In Defense of Fanfic
A lot of current writing is self-published, either online or in print or kindle. Much of it is fan fiction, stories set in a fictional world created by another author, often using his characters. Being a fan is seen as lower status than being an author, fan fiction as a low status literary activity. Quite a lot of what I read and enjoy is fan fiction, hence this essay.
I will list what I believe are the main charges against it and try to show that they are for the most part mistaken.
Most fan fiction is trash.
Also true of most other fiction, as per Sturgeon’s law. The solution, as with other fiction, is to find the authors you like and read them.
Fan fiction authors are free riding on the world building efforts of other writers. Their work is less of an accomplishment, less admirable, than the work of authors who build their own worlds.
Insofar as this is true, it is equally true of fiction set in the real world, including historical fiction. Arguably the author of fiction set in a preexisting fictional world faces a greater challenge than faced by the author of fiction set in the real world. The real world not only exists, it exists in enormously greater detail than any fictional world, even the best.1 The fanfic author who needs information about his world not provided by its original author, clothing designs, a restaurant menu or military tactics, has to create it himself. The author of a work set in the real world can look it up.
Fan fiction based on works of science fiction or fantasy and set in worlds invented by their authors is in that respect less of an accomplishment than the original but not much less, since such works, in most or all cases, themselves free ride on the world building of earlier authors. When I read Gate of Ivrel, C.J.Cherryh’s first published novel, it felt to me like an Andre Norton novel written by a much better writer. Norton agreed; the penultimate line to her introduction to the book was “Why can’t I write like this?” She was, at the time, one of the leading authors in the genre, and had the honesty and humility to recognize that a new author was a better writer than she was and say so.
Cherryh did not have to invent the genre — that had already been done by previous writers, Norton among them. She did not even have to invent the aliens. The first two books featured a hostile humanoid race, the Qhal. Only when I read the third book, set in a world where Qhal and humans interact peacefully, did I realize that they were Tolkien elves.2
Fanfic violates the rights, legal or moral, of the original author.
That is a problem, legal or moral, if the author objects. One fanfiction site, FanFiction.Net, has a policy of refusing to carry fan fiction that repurposes characters originally written by authors who disapprove of fan fiction. Some authors don’t object; one of the founders of Archive of Our Own was Naomi Novik; some of the fanfic it hosts is based on her books.
The legal situation under copyright law is unclear, depending on whether the new work is considered sufficiently different to count as fair use. My own view is that whether or not it is illegal, it is discourteous to use characters invented by someone who does not want them so used. I can easily imagine an author seeing such use as distorting the character, puppeting him around to do things the real character would not do. That is less of a problem if what is borrowed is not a character but a world; to the extent that there are differences from the original that makes it a different world. It is also less a problem if the characters used existed only as background figures in the original, never portrayed in any detail.
My favorite fan fiction3 avoids such problems by borrowing its setting not from a novel but from a role playing scenario created for people to set their own stories in.[4] Some, but not all, of the major characters of the fanfics are mentioned in the setting but almost all of the character building is by the fanfic authors.
Some of the same authors have written threads set in Tolkien’s universe using characters who play a major role in his stories. He is no longer alive but I suspect might have objected. I also suspect that in some cases a purpose of the thread is to present a favorable picture of characters who, in the fanfic author’s view, Tolkien treated unfairly.
Which raises an interesting moral question. Is it wrong to enter a fictional world in order to see justice done to a fictional character wronged by his author?
The Virtues of Fanfiction
There are two. One is that it provides a way in which a new writer can get into writing, easier for some than starting entirely de novo. It supplements the other way in which writers get started nowadays — by participating in, often by running, roleplaying games.
The other virtue is that it provides readers with an opportunity to continue reading a story they enjoy that is no longer being continued by its original author. That was part of the attraction of Orlando Furioso, Ariosto’s continuation of Boiardo’s unfinished verse epic Orlando Innamarato, itself a sixteenth century fanfic of the medieval Chansons de Geste, verse accounts of the deeds of Charlemagne’s knights. The most famous and possibly earliest is the Song of Roland, whose protagonist was borrowed by Boiardo and then Ariosto; “Orlando” is the Italian version of “Roland.”
The Vice of Fanfiction
It often appears a bit at a time and I am not sufficiently strong minded to wait until a work is complete before reading it.
My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
That point first occurred to me in a different context, the comparison of historical recreation in the SCA, based on real history, with larping, based on invented, usually fantasy, worlds. The real world is a much richer, more detailed setting than any fantasy, even one created by a world building genius such as Tolkien.
The relation of Cherryh to Norton and both to Tolkien reminds me of Kipling’s poem “The Palace,” mentioned in an earlier post.
Discussed in two previous posts, The Web of Story and Fictional Saints, and mentioned briefly in a third.
Golarion in the Pathfinder rpg.
One big advantage, from an authors perspective, is that writing fanfic comes with a built-in audience. Especially if you write in a setting that already has a significant community attached.
If you just wrote your original fiction, you'd often get almost no readers unless you get really lucky. If you sand off the numbers and put it into something popular, you can get a lot and therefore also a lot of feedback. Once you are a known good fanfic author with a bunch of fans of your own, you can then try to publish your original fiction with much better chances than if you tried that first.
I think that the objection "most fanfiction is trash" can be steelmanned.
Most fanfiction is written and posted unedited, or with very slight editing at most. The average fanfiction is written by a writer with less experience than the average published original story or novel, because getting published takes a lot of practice but posting fanfiction online doesn't. On top of this, publishers (for all their flaws) do filter out bottom-quality stories, so that pushes the average published original story up higher.
Because of all these effects, you're more likely to encounter absolute trash among fanfic than among published original stories, and fanfiction will have higher percentages under most quality bars than published original fiction.
All this steelman is true. However, as you say, there is very good fanfiction out there; the solution is to find the good stories and ignore the rest.