Quote:
Originally Posted by Belfaborac
As far as reading it goes, I guess some people really, really, REALLY fall in love with characters, worlds and whatnot and simply don't want it to end. Fair enough of course, but the few fan fiction stories I've sampled have left a lot to be desired and I personally wouldn't want to "pollute" a great reading experience by continuing onto inferior material.
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Thank you for calling what I do "pollution". I guess you can determine from my posts here that my writing is inferior and leaves a lot to be desired. Gee. Thanks.
There are several reasons for writing fanfic. One of them is, indeed, a training ground for inexperienced writers. Just like many artists start off duplicating famous paintings and copying painters' styles, it can be easier for writers to set stories in existing backgrounds, especially if they're doing any type of fantasy, SF, or historical writing, so the world-building is already done, and they can concentrate on the story. It's really no different in that sense than doing, say, Hemingway pastiches, except that one is usually somewhat less reluctant to share the results (which might not be a good thing). It's a way to learn, and to find your own voice.
Another reason is the "what if" aspect -- exploring the things that might have happened, or that happened offstage, or before or after the canon storyline. Take, say,
Star Trek. You have a ship with hundreds of people on it, in a galaxy with uncounted billions, and out of necessity, the show follows only a small group of those people, and really shows the viewpoint of only a tiny handful. For a lot of people, we just have to wonder ... what
was that red-shirt thinking as the monster ate his buddy? What was going on in Engineering that was summed up in "all okay now, Captain"? What happened on the Tholian ships? How did things work for someone else? All of those people have stories, and some of them call out to be told -- different ones for different writers, of course.
Still another is continuation. Like Carriebear, I write fanfic for TV shows. Canceled TV shows. Canceled TV shows whose stars are retired or dead. There will never be another episode of the shows I love, so if there are going to be any more stories about those characters and those places, they'll have to be fanfic. It may not be as good as the original but it's all we've got. And in some cases, given my fondness for corny TV shows from the 60s and 70s, the fanfic can be, and
is, better than canon (someone with all the time they need and writing for love can write a heck of a lot better than someone being paid to turn out a 22-minute script in a couple of weeks). I've seen some very, very good stories written as fanfic.
And, really, what
is fanfic? Take the
Mission Impossible movies. In my opinion, they were not only fanfic, they were
bad fanfic. They were fanfic because they weren't written by the original canon authors, but by other random people decades later. They had the legal right to do so, yes, unlike we more conventional fanfic writers who trample on copyrights and trademarks as a hobby, but that's really the only way in which their writing differed. Well, that and the fact that they showed absolutely no respect for the original, something which would attract harsh criticism in the more rigorous parts of the fanfic world. When you look at any of the cases in which Hollywood has dug up the moldering corpses of dead TV shows and made dubious movies out of them, I would argue that they, too, are fanfic, and wouldn't be accepted by good fanfic writers because of their differences from canon. And the novelizations ... ouch. Just because Joe Schmoe was paid to write a spin-off novel and some fanfic writer does it for free doesn't mean Joe's book is any more "correct", and given some of the novelizations I've seen (hey, I was desperate, and they were what was on the charity book table!) a lot of times it's bad, worse, or downright dismal. Writers of spin-offs are the people who are willing to write in someone else's world, fitting certain guidelines, and accept no rights to any of their creations -- how is that really different from fanfic, aside from them getting paid?
Yes, there is a lot of
bad fanfic out there. There's a lot of utterly terrible fanfic. The current trend that all writing should be praised, and if you "don't like, don't read" isn't helping, to say the least. But is that really unique to fanfic? I refer you to Smashwords for "pro" (at least in the sense of being for sale) counter-examples. We've seen enough utter dreck, I would think, to know that the writing of dreck is not limited to those writing out of love; there are plenty who do it for money, too. The major fanfic archives have no formal filters. Anyone can write anything, and someone probably has. Yes, that can (and, to a painful extent, does) include bad romance written by teenage virgins. But again, that's not unique to fanfic. We're not that lucky. But, although the signal to noise ratio may be execrable, that's not to say there's no signal. I'd venture to guess there's a lot more good fanfic based on old TV shows (my personal area of interest) than there are good Hollywood movies based on the same, because frankly I haven't seen or heard of a single one of the latter.
I guess the bottom line to the question of why we write fanfic -- and not just teenage girls learning to write, but established pros under pen names, and published authors who are making a living at something else, and just about anyone else you can think of -- is simple: it's fun. It's fun to write, and it's fun to read.
Seriously ... haven't you ever wondered what the characters were doing when you weren't looking? Or what that guy who never even had a name in canon did after all the heroes were gone? Or what if ... or if only ... or if this goes on? If you have, then you've taken the first step to writing fanfic.