Writer's Block: Sheldon and Penny 4ever!
May. 12th, 2010 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I have no idea who Penny and Sheldon are. None at all. But fan fic -- well yes, I can't say I love it, but .....
I've been telling stories since before I could walk. I told stories to anyone who would listen about anything that caught my imagination. When I was 18 months old my favourite tv show was The Lone Ranger and I used to bounce in my pushchair and shout 'bang, bang, hiyo Silver" at passersby. As soon as I had the vocabulary I'd expand on it and tell everyone what I was imagining. When I was a little older my favourite tv show was Rawhide [there were a lot of Westerns on tv then] and I told stories about the characters from that. That means that at age 3 I was guilty of committing fan fiction. Not only that but I told stories about real people too. My story about the milkman and how he had lost his horse and I had helped him find it kept my grandparents bemused for a week. So that's RPF with oodles of author insertion.
Once I could write I wrote the stories down and drew them and coloured them in. Anything fell victim to my 'creativity'. Robin Hood, the Jungle Book{book not cartoon], all the westerns, stuff off the radio. Some of the stories were LONG for a six or seven year old. Sometimes I made up new characters and just played with the worlds and sometimes I made up and peopled worlds of my own and mixed in the characters from tv.
And I didn't know any of this was wrong!
In the 60s I started writing Star Trek fan fic with a friend. We made up our own characters, awful Mary-Sues, and our own ship and while they might have met the crew of the Enterprise, they didn't stay with them long. There was a whole universe out there to play around in and there were bits of canon that just begged to be changed.
And I didn't know that it was wrong to mess with canon!
My friend moved away and I stopped with the fan fic and wrote my own stories and made the mistake of showing them to my parents who sniffed and suggested a career as a secretary might be good, so the world was safe from my deathless prose. Later, much much later, with many original stories written just because I HAD to [you know the feeling I'm sure] I wrote some fan fic about the Warhammer 40K universe out of irritation at the official stories. Then I discovered Harry Potter fan fic and wrote some of that, but usually around the edges of the world, expanding on the gaps and grey areas, of which there are plenty. I made up lots of OCs and places and systems that had very little to do with the books and had a whale of a time doing it.
And I didn't realise that I was a [insert insult here] - I just thought I was having fun.
So yes I don't see the harm in fan fic because I think it's an expression of the natural human urge to share stories that the people you tell them to will recognise. Like Homer - the blind Greek guy not Simpson - who told stories of kings and gods and events that his listeners already knew about. Or Shakespeare who wrote blantant fan fic of the Decameron. Or anyone who writes an historical novel with historical characters in a central role. The listener, audience, reader already knows the story - the pleasure comes in hearing how it is told.
I'm assuming that this question has been asked due to the recent Diana Gabaldon debacle - if it hasn't it has come along very opportunely. I feel for that woman, I really do. I have read Cross Stitch, her first offering in the Outlander series, and had the same feeling I had when reading Twilight - that I had accidentally got hold of her private sexual fantasy journal and that I really shouldn't be reading it. Presumably any fan fiction she has come across has hit her like it would hit me to find candid nude photos of ME on the internet. But I soldiered on to the end of the book despite my growing irritation with the protagonists and distaste for the tone of the sex scenes. I won't be writing fan fic of it - you have to care to take the trouble to craft a well thought out piece of criminal plagiarism and you have to tell it to people who care as much as you do.
There's one thing that I have wondered a lot about with this whole "Fan ficcers stole my baybeez" thing and that is how far do you have to warp a borrowed world to make your work creative? For instance, I could set out to write a novel about Napoleon with him as the central character and draw all my research from primary sources. I could use his own letters and journals, those of people who knew him, papers of the government of the day etc, and stick absolutely to the events and chronology of his life. And that would be considered to be a piece of original fiction even though I'd actually made very little up. It would not be considered to be fan fic of a charismatic character and the world that he lived in and I could, in my dreams, get paid royalties if I managed to get it published and sold any copies. BUT if I wrote a novel about my favourite Harry Potter character - Gilbert Wimple, of whom we have a name, a job, and the fact that he has horns - and invent a whole life story for him and construct new bits of world for him to inhabit and new people for him to interact with THEN I'm not being creative but am all kinds of bad words.
I honestly can't see much difference in the levels of creativity in retelling the life of Napoleon, conforming to his canon and quoting his own reported dialogue, and constructing a life of Gilbert Wimple almost from scratch other than that I could, in my dreams, get a financial reward for one and nothing but job satisfaction for the other.
Fan fic falls in a grey area. Parody is quite legal. Writing about real people and events, as long as they are old ones, is perfectly okay. The big thing to consider is not the legality of fan fic but the feelings of the author. Some, like JKR, don't care - in fact they take it as an enormous compliment that people want to borrow their worlds to play in. Some, like Tanya Huff, say do it if you must and please have fun but they really DON'T want to know about it or see any of it. Some put out word that fan ficcers will be hunted down and shot and some shriek like a goosed moose. So I guess the best thing to do is find a fandom that's fan fic friendly.
It's a bit tough on those who are really into the idea of writing from the POV of a gorgeous modern American woman, thrown back by fate to a time long past where she can lurch from one narrowly averted rape situation to the next but there's plenty of very similar material available, some even set in the same period. No point in upsetting the internationally best selling author is there?
Jeez this has gone on a bit. sorry.
I have no idea who Penny and Sheldon are. None at all. But fan fic -- well yes, I can't say I love it, but .....
I've been telling stories since before I could walk. I told stories to anyone who would listen about anything that caught my imagination. When I was 18 months old my favourite tv show was The Lone Ranger and I used to bounce in my pushchair and shout 'bang, bang, hiyo Silver" at passersby. As soon as I had the vocabulary I'd expand on it and tell everyone what I was imagining. When I was a little older my favourite tv show was Rawhide [there were a lot of Westerns on tv then] and I told stories about the characters from that. That means that at age 3 I was guilty of committing fan fiction. Not only that but I told stories about real people too. My story about the milkman and how he had lost his horse and I had helped him find it kept my grandparents bemused for a week. So that's RPF with oodles of author insertion.
Once I could write I wrote the stories down and drew them and coloured them in. Anything fell victim to my 'creativity'. Robin Hood, the Jungle Book{book not cartoon], all the westerns, stuff off the radio. Some of the stories were LONG for a six or seven year old. Sometimes I made up new characters and just played with the worlds and sometimes I made up and peopled worlds of my own and mixed in the characters from tv.
And I didn't know any of this was wrong!
In the 60s I started writing Star Trek fan fic with a friend. We made up our own characters, awful Mary-Sues, and our own ship and while they might have met the crew of the Enterprise, they didn't stay with them long. There was a whole universe out there to play around in and there were bits of canon that just begged to be changed.
And I didn't know that it was wrong to mess with canon!
My friend moved away and I stopped with the fan fic and wrote my own stories and made the mistake of showing them to my parents who sniffed and suggested a career as a secretary might be good, so the world was safe from my deathless prose. Later, much much later, with many original stories written just because I HAD to [you know the feeling I'm sure] I wrote some fan fic about the Warhammer 40K universe out of irritation at the official stories. Then I discovered Harry Potter fan fic and wrote some of that, but usually around the edges of the world, expanding on the gaps and grey areas, of which there are plenty. I made up lots of OCs and places and systems that had very little to do with the books and had a whale of a time doing it.
And I didn't realise that I was a [insert insult here] - I just thought I was having fun.
So yes I don't see the harm in fan fic because I think it's an expression of the natural human urge to share stories that the people you tell them to will recognise. Like Homer - the blind Greek guy not Simpson - who told stories of kings and gods and events that his listeners already knew about. Or Shakespeare who wrote blantant fan fic of the Decameron. Or anyone who writes an historical novel with historical characters in a central role. The listener, audience, reader already knows the story - the pleasure comes in hearing how it is told.
I'm assuming that this question has been asked due to the recent Diana Gabaldon debacle - if it hasn't it has come along very opportunely. I feel for that woman, I really do. I have read Cross Stitch, her first offering in the Outlander series, and had the same feeling I had when reading Twilight - that I had accidentally got hold of her private sexual fantasy journal and that I really shouldn't be reading it. Presumably any fan fiction she has come across has hit her like it would hit me to find candid nude photos of ME on the internet. But I soldiered on to the end of the book despite my growing irritation with the protagonists and distaste for the tone of the sex scenes. I won't be writing fan fic of it - you have to care to take the trouble to craft a well thought out piece of criminal plagiarism and you have to tell it to people who care as much as you do.
There's one thing that I have wondered a lot about with this whole "Fan ficcers stole my baybeez" thing and that is how far do you have to warp a borrowed world to make your work creative? For instance, I could set out to write a novel about Napoleon with him as the central character and draw all my research from primary sources. I could use his own letters and journals, those of people who knew him, papers of the government of the day etc, and stick absolutely to the events and chronology of his life. And that would be considered to be a piece of original fiction even though I'd actually made very little up. It would not be considered to be fan fic of a charismatic character and the world that he lived in and I could, in my dreams, get paid royalties if I managed to get it published and sold any copies. BUT if I wrote a novel about my favourite Harry Potter character - Gilbert Wimple, of whom we have a name, a job, and the fact that he has horns - and invent a whole life story for him and construct new bits of world for him to inhabit and new people for him to interact with THEN I'm not being creative but am all kinds of bad words.
I honestly can't see much difference in the levels of creativity in retelling the life of Napoleon, conforming to his canon and quoting his own reported dialogue, and constructing a life of Gilbert Wimple almost from scratch other than that I could, in my dreams, get a financial reward for one and nothing but job satisfaction for the other.
Fan fic falls in a grey area. Parody is quite legal. Writing about real people and events, as long as they are old ones, is perfectly okay. The big thing to consider is not the legality of fan fic but the feelings of the author. Some, like JKR, don't care - in fact they take it as an enormous compliment that people want to borrow their worlds to play in. Some, like Tanya Huff, say do it if you must and please have fun but they really DON'T want to know about it or see any of it. Some put out word that fan ficcers will be hunted down and shot and some shriek like a goosed moose. So I guess the best thing to do is find a fandom that's fan fic friendly.
It's a bit tough on those who are really into the idea of writing from the POV of a gorgeous modern American woman, thrown back by fate to a time long past where she can lurch from one narrowly averted rape situation to the next but there's plenty of very similar material available, some even set in the same period. No point in upsetting the internationally best selling author is there?
Jeez this has gone on a bit. sorry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-12 10:50 pm (UTC)Also, fanfic helps us connect with other people! :) I know you and I would never have met if it hadn't been for Sirius Black.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-12 11:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-13 08:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-13 12:27 pm (UTC)I think I started writing down the stuff I made up in my head that way at age 13; I had just discovered LotR, the Silmarillion, and the fact you could have fantasy worlds complete with maps, and I promptly made my own. As far as my fandoms of that time were concerned, I was more into fan art and kept drawing Teja and Totila, or Feanor...
Of course, I was all alone in the world with that; no internet yet, and no idea that there was something called 'fandom' at all. Or that for the Tolkien stuff, I would actually find other people as much into it as me.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-13 03:34 pm (UTC)I do think it's important to respect an author's wishes if they are dead set against it, but I also think they are being foolish. I think it's a compliment that someone loved your world and your characters enough to want to see more stories about them. But if the author hates the idea, post it in a locked entry, and everybody is happy.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-05-13 04:27 pm (UTC)I digress: Penny and Sheldon (icon) are characters from The Big Bang Theory, which is one of my favourite new comedies about the wonders of geekery. They are not, in any universe, an OTP.