Constant Thoughts

When I first heard about fan fiction, I thought it was the Worst. Idea. Ever. By a long shot. Why not be original?, I thought. It seemed so… dishonest, almost like stealing. And slash (actually, shipping generally) seemed to be downright obnoxious. The characters are author’s, right?

Then, of course, I learned about textual analysis, and the whole concept that each reader constructs their own reading of each work, only truly applying to them. Fine. But still – fan-fiction’s different, right?

Not so much. On the off chance that you still can’t stand it (or want to convince someone else), here are some thoughts:

1. Fanfiction is very similar to interpretive commentary – but instead of writing about a work, it rewrites the work.
2. In works with multiple authors (many books and plays and musicals, every TV show and movie ever) often the only difference between the fanfic author and the ‘real’ author is money, and possible (but not guaranteed) review by the ‘original’ author.
3. Fanfic was around long before the Internet (For example, Alice in Wonderland was extensively reinterpreted, and it was hardly the first).
4. Plenty of well-known modern works are nothing more than popular fanfic. (Ever hear of Wicked?)
5. Fanfiction is essentially modern communal storytelling/mythmaking – one person makes up a story, others retell it, others make up more stories with the same characters, still others use the same characters in identical situations, and a few put themselves in the story to make themselves look good!
6. If that’s not enough think about this: Shakespeare was a fanfiction author. He took existing historical characters, stole the plot partly from history, partly from preceding plays, and made what’s widely considered the greatest English literature to date.

So anyway, I’ve managed to be convince enough to try writing some myself – hopefully it’ll be easier than writing original fiction (which I’ve mostly failed at before now), and be decent writing practice to boot.

Or not. But fanfic’s fun, anyway!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 11:00 am, filed under random musings, and tagged fanfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.