fan/author otp

[lotesse]

no_remorse wrote something that got me thinking about the ideal closeness between fen and TPTB. Because I'm sort of in the middle of an unusual situation.

My boyfriend's been working on a fantasy novel for the past two years, and very early on in our relationship I started editing for him. It's become a routine for us--anything he writes during the day will be read to me in the evening, and we'll talk about it, dig up problems, ect. And because he's bloody brilliant, I've fallen completely in love with this story. I've read my print-out of the current draft dozens of times. And for the past seven years or so, my interation with texts that I love has become explicitly via fanfic. So what do I do? I start ficcing it.

Except that I'm dating the author, and have a large amount of input in his writing process.

This really came clear to me a few weeks ago. He had got round to one of the characters introduced long before in the story, who I had become quite attatched to. As is my default, I had mentally written fic about her. Some of it I had written down. I had, as is often done in fannish circles, extrapolated a backstory for her. And the Boy was writing something totally different that, to me, didn't make sense of the character.

We talked about my concerns, and in the end he worked something out himself taking them into consideration. But it felt very strange, realizing that ficcing his novel was perhaps not such an innocent or harmless pursuit. Because I don't want to influence the source tet, not like that. One of the things that I love about fic is it's property of twisting canon, peering round at it from another point of view. Reinterpreting it. Except that I also don't want to stop making my silly little stories. It makes me happy, and I don't really know any other way of reading a beloved text anymore. I've become very used to it.

We joke about my slashing it. But he reads my fic. And, in the end, I really want this to be his story, except for the part of me that wants it to be perfectly tailored to my textual kinks. What harm does fanfic do? There's no question here of legal issues or anything like that.

Is that the only reason for the prohibition between fen mixing overmuch with the creators of their source media? It feels like there's more to it than that, because I felt strange about it even with nothing such as a legal threat in sight. It has more to do, I think, with our idea of creative property. I feel like I'm interfering in his book, his creative material.

There's much talk about fanfiction being a revival of the old oral traditions of storytelling, where the tale doesn't belong to anyone but it told again and again and again, a thousand variations played on a melody so old that no one can remember who first sang it. Perhaps the awkwardness I feel comes from a clash between that anarchic storytelling style and our current cult of the artist as an individual. But my question would be whether one method would be better, ethically or artistically, than the other. Which best serves the artist, and which best serves the art? It does seem sad that that ancient maker or melodies has been so completely forgotten that only the most distant variations on his tunes have survived. Because he must have been a very great artist, and to have poured all his soul into his creation. But the tapestries of the old stories that have been told and re-told are imcomparably rich and fair.

I know that I've influenced the Boy's writing through the editorial process. Is my fic doing the same thing? Or should I not write it? Or if I do, should he not read it? Who, if anyone, does our closeness as author and fan damage?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think you should staple the two works together, rewrite it in screenplay form, and sell it to Hollywood. I mean, this sort of interaction is just priceless!

J. K. Rowling reads her fanfiction and we don't see her losing any creative steam or making Harry and Draco fall in love by accident. I say he does what strikes him as best and credits his loving girlfriend on the back page. Or at least gives you a cameo in the feature film.

~Ali

[lotesse]

Oh, see, with JKR I think that we do. One of the most common responses to Phoenix was, "This reads like fic," and not in a good way.

At any rate, I've already got sort of half of the female romantic lead's personality, so no gripes there.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

Oh, see, with JKR I think that we do. One of the most common responses to Phoenix was, "This reads like fic," and not in a good way.

I'm not sure whether you're implying that she was actually influenced by fic, because I think any similarities between what she wrote and what fans wrote before she published the fifth book are there because of a) fanfic writers successfully following some clues about what was going to happen in the series; and b) coincidence.

I know that I heard from a slew of readers after OotP who said that they were glad that I didn't kill Sirius, for instance, since they were upset with her for doing just that. The upshot of there being so much fanfiction for the HP universe is that readers are feeling more and more convinced that they don't need to be satisfied with whatever JKR hands us; there is a fic-version of her world out there to suit just about any reader if the original contains something that upsets you (like Sirius's death).

I think that similarities that happened to exist between OotP and fanfics that some readers disliked for whatever reason are the main reason for the unfavorable comparison between OotP and fanfics; it's not really based on OotP's individual merits. I sincerely doubt that JKR followed the lead of those writers; it's far more likely that they followed the clues she provided in the text or, in a couple of cases, accidentally hit on the same thing she had already decided to do.

For instance, I happened to pick exactly the same date for Percy's birthday that she later revealed on her website--August 22--and had the sheer dumb luck to light upon the correct year for Lucius Malfoy's birth, as revealed in OotP: 1954. I happened to put the Ministry underground and put magical windows in the Ministry to compensate for the lack of view. I made Ginny a Seeker and Ron a Keeper. I put Harry on trial in the same courtroom where he had his hearing in OotP. And dozens of other things. But I doubt that any of these plans were not already in place for OotP well before I ever started writing my fics.

The goal for a lot of fic writers (although not all) is to have people say that what they've written seems like it could have come from JKR. So why should JKR continuing to write like herself--which now means bearing a resemblance to any fic writers who have successfully blurred the line between fic and the original--reflect poorly on her rather than reflecting well on the fic authors?

[lotesse]

I don't really have the relative data to determine where exactly the influences fall. It is entirely possible that the sheer body of fic makes it so that everything written in the Potterverse seems fic-like.

But just in terms of opinion, that whole "reads like fic" thing is definitely out there, and not in a good way. That's what I'm more interested in--the perceptions and valuement of such stylistic crossover between creator and fans, and how both parties are effected.

[(Anonymous)]

What does it mean for something to "read like a fic?"

~Ali

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

There's much talk about fanfiction being a revival of the old oral traditions of storytelling, where the tale doesn't belong to anyone but it told again and again and again, a thousand variations played on a melody so old that no one can remember who first sang it. Perhaps the awkwardness I feel comes from a clash between that anarchic storytelling style and our current cult of the artist as an individual. But my question would be whether one method would be better, ethically or artistically, than the other. Which best serves the artist, and which best serves the art? It does seem sad that that ancient maker or melodies has been so completely forgotten that only the most distant variations on his tunes have survived. Because he must have been a very great artist, and to have poured all his soul into his creation. But the tapestries of the old stories that have been told and re-told are imcomparably rich and fair.

I think this is a really important question, but I see it less as a question for fic as for how we talk about/write about fic. In older writing on folk traditions, or those old poems you see credited to "anon," you see critics going on about the pure, organic spirit of the people, the folk, and where it can be seen, etc. And to me, though I understand the reasons why the cult of the individual author has been under fire for the last 40 years in "high culture," that's a damaging fantasy about the nature of non-elite artistic production. There are more positive ways of looking at it, but it is important to remember that every artist is individual, and that every artist also produces as part of a cultural system, regardless of their social class or how they distribute their work (though there are methods of distribution that cut short, at least temporarily, the process of adaptation.

So your comment is about the divide between the "original" writer and the fic, but I think it goes for fic writers themselves- that is, that even though we see quite clearly what system and relationships and sources produce fic in some ways (we don't trace *all* the sources that impact a particular fic), the fic writer too is an individual artist who deserves credit.