About Fanfic
NOTE: This essay is aimed chiefly
at newcomers to fan fiction -- but veteran readers/writers of fanfic
may find the latter sections, notably "Collaboration & Courtesy", of
interest.
If professional publishing and media are the major leagues,
fanfic -- or fanfiction, to use the full phrase -- is sandlot
baseball and pickup basketball games down at the Y. Writers of
fan fiction aren't in the game for money; they write about their
favorite characters from Star Trek or Yu-Gi-Oh or the
Harry Potter books because they want more about those
characters. And while some fanfic writers go on to write and
publish fiction as pros, others say they're happy to stay in the
fanfic sandbox.
On one hand, the stories are a great compliment to the creators
of the characters -- it means the original storytellers have
fashioned something with which readers or viewers have bonded on a
deep personal level. On the other, they open a serious legal
can of worms, because copyright and trademark law frown harshly on
writers who borrow other people's creative property in ways that may
diminish its value.
Before (and After) the Web
Fanfic in the pre-Internet world rarely attracted much attention,
because it mostly existed "under the radar", practiced by small but
lively communities of fans who circulated thick manuscripts by US
mail and gathered occasionally for weekend-long discussions of their
efforts. One might see "mediazines" offered for sale at SF
conventions, but the prices barely allowed writers to recover their
printing costs, and much of what was being written involved TV
series long since cancelled and out of production.
The advent of online message services brought fanfic writers out
into the open. CompuServe, Prodigy, and GEnie all developed
communities of fanfic writers -- in some cases, representing fans of
popular literary universes as well as television and films.
And as the Web evolved into its present form, sharing fanfic became
as easy as posting text on one's home page.
In the case of media-driven fanfic, the changes have been mostly
in form rather than attitude. The corporate owners of such
franchises as Buffy and Star Trek officially frown on
fanfic, but as a rule they only go after it if it's drawn
specifically to their attention, and/or it's outrageous enough to
make the franchise look bad (i.e. "slash", the notorious subset of
fanfic that revels in intimate (and often same-sex)
relationships).
Authors of prose fiction have been less tolerant -- and with good
reason. The ease of Web publishing (and desktop publishing,
for that matter) puts literary fanfic in much more direct
competition with its professionally published counterpart.
Badly written fanfic can more easily trash the image of an author's
original work, and better-written material can either steal "market
share" from the author's books or take the characters in directions
contrary to those their creator had in mind. Even in the
pre-Web world, prominent novelists including the late Marion Zimmer
Bradley and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro have been involved in serious legal
disputes with fanfic writers and editors; in MZB's case, the dispute
deep-sixed a substantially completed Darkover novel and spelled the
end of a series of shared-world anthologies set in the Darkover
universe.
Collaboration & Courtesy
Despite the persuasive legal arguments that
fanfiction is a legal no-no, it's often difficult for authors to
mount objections to fanfic as a matter of principle. One
reason is that no few pro authors have written it themselves, though
it's vanishingly rare for a writer to circulate fanfic openly after
turning professional.
But there's a more significant explanation -- and
it's that pro authors practice their own form of fanfiction under a
different name: "shared world" fiction. The cabals of writers
behind Thieves' World,, or the Wild Cards project, or
the Forgotten Realms novels are engaging in much the same
sort of collective creation practiced by fanfic authors writing
stories about Buffy Summers or Fox Mulder or Clark Kent. And
the lines blur even further when one looks at cases such as the
1632 universe created by Eric Flint and populated by fan authors
in the Flint-edited anthology Ring of Fire -- or the novels
of Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair and its sequels), which
have a great deal in common with the subclass of fanfic dealing in
"crossover" stories, where characters from one invented universe
encounter characters from another.
One might argue, with considerable merit, that the
better distinction -- from a literary standpoint, anyway -- isn't
between "fanfic" and "profic", but between fiction written in a
shared or collaborative universe and fiction written in an
individually created universe (by the creator thereof). This
doesn't eliminate all of the legal quagmires associated with fanfic
as it's practiced, but it does provide a model that may help both
fan and pro writers better understand the creative issues involved,
and it helps explain why the ethics of media-based fanfic and fanfic
derived from literary sources don't always run in parallel.
Media and gaming universes are collaborative by their very nature,
while the considerable majority of universes created in and for
original novels are the product of individual creators.
In Conclusion....
From a strict legal standpoint, circulating or
"publishing" fanfic is a risky proposition; there's always the
chance that someone wearing a Copyright Police badge will show up.
(Note here that writing fanfic is not, in and of itself,
generally illegal -- it's the distribution that can get one in hot
water.)
That said, fanfic writers who are (a) writing in a
universe that was collaborative to start with, and (b) keeping
anything too (porno)graphic out of the hands of minors, are probably
not in danger of rousing anyone's serious wrath. At this late
date, corporate media-universe owners can't easily rebottle the
relevant djinni -- there's just too much fanfic out on the Net
already. Indeed, big corporate interests have recently stuck
their toes into the fanfictional pond, launching a site called
FanLib.com that's aroused a good
deal of controversy among the fan community.
Fanfic written in an individually created universe
-- which is to say, spun off from a professional author's novel or
novels -- is another matter entirely. Unless an author
explicitly posts a "Sandbox Open" sign, the polite (and legally
sound) thing to do is to leave that universe alone.
The handful of links below should allow the
interested novice to investigate the world of fanfic in somewhat
more detail. Be warned that the quality of fanfic (like the
quality of "profic") can vary extremely widely, and that some
archive sites are more carefully edited than others. If you go
spelunking in any of those I've listed, be prepared for anything --
and remember, you've been warned.
Resources: Theory & Practice
Chilling Effect
on Fanfic & Copyright
Dr. Merlin's
Guide to Fan Fiction
Scrivener's
Error on Fan Fiction
Archives: Read At Your Own Risk!
Fanfiction.Net
The Gargoyles
Fanfiction Archive
Yuletide Treasure