McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
Fanfiction: Is It Real Writing?
trboturtle:
There are several things to remember:
1) Most fanfiction is written for enjoyment of the writer and a few others and will never reach the quality of "professional" writing.
2) There is a lot of crap disguised as fanfiction out there and sometimes you want to scream in frustration as the writer has no idea about what they're doing.
3) If you see that an anime fanfiction is rated as a lemon, that means it has SSC and is NSFW.
4) There is WAY too much Dragonball (37,145), Inuyasha (103,915), and Naruto (304,210) fanfiction stories out there (Numbers from Fanfiction.net) ;D
Craig
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: Zuriel on June 28, 2012, 05:16:26 PM ---I disagree that fans do not "get it" well enough to write a fanfic if its too complex.
--- End quote ---
I don't necessarily mean if it's too complex, at all. (Though don't start me on Homestuck fandom.) I mean more, there's a lot of fanfic out there that takes any number of interesting relationships at very precise levels of emotional weight and realisms and turns them into.. banging the Barbie dolls together. (Rather a lot of Aubrey/Maturin fanfic tends to be a particularly vile quagmire in this direction, frex.)
--- Quote --- And I have yet to find many stories that completely satisfied me
--- End quote ---
I've found quite a number that have, myself, which is pleasing. And the ones that don't... I am usually motivated to move on from, or sometimes to write something that is to some degree a response (at the level that The Forever War is a response to Starship Troopers), but actually trying to "fix" or expand one someone else's universe doesn't do it for me. At the end of the day, it's not my baby, and the brood of stories I have of my own are quite demanding enough.
--- Quote ---Good writers are not immune to making bad choices, usually messing up a good thing when their egos begin to inflate and they believe everything they write is golden.
--- End quote ---
I think you may be using a different definition of "good writer" from me, here.
--- Quote ---Fanfic, to me, is quite the compliment to a writer, that the author's story is so well thought of that people want more. It doesn't mean the fanfic writer didn't like the story and wrote his own story to subvert the original. Quite the opposite in most cases.
--- End quote ---
I would see subverting as kind of more respectful, actually. At least it's indicating that you've given the source material some critical thought, rather than just wanting to turn out more of the same.
--- Quote ---I have run into a few people who don't read fanfic because they don't want to get "confused" over what's canon and what is not...which seems rather bizaare to me, as these people are very well-versed in the stories, and I would think they are highly aware of what actually took place in the original work. It's their perogative, but a rather flimsy excuse.
--- End quote ---
One of the fundamental things here seems to me that, certainly IME writing and in the experience of pretty much everyone I know who writes, there's a great deal more detail about the world in a writer's mind and notes, however they manage that, than shows up in the actual novels. (We have plenty of WoJs alluding to things which have not made it into the DF novels or stories, for example.) And no matter how well a fan knows a published text, they can only extrapolate from the above-water portion of the iceberg.
(That latter para in the context of fanficcing works of individual authors; again, shared universes like Star Trek feel to me to be in a different space. I'm not drawn to Star Trek fanfic because I find that universe morally unpleasant and kind of dull - and as literary responses go, thinking about the Prime Directive as a piece of morality one finds unpleasant is an acknowledged major influence on Iain Banks' Culture novels, which i am far happier to have in the world than a comparable volume of additional Trek fanfic.)
Quantus:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on June 28, 2012, 06:31:27 PM ---I don't necessarily mean if it's too complex, at all. (Though don't start me on Homestuck fandom.) I mean more, there's a lot of fanfic out there that takes any number of interesting relationships at very precise levels of emotional weight and realisms and turns them into.. banging the Barbie dolls together. (Rather a lot of Aubrey/Maturin fanfic tends to be a particularly vile quagmire in this direction, frex.)
--- End quote ---
This made me think of something almost on topic that I want to share anyway. For those of you who dont watch much Anime, there is a deaded phenomenon called the Filler Arc, that we all despise. Let me explain: the majority of anime's out there began as Manga's, which is a fancy way to say weekly serial comic book. This is generally the testing ground, and the popular ones are taken and animated. But in some cases the manga continues on a weekly basis, same as the anime. And since neither miss more that a handful of weeks each year (no half year seasons over there), and the anime can usually cover much more material in a 1/2 hour episode than the manga would each week, the Anime will eventually catch up to the Manga. When this happens they will either branch completely, or the anime will enter the dread realm of the Filler Arc. This is where a secondary team are given the task to fill the screen with something their audience might find somewhat entertaining, while everyone waits it out for the Manga, and the original Creator of the whole thing) to gain some distance over the anime. What this means is a few weeks, months, or even years (damn you naruto) where there is basically an imposter puppetting the characters (like barbie dolls), but completely ignoring the ongoing character developments, and being unable to do anything that will have a lasting impact since they cannot disagree with what the mange will have done, once they get back to the real story lines. It makes a mess of the timelines, and defaults all the characters back to the same interactions and development they had at the very beginning.
Yarg, I say!
ok, what were we talking about?
--- Quote ---One of the fundamental things here seems to me that, certainly IME writing and in the experience of pretty much everyone I know who writes, there's a great deal more detail about the world in a writer's mind and notes, however they manage that, than shows up in the actual novels. (We have plenty of WoJs alluding to things which have not made it into the DF novels or stories, for example.) And no matter how well a fan knows a published text, they can only extrapolate from the above-water portion of the iceberg.
(That latter para in the context of fanficcing works of individual authors; again, shared universes like Star Trek feel to me to be in a different space. I'm not drawn to Star Trek fanfic because I find that universe morally unpleasant and kind of dull - and as literary responses go, thinking about the Prime Directive as a piece of morality one finds unpleasant is an acknowledged major influence on Iain Banks' Culture novels, which i am far happier to have in the world than a comparable volume of additional Trek fanfic.)
--- End quote ---
This is why I love it when a world releases a tabletop RPG, because it it gives the author a chance to release as much of that extra material as possible (barring spoilery stuff) in a way that they dont always have time or opportunity in the main works. Thats assuming the author works closely with the RPG dev team and confidently call it cannon. Star Wars did this, DF has. Ive seen some others with RPG rulebooks like WOT, but that was a generic writup on top of a basic d20 system, it really didnt give you anything that wasnt already fully explained in the books. And then there are things like Forgotten Realms novels where you can almost hear the dice rolling when the do certain things, and they would go to great lengths to explain away changes that were made for game balance.
Fun times...
The Deposed King:
I guess there's nothing wrong with Fanfiction, so long as its legal, as mentioned before etc.
Personally if I wasn't writing independent works, I would write fanfic with the intent to get into a continuing world, as those mentioned, Forgotton Realms, Warhammer, etc. If not I would probably not write it.
I'd rather write my own stuff and tend to have a slightly negative feeling about mucking around in another author's world without express permission. But that's mostly just me. Same as I don't like reading series books out of order or reading prequels.
The Deposed King
cenwolfgirl:
it is what ever you are confitable with and want to write
(oviusly as long as it is legal )
i have read so very good fanfic in the made an art section
but have never written any my self
but would like to see if i could try one day
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version