jeriendhal | Not Your Sandbox

james_nicoll would like to point out that Diana Gabaldon doesn't care for fanfic.

Now, it's important to point out that what's she saying is essentially correct. Her characters and stories are copyrighted material. When other people publish stories online using them, for profit or not, that's a violation of her copyright, and with Sturgeon's Law in mind the result is 90% likely to be crap anyway. So she's well within her rights to call fanfic authors out on this.

Nevertheless...

With a grand total of one exception that I can think of in the past twenty years, fanfic's effect on author copyright has been frankly negligable. Plus, banning fans from writing fanfic is approximiately as effective as shoveling water. You'll expend a lot of energy you could be using for something else for very little effect.

There are ways of dealing with it. Now some authors, such as Gabaldon, try to forbid it. That's probably the least effective method. The ones who want to write in the author's world will, or alternatively will become so irritated by the resctriction that they quit buying the books.

Some like Mercedes Lackey or Anne McCaffrey try to at least channel it, making fanfic authors jump through legal hoops to be published semi-legally. That's only as effective as the fanfic writers who choose to pay attention to it. It was somewhat effective in the days of published fanzines, but with the explosion of the Internet it's nigh impossible.

Many authors take Lois McMaster Bujold's approach and politely ignore it, perhaps even making a note on their website that while they won't ban fanfic they're legally obligated not to read it either.

Some, like David Weber, take the rather unique approach of co-opting it, effectively opening their universes to a limited degree to outside authors to play in and professionally publishing the results. That can be tricky, especially when dealing with amateur authors, but you can't deny the fannish good will it generates.

And sometimes the fanfic author hits the proverbial jackpot and becomes one of the team, such as the Buffy fic writer who became a member of the show's writing staff.

* * *

Then of course there's the really gray areas of professional writers playing in another author's playground, except that the author is safely dead so copyright isn't an issue anymore. Is The Seven Percent Solution or the Mary Russell novels ripping off Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest work, or paying homage? Is the Wind Done Gone or Wicked stealing from the grave of the authors of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz or providing clever social and literary commentary?

* * *

Me, I'm extraordinarily lucky. Not only do I write in the universe of one author who's fanfic friendly (LMB), but I also write in

chaypeta's universe and received the high honor of not only her becoming a consumer of my works, she's seen fit to use some of my ideas in her own writing. For which I'll be forever grateful.

Because it's her sandbox. She just lets me play there.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lennan.livejournal.com

The concept of copyright and authorial ownership is very new. Historically, originality wasn't so closely guarded. J.S. Bach blatantly took melodies from other composers, myths being told over and over again differently, and medieval poetry retelling Greek myths is much closer to fanfiction than inspiration. You have to think about what is fanfiction (outside of personal feelings on its morality). What Fanfiction does is literally take the world and/or characters of a story and re-writes or re-imagines their stories or makes new ones outside of the original author's intent. When you retell a myth, changing one detail or another, or (I would argue) trying out a different theme, it's still closer to fanfiction than West Side Story is. White's version of Arthurian legend is also closer to fan fiction than West Side Story in my opinion. The setting is the same, the characters are the same, and are meant to be the same people, etc. It's just that they're meant to be what the writer thinks they should be. I actually don't like the "oh if the author's dead and ancient then it's fair game" leniency towards making derivative works because that strikes me as a tad hypocritical. So you want people to respect you, but you don't want to respect long dead or anonymous authors who you shamelessly pilfer from because that means you might not be able to steal from them? I can't side with that, personally. In fact, I really hate that manner of excusing oneself from responsibility. If say, Galbaldon was losing money from fanfiction or someone was selling it without her blessing, then I would say she has a legitimate complaint under law since the law does appear to seek to protect her economic gains on her intellectual property, but fans doing what a lot of authors and most likely what she has done in the past without realizing? Not so keen on that.

That's why I used Hamlet. Hamlet was pretty blatantly based on various sources like the Ur-Hamlet text among others. Even White's and Malory's Arthur stories draw heavily from prior stories in a non-inspirational sense. It's literally a re-telling, re-telling is more or less fanfiction in my view for these cases. While you can argue that West Side Story is inspired, I can't say the same about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which relies on the original play. Nor can I call Wide Sargasso Sea "inspired" by Jane Eyre. It was clearly engaging with the original and meant to be part of that fictional universe. In all these cases you're retelling a story that is essentially the same as or part of the original. It's really a very human thing to want to retell the story that you know, and in any case when you summarize or paraphrase a story for someone else you're essentially writing verbal fanfiction since most likely you're going to make up details that you don't remember clearly. To me, regardless of how you categorize it, human nature tends towards telling and re-telling the same stories, especially if its one that resonates with them. They share these stories with like-minded people, engage with the original and come to new ideas about the original, but it's still part of the original. That, in my view is part of fanfiction and part of human nature. It's creating a mythos by branching more stories onto the "main" story, which is something that Tolkien understood pretty well.

I say that suppressing fanfiction is bad business because regardless of the personal squick factor, what the author is doing is basically saying: you're not allowed to engage with my text. You have to passively take my story and enjoy it only one way and that's the way I tell you to. People don't do that and I think an author is doing a disservice to the fans by cutting them off from engaging with their text. But I do draw the line at fans making profit on a modern author's work at the author's expense.

From:

ankewehner.livejournal.com

Yeah, times change. Used to be people didn't even get credit for their work.

I actually don't like the "oh if the author's dead and ancient then it's fair game" leniency towards making derivative works because that strikes me as a tad hypocritical. So you want people to respect you, but you don't want to respect long dead or anonymous authors who you shamelessly pilfer from because that means you might not be able to steal from them?
When the author's dead, there's no way they could see how their creations are (mis)used by others. Hypothetically speaking, if my pipedream of getting "officially" published came true, that's how I'd think about my own characters, too, so I don't think it's hypocritical.

My rambling about inspiration was more about your line "I also recognize that every author is to some extent deriving their ideas from half-remembered and mis-remembered bits of things they read as well." This sounded to me more like inspiration than re-telling to me, taking some small detail of the original story and building something otherwise new around it. (Or rather, otherwise drawn from other sources, making at least the combination new. Nothing new under the sun, and all that. :))

You have to passively take my story and enjoy it only one way and that's the way I tell you to. People don't do that and I think an author is doing a disservice to the fans by cutting them off from engaging with their text.
I find the way you phrased this objectionable, because it sounds like you are trying to dictate how people should deal with their reading material, as if you think someone who does not want to write fanfiction is doing it wrong.
I read a book and feel with the characters. I look for foreshadowing, or references to other books in the same series. I like to draw comparisons to other books, or myths, that might have been inspiration, or might have drawn from the same source. Is that not engaging with the story?

I do agree that banning fanfiction is a bad move, because it alienates the people who like to write fanfiction.

From:

lennan.livejournal.com

"When the author's dead, there's no way they could see how their creations are (mis)used by others."

Actually, that's precisely why I find it hypocritical. So it's okay to take their stories and do what you will with it if they're dead, but not okay if they're not? One day (general) you'll be dead and it'll be the same thing, if those authors are using ethics to curb people getting ideas from them, then I hope that those authors say that their works are fair game for derivative works after they die, just like every other dead author. Since those authors did precisely the same thing with old works anyway. I find it hard to make a moral ground of that. The morality, in my view is shaky here, on the other hand, it's not shaky if you take it on economic grounds and it isn't shaky as a matter of opinion. If authors were harmed economically or if they felt their wishes not to see fanfic floating around were not being respected, then I can stand behind authorial anger. I might, however, question why they get so giddy about fanart, though.

I'm sympathetic to how you feel about your characters, quite frankly, if I ever publish my story or get it online, I really will not be reading the fanfic starring my characters. There are very few people I can safely say right now who I would trust with my characters. And...I just can't do it, reading fanfic I mean. But if you or I as an author are not going to respect all works the same way, what sort of moral ground do we have to expect it of anyone else? Again, I see this as a matter of opinion and basic courtesy to another human being. And frankly, while I know that I would not want to see my characters being misused, I'm not going to pretend I have higher moral ground in insisting that fan-fic writers are somehow doing something wrong, when they're doing what humanity has done for thousands of years.

"I find the way you phrased this objectionable, because it sounds like you are trying to dictate how people should deal with their reading material, as if you think someone who does not want to write fanfiction is doing it wrong."

I wasn't clear, I'm sorry. My point in writing it like that is that the way Gabaldon phrased her disdain for fan-fic writers was pretty childish. It really sounds like that's what she's saying by telling people who engage in a text by fan-fic that they're doing it wrong. That there's only one way to engage with her text (or even any text) and that's the way she dictates they do it. Well, no. People are going to engage however they want, whether it's by writing critical essays, discussing, fanfiction, or whatever else. It's one thing to say, "please don't write fan-fic of my work, or if you're going to do it don't post it publicly, I don't really appreciate it because I find it squicky" but it's quite another to imply they're all criminal and stealing, when what they're actually doing is engaging with the text. In their own way.

I do not write fanfiction, the closest I've even done to fanfiction is childhood daydreaming about AU stories in my head, just in case you might think I'm a fan-fic writer. Writing fanfic ain't my cuppa, and since I've been a student of literature, I'm more like you in how I prefer to engage with a text. I'm not trying to say that there's one way of reading, in fact my views on books and reader engagement are far from that and are extremely broad. If they weren't so broad I wouldn't be defending something in which I don't even participate.

From:

ankewehner.livejournal.com

I hope that those authors say that their works are fair game for derivative works after they die, just like every other dead author
Yep, that's what I said. :)

I might, however, question why they get so giddy about fanart, though.
Just speculating a bit... I think fanart might be more likely to be a direct adaptation than fanfiction.
A piece of fanart can be about depicting as precisely as possible a certain scene the book author described. That's way more obvious a message of "I admire what you wrote" than a piece of fanfiction that carries more ideas the fan came up with, which might be (mis)understood as "You did not put enough detail there", "I can write your story better than you" or "I want to tell my own story, but using yours as foundation is easier than making up one from scratch".
Of course you get crazy what-if/out of character fanart, too, but there can easily be a bias of what the author sees or hears about.

Thank you. :)