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?