fanfic

[nancylebov]

Robin Hobb has an essay on what she hates about fanfic. I've seen a few discussions of it--here's a major one.

If I (re)read any of Hobb's fiction, I'm definitely checking for control issues--I can understand being offended at characters being fanficked into activities which are wildly out of character and/or undignified, but Hobb even hates it when a scene she's chosen not to put in the novel gets written up.

Does Laurel Hamilton fanfic consist of horror/mystery stories with no sex?

Discussion link snagged from superversive.

Comments

[deor.livejournal.com]

? Both your links go to the same page.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's corrected. Thanks for pointing it out.

[avram]

You screwed up the closing tag on that link. It should be </a>, not <a />. Also, as deor pointed out, both links go to the same URL.

Anyway, wow, that’s a terrible rant. Totally irrational. I’ve lost a chunk of respect for Hobb/Lindholm. Is Wizard of the Pigeons a worse book for having been set in a real-world city (Seattle) instead of an invented one?

[pariyal.livejournal.com]

I had the kids wondering why I was shaking my head and snorting when reading that rant.

Anyone who read fan fiction about Harry Potter, for instance, would have an entirely different idea of what those stories are about than if he had simply read J.K. Rowling's books. If you can show me one person whose idea of Harry Potter is based solely on fanfic (i.e. who hasn't read any of the books, nor watched any of the movies, or seen any of the merchandise) I'll revise my opinion of that.

To me, it is the fan fiction writer saying, "Look, the original author really screwed up the story, so I'm going to fix it. Here is how it should have gone."

She seems to be saying that people write fanfic because they don't like the original, not (as I've always thought) because they love the original to pieces and there simply isn't enough of it.

When I write, I want to tell my story directly to you. I want you to read it exactly as I wrote it. I labor long and hard to pick the exact words I want to use, and to present my story from the angles I choose. I want it to speak to you as an individual.

Er, yes? What does fanfic change about the original story? It's not as if the fanfic writer pretends to be the original writer. (She does seem to think that fanfic writers publish under the original writer's name)

I could counter-rant for hours more, but I'd rather have the proper link to the discussion (nag, nag) :-)

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I think fanfic can affect how you see the characters, especially if your memory for what you read where isn't excellent. This is mere opinion, since I read very little fanfic, but I suspect that if I read a lot of "Snape is a good guy" stories, I might see what I now consider to be grossly abusive teaching differently.

I do think some fanfic is intended to subvert the original--frex, based in irritation that sex isn't onstage.

[nosebeepbear.livejournal.com]

Hrm. I don't get links at all. *scratches head*

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's control issues -- at least, not as I feel exactly the same about that aspect of it. Maybe it is, but it's a case of what you control. I'm going to try this with a different analogy.

The easy analogy is someone coming along and daubing bright green genitals on a Rembrandt. But beyond that, when writing, there's this mass of stuff in your head, and you construct a path through that for other people, such that the path shows the angles and vistas on the stuff you want to show. (The stuff can be plot and world and landscape and character and whatever. It's stuff.) In the end, the story that can be read is a path through stuff. Someone else who has walked that path has seen what you wanted them to see if you built it well enough but they're not inside your head, they're inside their own head, reading, collaboratively reading. The stuff that's around their path is probably thinner than the stuff you started with, and in any case it is different. They have the view from the high place you gave them, but if they dig down on their mountain it'll be hollow, or solid rock, but your mountain will have the sedimentary layers and caves -- and at the roots of your mountain will be you, this starts in your head, at the deepest roots of your mountain will be your real life and memories, and in the sedimentary layers will be what you have built from them, layer by layer, consciously and unconsciously. Now it doesn't do any harm for someone to stand on your path and start mining their own mountain, but if they start mining it and saying it's your mountain and coming up with the wrong ores, which they're pretty much bound to, them not being you, their head not being your head, and you only having given them the outside, that one path, that's going to be pretty upsetting for you, that is in fact going to be a violation, whether or not it disturbs the path for anyone else.

Make sense?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That makes sense, though it doesn't seem to be Hobb's point. She's more concerned with readers experiencing things she doesn't want them to experience rather than people mucking about in something that's in *her* head.

And at this point, I might take a look at your books for whether the importance of well-developed imagining shows up. I bet that the love of logistics in _The King's Peace_ would count. At the moment, I'm seeing imagining the real world accurately, and imagining an invented world in consistant detail as similar, but I might be missing something.

I wonder if writers who don't find fanfic offensive also don't imagine their worlds as vividly.

I've also wondered if it would help to refer to fanfic as "based on Harry Potter" or whatever rather than "Harry Potter fanfic". Probably not much.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I read what she wrote as a way of saying that. You write, you build the path, you see a way you could get the path down into the caves but you don't dig there. You are, as a writer, in control of what the reader experiences, at least in some ways. I don't think it's being a control freak to say that. I think of it there being a space with the reader on one side and the writer on the other and the writer is shaping and the reader is responding. This comes back to Card's stupid "raping the reader" thing, the writer and the reader are having an interaction and the writer is in control of some things and the reader in control of others. The writer is quite deliberately trying to lay a path to take the reader through the landscape at the right pace.

Rowling has apparently given permission for HP fanfic, so I don't have a problem with it. I don't agree with Hobb that it is per se an invalid thing to do -- there is definitely a thing where having it be Medea who does this brings its own spearpoint with it -- Charlie's story about the Y100 problem in Airstrip One for instance. I think that has hazards, actually much the same hazards as using real history, with the weight of significance, but I don't think it inevitably produces crap the way Hobb seems to.

I also don't think people who don't mind it necessarily have words less imagined. There are people -- Gwyneth Jones definitely has talked about this, and Somerset Maugham seems to have been another -- who get characters and story in their head and then get them out of their heads by writing about them. Maugham talks about having lived with one character from Cakes and Ale for years, wondering where she could fit, then putting her in it and forgetting about her until reminded on re-reading to write the preface. I can see that in that sort of case, a writer might not care about what other people did with their characters and world, no matter how well imagined. Jones said (on a panel at an Eastercon long long ago) that the question "What happened to X character after the end of the novel?" was literally meaningless to her, the character only existed in the context of the novel, and so did the events, and the world, so there wasn't any "after". OTOH, maybe that would make it even worse, what do I know?

You were talking about Hobb not wanting "even" non sex scenes that took place offstage written. The thought of someone doing that with something of mine makes me distressed beyond the point of rationality, because they could not possibly get it right as it is in my head, and it is in my head and I didn't write it for a very good reason. (However, songs and pictures even though they get it wrong don't bother me anything like as much, and it's interesting that when I've been promoted to respond to anything it's always been poetry.)

Robin Hobb's hostility to fanfic

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

I kinda feel divided loyalties here -- some fanfic fandoms are doing interesting enough porn and forming communities around it. The people who write what I've been sampling aren't professional writers.

The other side of it is that writers can be possessive about what they've created. The fanfic writers who do original research using historical sources are one thing; the fanfic writers who claim parity with the original writer (the fan fic writer who wanted equal billing on a Marian Zimmer Bradley novel was an incident that this brought up again) are morons.

The morons always outnumber the people who are riffing intelligently off an earlier work.

The advice to pros is to never read fan fic based on their work or, at least, never acknowledge it.

I ran into a bookstore clerk who took a story to a workshop with, if I remember correctly, Marian Zimmer Bradley. The clerk complained bitterly that MZB had stolen her idea of a magical falcon.

Some people have more patience for that sort of crap than others. Hobb may simply be on the far end of a continuum, but I don't think she's off the main sequence.

But to further complicate matters, most Elizabethan plays were based on stories found elsewhere.

If someone really doesn't want her work riffed on, leave it alone out of sheer human courtesy. Some people are more possessive of their work than others, just as some people are more protective of their children than other parents.

There's a tendency for some people not to respect other people's boundaries. What I've seen in the discussion of this is people belittleing Hobb's for wanting to set a boundary. Given that there are people who consider it perfectly okay to tell strangers about their sex change operations (in like the first thing out of the OP's mouth) because they've read a stranger's books, I think some people need to learn a bit about social life. Some people are more touchy than others about this. If you can't imagine your own world and characters, don't think you have the both the right to use someone else's and the right to call the person names if she objects.

She may have been extreme, but the reactions to her are the sort of crawling horrors of human rudeness and bad manners that make me run screaming. I don't have to worry about another professional writer's claiming I've stolen something from him or her if coincidences happen. We've all been there. I could have to worry about some loony wannabe deciding that I'd stolen her magic falcon.

If people genuinely like her work, they should respect her wishes as the person who gave them that work and not write fanfic about it, or at least have the common decency not to post it on line. It smacks of fermented jealousy and envy that they'd deliberately try to annoy the person who wrote something that impressed them that much. They know they're being annoying, so they're jerks, regardless of how sensible she's being about it.

Of course, I'll identify with someone who's doing the original work over the folks doing the fanfic.