Fanfiction: an overall positive media piece for once

[meridian_rose]

There's a really nice piece about fanfiction here; it's worth reading in it's entirety but I'll give you what I think are the highlights. It starts by positing that fanfiction "is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it's largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it's unbelievably massive." It differs from most articles on fanfic by talking to professional writers who still write fanfiction, taking away the accusation that fanfiction is merely an amateur pursuit.

Naomi Novik, whose Temeraire novels are best sellers and have been optioned by Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings movies, writes fan fiction. "Fanfic writing isn't work, it's joyful play," she says. "The problem is that for most people, any kind of writing looks like work to them, so they get confused why anyone would want to write fanfic instead of original professional material, even though they don't have any problem understanding why someone would want to mess around on a guitar playing Simon and Garfunkel."

Emphasis mine; this is why I get so annoyed at the 'lack of creativity' opposition to fanfic; every musician who only plays cover versions, every orchestra that only plays classical music, is as guilty of a lack of creativity as a fanfic writer. More so, I'd argue.

The reporter talks to Racheline Maltese and describes her as "38. She's an actor and a professional writer — journalism, cultural criticism, fiction, poetry. She describes herself as queer. She lives in New York City." Maltese's blog, Letters From Titan is well worth reading for her take on how the lines between media and real life can be blurred, on media representation, on queer culture. She's also on LJ: rm, freely admitting to her fannish identity and to the fact that she writes not only what could be called 'professional meta' but fanfiction. Obviously, she's on the pro-fanfic side:

"To say that a story stops after we close a book is absurd," says Maltese. "To say that we can think certain things about a story or what might happen next in a story or what might have happened if someone had turned left instead of right but that we can't write them down is absurd."

And another blow to the 'lack of creativity' defence:

Up until relatively recently, creating original characters from scratch wasn't a major part of an author's job description. When Virgil wrote The Aeneid, he didn't invent Aeneas; Aeneas was a minor character in Homer's Odyssey whose unauthorized further adventures Virgil decided to chronicle. Shakespeare didn't invent Hamlet and King Lear; he plucked them from historical and literary sources. Writers weren't the originators of the stories they told; they were just the temporary curators of them. Real creation was something the gods did.

It also points out to those authors who handwring over their 'children' being kidnapped and abused by evil amateurs that:

A writer's characters are his or her children, but even children have to grow up eventually and do things their parents wouldn't approve of. "We don't own nonfictional people," Maltese says, "and at the end of the day, I don't think we can own fictional ones either."