derivative works in context

Via cofax7, Boing-Boing on Bookshop's Post

From boing-boing comment:

If fanfic wants to be something that expresses a love of / obsession with a particular cultural product and reinforces a shared, often subcultural, identity built around it - which is surely, what fanfic is - then it is unlikely to have much impact beyond that. But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture. Exactly like most of the things on this list, whatever their origins.

A lot of arguments about fanfic revolve around the idea of the lack of creativity--which is absurd--the lack of quality--because pro novels are uniformly good, let me refer you to Brian Fucking Herbert before you even bother--but this one, this one....

But as soon as it starts to mean something independent of the original product, it ceases to be fanfic and becomes part of wider culture.

No, it ceases to be fanfic when authors can legally publish it and potentially get paid for it. Diane Duane's Spock's World had exactly as much context to wider culture as D'Alaire's Voyager fic Word Painter.

Cofax goes into the context bit here, which I agree with and keep thinking I want to add to, but it's more complicated than that.

Derivative works already mean something independent of the original product; that's why they were written. So it comes back to the context issue; a derivative work isn't fanfic if it can stand alone without context.

I could say this; all fiction requires context.

I could say this; some fiction requires more context than others.

I could use this: tell me that Apocalypse Now would work if you were not American, did not know the military existed, and lived on the moon. Fiction accesses context consciously and unconsciously all the time, from general cultural context to historical context to language context--Bastard Out of Carolina, hard Southern: Mairelon the Magician, cockney: Ghost Story, very British. The Yellow Wallpaper requires knowing about the treatment of women by society and the patriarchy in the nineteenth century; Raj needs a basic understanding of India's state under British rule and the effects of colonialism.

And samdonne's Your Cowboy Days Are Over requires some understanding of colonialism and Stargate: Atlantis.

At some point, someone needs to just admit it; it's not about context, and in some ways, it's not even about copyright; it's the subculture around fanfic that makes it unacceptable. Derivative fiction that comes out of mainstream is literary and critical and meaningful and art; derivative fiction that comes out of fanfic communities isn't.

Or as one poster put it:

I read (and watch, and listen to) plenty of things that aren't pushing any artistic boundaries. But I don't pretend it's anything more than popcorn, and for the most part the producers don't pretend it's anything more than popcorn.

Yeah. I miss coffee right now.

ETA: Link corrected.

Comments

[dduane.livejournal.com]

...I see nothing in law or custom to indicate I should approach you with head bowed and hosannas on the tongue.

Anybody approaches me with bowed head, and I'll assume they dropped some change and get up to help them look for it. As for any hosannas, I'm afraid my reaction would be very muted until I was somewhere private, at which point I'd have to fall over snorting. I'm entirely too aware of the profoundly clay-y state of the feet of a lot of creative people. My own not least among them.

Respect for the creator of a work or a series, though, that is nice: when it happens. In the ficcing commmunity, it doesn't always. And the wise writer-with-a-fandom eventually learns not to expect it, as there are always voices raised to tell you how you should be doing what you're doing a lot better, and they don't usually bother to moderate their language much. Now, when I walked into Gene Roddenberry's office with Michael Reaves to pitch what eventually became "Where No One Has Gone Before", sure, I was absolutely thinking, "Here's a chance to add something that I think this universe, which I have loved a ton for my whole creative life, has been missing." But no way I was going to rub his nose in it. And (at the prose end of Trek rather than the screen end) when I found out that people had been sending Gene mail that boiled down to, "Diane Duane's Romulans are much better than yours!", I was mortified. Not even so much at the possibility that somebody at the Franchise might get the idea that I was putting people up to it. But whatever else might have been said about Roddenberry at the time or has been said since, there is no arguing the fact that he fought the fight to get the original series past NBC and keep it alive, against unusually daunting odds and at great cost to his own quality of life. As someone who's been involved in increasing amounts of TV work in recent years, I've been developing a healthy sense of what it takes out of you: and Gene deserved serious, serious respect for what he'd done in getting Trek started.

As regards the use of origin disclaimers, I understand the intent of those and appreciate them. But in the past I've been alerted to instances when that custom's honored and then (as it were) honored in the breach immediately thereafter: for example, "these characters are from DD's YW universe, but she doesn't really know how to use them, so watch while I show how it should be done." Or sometimes the disclaimer has been accompanied by phrases that have factored down to "And now that I've got that out of the way: I really love this universe, and therefore it's mine now to do with as I please." (I have to say that, happily, this kind of thing is far less common for me than it is for some other far better-known writers. Nonetheless, it grates, and sometimes grates more when I'm considering those other writers' reactions than when it comes down to mine. I can just imagine how it must have been for J. K. Rowling -- who had to suffer a ton more for her art, getting started, than I ever did -- when she had to sit in a courtroom and watch YouTube video of the young man who was saying to a crowded room at some con, "Jo's left the universe. It's ours now." O RLY?) This is the kind of thing that can spark the auctorial Where Were You When Page One Was Blank response. I find myself staring at that damn blank page -- either Page One or one of its four or five hundred successors per book -- every single day. And to have the value or validity of that daily battle, as it sometimes seems, just shrugged off or brushed aside, can make you pretty cranky.

(cont'd in next)

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

I don't see why it's startling or disrespectful that a critique of the original work (and when you see a disclaimer such as you describe, I think the work which follows is typically both a critique and a criticism of the original canon) is critical. Why shouldn't someone say out loud that the original work didn't succeed for them, and it failed in these specific ways, and present their argument in a convenient narrative form? You wouldn't say a book reviewer was an ingrate for telling people that your book was terrible, even though the only reason they have a job is that you write books for them to review. You wouldn't say a tenth grader or an English major who wrote that a book's symbolism is ineffective was a petulant whiner, even though they were only able to pass their class by reading and writing about your book. Fanfiction's not really different than either of those situations, to my mind. And so, it seems odd to say that a fanfiction writer is being some sort of poor sport for letting people know what they thought of your book, because they wouldn't even have anything to write fanfiction about if you hadn't written the original work first.

Also, originality is not an indicator of literary quality or entertainment value.

"Jo's left the universe. It's ours now." O RLY? That reads really differently to me than to you. To me it reflects that, Rowling is done writing about the Harry Potter universe for the general public. And thousands, possibly millions, of people all over the world are not done writing in that universe; they still have hundreds of millions of words of story to go, using those characters and settings. She's had her say, now her readers are having theirs.

As for fanfiction being written which goes places an author never would have gone in the original, well…reader response theory is forty-odd years old. If a writer is upset by, disturbed by, or just unprepared for readers understanding their text differently than they intended it, then writing for publication would seem to be a poor lifestyle choice. But in my experience, no copies of the story I wrote have ever been altered, much less harmed, by someone thinking something about them I didn't intend, or even when I intended the audience to have the exact opposite thought to what was expressed in the story inspired by mine.

FYI, Warner Bros., Bloomsbury, and Rowling have been unsuccessful in preventing the dissemination of adult Harry Potter material. Restrictedsection.org, which received a C&D on this matter, is password-protected and not indexed by search engines, but is still available to anyone who cares to attest that they are over the age of 18.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with critiques being critical... when they are. But the art of responsible critique isn't as widely disseminated as it might be -- as I've discovered when teaching writing workshops. Some of what passed for critiquing technique among the participants wasn't worthy of the name, having more to do with the "Rite of Spring" school of thought where you rip up the content and the author equally and leave the bloody bits lying around on the carpet -- the idea apparently seeming to be that the writer and the written will somehow put themselves back together and be stronger for the ordeal. Actually telling the subject of the critique what didn't work and then explaining how to fix it so that everybody can benefit seemed an alien concept to some of these folks. But it didn't stay that way for long. Anyway, I find that the tone of voice matters in critiquing, and here as in much else of life, honey (or at least something of relatively neutral pH) works better than vinegar if you want to get the message successfully internalized.

If a writer is upset by, disturbed by, or just unprepared for readers understanding their text differently than they intended it, then writing for publication would seem to be a poor lifestyle choice.

Well, the guts of this choice got made when I started writing at age eight or so and quickly became one of those people who can't not not write. And I'd guess it's too late to try to change now. Fortunately, I'm also one of those people who're lucky enough to be able to make a living at what they have to do. If you're suggesting that I should just suck it up and get on with it... well, so I do. :)

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

I honestly have no idea what the difference between responsible and irresponsible critique would be. (Responsible to whom? for what?)

But, there's a big difference between author-directed critique, like when one mails a fan letter, is an editor, or is part of someone's writing group, and critique directed at other members of the audience, like when you're a reviewer or posting fanfiction to the Internet. I mean, yes, if something is made available to everyone, the author is as able as anyone else to read what I wrote, but when I write White Collar (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1358522/) fanfiction, I'm not doing it to convince Jeff Eastin to write scenes where Diahann Carrol and Matt Bomer make out. I do it for the same reason I write entries on my Dreamwidth journal saying why I think it's misogynist and bad writing to have Kate function as Neal's quest object, rather than a character in her own right: to convince people whose views about what makes television interesting and amusing are in the same neighborhood as mine to think about White Collar the same way I do, and to impress people who don't care about White Collar with my smooth word stylings. In other words, I'm talking to friends and acquaintances around the world's biggest water cooler. I don't think I should modulate my water cooler talk because of the possibility TPTB might be reading it. If they think about TV like I do or they think I write well (or in a way they enjoy pointing and laughing at), they're welcome to read it, they're even welcome to tell me how and why I'm wrong on the internet, but it's not for them.

I also don't think that people being bad at critique, (in the sense of making illogical or unsupported arguments, or themselves writing poorly, or reading the original in an uninteresting way) is a reason to condemn the enterprise generally. For one thing, doing it badly is usually the first step to doing it well. For another, a lot of people doing something in their free time badly aren't preventing a whole lot of other people doing something in their free time well, and they keep the bar low enough to encourage new people to enter the system thinking, "Okay, I can at least do better than that." And, lastly, I return to, who or what are they hurting by doing this?

And when I said that if reader response disturbed an author, then writing for publication seemed a poor choice, I didn't mean that the writing was problematic there. Rather, letting other people read what one has written is the action which may be bringing more pain than pleasure.

[dduane.livejournal.com]

I honestly have no idea what the difference between responsible and irresponsible critique would be. (Responsible to whom? for what?)

Responsible to the other people participating in the critiquing process with you, in terms of making sure they and their fiction get the most out of it. A focus on assisting them in getting the feedback they and their work need with maximum effectiveness and minimum distress (especially seeing how closely many writers, especially newish ones, identify their work as an inseparable part of themselves: step carelessly on the written in such cases and you have to deal with having also stepped carelessly on the writer). Telling the truth about the work and what may need to be done to it for it to be improved, but doing so in the most courteous way possible. The creation of an atmosphere of respect, with an eye to having people feel like they're in a safe space and can trust the people they're working on their fiction with. ...This may all seem obvious, but I've seen workshops that were hotbeds of bullying, scorn, verbal abuse and casual cruelty... and the people who kept turning up and laying themselves open to this kind of punishment for the sake of their writing thought it was normal, and genuinely wondered why their writing wasn't getting any better.

I also don't think that people being bad at critique, (in the sense of making illogical or unsupported arguments, or themselves writing poorly, or reading the original in an uninteresting way) is a reason to condemn the enterprise generally.

Neither do I. But supporting everybody in doing it better strikes me as a good thing.

...Rather, letting other people read what one has written is the action which may be bringing more pain than pleasure.

Well, once there are a few hundred thousand copies of something lying around in Borders and Waldenbooks and in big heaps in the warehouse at Amazon, maybe that indeed would be the point where the writer had better get used to what discomfort may come with being read. :) But this isn't a problem I ever had to cope with when writing fanfic, as no one ever saw mine. (Star Trek / Monkees crossovers, for pity's sake: but at that point I didn't even know it was fanfic -- never even heard the word or found out that other people had been doing what I did until I was in my early 20's and went to my first Trek convention.) All that stuff was burned long ago, and believe me, everybody should be grateful. :p