Fanfiction

This last week has been one of those classic college sequences--first a midterm, then a presentation, then three high-school students crashing on my floor as they participated in an outreach program, then being stage crew at my middle school's talent show. In other words, there was a lot of fuss and not much got done.

The presentation was fun, though. I got to watch all three professors have a huge argument. It took their attention off me, an excellent thing indeed.

Being as it was one of those weeks, I spent a lot of time bouncing around the internet and procrastinating. In the course of these adventures, I encountered this.

It astounds me how negatively authors see fanfiction, even as another author. Yes, I've heard the horror stories about people actually trying to sell fanfiction or stealing your copyright entirely, but really?! I'd think that most of these people would have the sense not to come down on their fans like a ton of bricks for the crime of creating fanfiction. In the first place, it's like telling a roomful of kindergardeners to stop fidgeting: it's not going to happen, and you can't enforce it by punishment because there are too many people to punish. This article made me lose a lot of respect for a number of authors, for the reasons listed below.

In the second, it's jumping up and down on the fingers of new writers. Young writers often start out with fanfiction. I know this because I was one of them. Somewhere on my hardrive lurks a terrible Lord of the Rings fanfic, and a still more terrible Les Miserables one. Neither should ever see the light of day, but I owe the fact I'm a writer to that LotR fic, because it was the first thing I'd ever taken pleasure in writing. If I'd been forbidden from writing it, I don't know if I'd ever have started writing in the first place.

This stance is also just plain being a dick to your fans. They're writing fanfiction because they love your world. They're reading fanfiction because they love your world. If you feel like you're going to barf just looking at it, don't. (Actually, you shouldn't because of copyright reasons--you shouldn't steal their ideas, even if they're your characters.) Don't throw the lawyers at them! If they're not making money off you, they're no threat! For the most part, they can't afford the lawsuit, and it makes you look terrible and scares further people away from your fandom. (Which means that fewer people will buy your books!) If you take a long time per book, you are being really unfair; you're expecting your poor fans to wait long periods with absolutely nothing new, and forbidding them from coming up with it themselves.

Personally, I think Neil Gaiman has the most sense about this.  But then again, he usually does...