Oct. 11th, 2009 at 12:25 PM
I am sick and fucking tired of fanfic being presented as "training wheels". That's a load of BS. Fic is its own practice, with its own locally variable stylistic and presentational rules and its own systems of distribution and compensation, all of which are thoroughly distinct from commercial writing practices. Authors may enjoy writing both. They may write both sequentially. But fic is not somehow an annex of commercial publishing, nor is commercial publishing some kind of evolution of fic. Face it. Those first hundred thousand words are going to be crap no matter how you slice it; if they're written as fanfic instead of drawer-fic, it may appear that writing fic helped one get better. In fact, writing period helps one get better. Do not fall into the logical fallacy of mistaking the venue for the mechanism.
What pisses me off the most is the fanwriters who naively embrace this myth because it offers fast validation. Do they not see that this is the same political maneuver (albeit on quite a different scale) as saying "give us rights because we can't help being deviant" instead of "give us rights because we're human beings too, fuckers". No, of course they don't see it, never mind. The point is this "validation" is only available to writers who implicitly agree to denigrate their fanfic work, to be a shill, a practitioner of fanfic who presents it as of lesser value than commercial work. This offends me in purely logical terms, the two not being commensurate in the first place. It also gets me wound up in defense of my community, even considering that I want to give the vast majority of my fellow community members a good trouting on a regular basis.
So rather than being bamboozled into apologizing for our activity, try this one: "I write fanfic because I like it."
Comments
Cheers,
Phae (7veils)
All of it. So much. If someone were to replace "fanfic" with, say, "romance", and say that writing romance novels were "training wheels", then those who wrote romance novels would get offended.
So why is it that it's different with fanfic, that those who write it have to make some sort of apologetic or self-deprecating remark about it? I myself may never know.
Actually, that'd be really interesting to write about...
I mean, how often does one put a completely original short-story out there and receive forty reviews from strangers? Feedback is great. Feedback lets you know that you did something right, lets you know what you did wrong (I wince at some of the errors I've made, which were corrected for me by helpful strangers) - and sometimes a lack of feedback is itself eloquent.
Does this mean one becomes a "feedback whore"? Not at all, but ultimately one does write to communicate a particular vision to others (otherwise one might as well just write for the drawer), and it's always helpful to hear whether one's succeeding in that objective. That's why the venue can itself be important.
If anything, writing fanfic might be good training for writing tie-in novels or comic books in known universes. Original work often requires a different set of skills, at least that's my experience as a writer of both. With fanfic, you often have to adapt to another author's style and work and be very conscious of your own style (and change it, if only for one story), for example. Not a skill many authors of original work possess.
Writing fanfic is different, not easier.
Yeah. I'll readily admit that I read fanfic precisely because it allows for characters and stories being taken in directions where canon (usually that includes spin-offs, AU book series, etc. as well) won't go. And I don't just mean that in the relationship (pairing) sense, but also, say, taking a dark premise of the canonical world's rules to its darkest consequences while the show itself is restricted by ultimately having to keep the status quo. Maybe that's what some people mistake for the easy part, thinking "you can write what you want to, so where's the problem"...?
I hate that attitude so much. I will join you in that something extreme if I hear that, from anyone.