Star Wars fanfic writer tried to sell her (apparently awful) novel on Amazon.

Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote

Storytelling is basic to our species. It's one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories. It might surprise you to find out how many writers have works of personal erotica tucked away in their unpublished-or-unpublishable manusсriрt trunks. There's no good way to get those published, but they write them anyway, because they're writers, and eroticism is an important part of our lives.



Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it's a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing -- unnatural, even -- for writers to not engage with that experience. They always have. I could show you stuff centuries old -- heck, some of it's millennias old -- that's fanfic by any modern definition.



Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn't exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.



The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It's a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can't. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.



I'm just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it's barely readable, they'll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they're still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They're not so different as all that.



Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.



Personally, I'm convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.



This really is a basic impulse.



I've never heard that George Lucas had a mad on for fanfic. I hope that's true, because he's probably the most successful bricoleur in late 20th Century narrative art.



Lori Jareo is stupid because she put her fanfic into print and put it up for sale on Amazon. I still can't quite believe that a working editor with a degree in Journalism could pull a stunt like that. That's as far as my condemnation goes. My only problem with her writing fanfic per se is that she's so bad at it.