I will do just that, artemis. Okay, here’s his answer:
I knew you people would ask me to define what I meant by “cheat.” 
It’s hard to say exactly why, but I feel “cheat” is the right word. “Lazy” might also work, but it doesn’t quite bring the flavour of the idea I wanted to discuss. That it’s not quite right, not quite kosher, slightly unsavoury…you know what I mean?
Hey, good point, Fish, that the Greeks were always basically writing fanfic. I’ll have to pas that one on to my husband, the sceptic.
Really? :rolleyes:
I mean come on Askia, we all know that by now.
Something similar was done years ago with the Original Series, and published. At least two stories, one with Trek characters finding themselves on a 1960s TV show and one with Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley ending up on the real Enterprise. I read the latter and it was good.
Somewhere on the internet there is a C S Lewis fanfic by me 
Not all slash has quite that level of willful disregard-- but lately it does. If you can move past the conceit, especially when it goes unexplained, and concentrate on the writing itself, you might be pleasantly surprised by the strength of characterization. As you pointed out, it’s a fantasy within a known science fiction property.
If it helps, juuust consider all Trek slash as existing in some Meta-Gay-Lesbian-Bi-Transgender Mirror Universe where the point of divergence hinders on people’s sexuality. The only time you seem to see established characters’ homo-or-bisexuality in Trek canon is the Mirror Universe episodes, anyway.
BTW, I really gotta quit misspelling your last name with that extra “c”.
I thought I was dropping a bombshell. I personally did not realize slash was that old until shortly before I posted that. I honestly thought slash was a 90s phenomenon spurred on by the internet.
I think it’s storytelling.
Is it a “cheat” by using (at least as a basis) characters and situations invented by others? Maybe…but I doubt that it’s really anything new. Take mythology[…]
Would you believe that I actually started a Greek mythology paralel before reading Fish’s post? Honest to any god you’ll name. :eek:
So yeah, I’d say that fanfiction, in one form or another, has probably been around since the days when we were stealing meat from saber-toothed cats. Only now, instead of Hercules or Lancelot or Jesus*, we use Spock and Shinji.
Is it a legitimate “art form”? Well, what the hell is legitimate art? A urinal with a signature on it? A false-color tile painting of Marilyn Monroe? An alternate-history scenario of Hitler invading England? James Cameron’s Terminator movies? A variation on a musical theme? Are they art proper, derivitive “cheating,” or entertaining pablum? Maybe one of those, maybe all of them. Maybe they just are, and their categorization depends only on the observer.
*Apocrypha, anyone?
To the OP:
does your husband think that Chris Claremon cheated when he took up X-Men?
He didn’t invent them and, unlike fanfic writers, got paid for writing them. But he took a bunch of obscure characters invented by other people and made them famous.
I feel like I should say at this point that I am not opposed to fanfic; I just need to get clear in my head if it is ethical or not. Your points are excellent, Ranchoth. Maybe that’s the word I was looking for - “legitimate.” Is it legitimate fiction?
Nava, I will put that question to my husband as well. Another interesting facet of this debate - NO! NOT A DEBATE! A DISCUSSION! NO DEBATING GOING ON HERE!
Ogamighty, if this didn’t ever give the Aspergeek in me the shivers. I’d guess the various fandoms are much more focused on defining pissy little categories and pigeonholes for their fiction than in the actual quality or readability of the works.
Legitimate in the sense that it uses previously existing characters and “worlds,” yes. As others have pointed out above, plenty of published and well-regarded fiction has done that.
In the sense that it’s good writing… well, that depends upon who’s writing it. Some stories I’ve seen are barely literate or coherent, and some are much better than published novels (and have less typos).
With ethics, we come up against the issue of copyright and no, I don’t think we fanfic writers have a good leg to stand on here–but I don’t think that’s what your husband is addressing here.
For me as a prolific fanfic writer (nearly 100 stories in the last 10 years), writing stories in established fictional settings is giving a pre-established audience of readers what they want–more stories about characters in the fandom they like and are interested in. I write for my own entertainment, and post for other people in the same fan-bases who like the sort of stories I write. I can’t say I’m terribly concerned with the disapproval of people who don’t get or enjoy fanfic or slash; if they don’t like it, they are not obliged to read it.
I’d say it’s ethical as long as the writer is not trying to pass his work off as officially sanctioned. And it’s legitimate if the author writes something new. Lots of great fiction has been written with a strong foundation in previous works (although, usually works in the public domain, if the author actually wants to make any money on it). Would you consider Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to be unethical or illegitimate? Or the Disney public domain stories?
The thing about fanfiction is that it’s usually bad. And not just a little bad, but truely dreadful. Sure, there are some talented writers out there, but they are greatly overshadowed by the number of ultra-fans with no talent churning out dreck.
shrugs It may be, but so is the Extended Universe, and it seems to be well-embraced amongst Star Wars fans.
Fanfiction follows the rule that 90% of everything is crap. However, that 10% makes me not give a flying fajita if it is cheating because I like it.
Gaudere’s Law…
If memory serves, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006 went to Geraldine Brooks (Viking is the publisher.) Her novel basically tells the story of the life of the father of the four girls from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Basically, this is a piece of fanfiction. A good one. Is it a “cheat”? Dunno.
I’m definitely coming around to that way of thinking.
Yes, and no.
Yes, it’s a cheat because the writer of fanfiction often gets to skip a lot of the need for background that can build a world and make it believable. It’s a cheat because the characters that the writer will be working with are quite well filled out, and the writer doesn’t need to do much work to develop them in the mind of his readers.
Finally, it’s a cheat because fanfiction will get read more than most stuff that ends up on a slush pile. Simply because there’s a ready-made audience for it.
But that last part is also why I think it’s also useful to the writer. Most fanfic readers will give feedback to an author, if he or she makes it clear that they’d welcome it. So a beginning writer can focus on character interaction, and tune that, and get feedback from people who know the characters and scenes. This sort of thing can be invaluable for a novice.
Because I agree that it is a cheat, I’d never written any fanfic for a series that I knew the creator objected to having fans writing in. But I can’t say that I never broke that kind of rule, since sometimes the word isn’t out where it’s easy to find.
On the other hand, even if fanfiction is a cheat, where does one draw the line for derivative works? Several have been mentioned upthread. A particularly famous fanfiction character is Lancelot - who was added to the decidedly English story of King Arthur by French court bards. Now he’s part of the canon for that cycle of stories.
As long as the writer treats the canon that is being used with respect I really don’t have a great moral problem with fanfiction. (Of course I’ll admit that there are a lot of different definitions of respect.)
You say cheat, I say tool. A crutch is a tool, which one eventually discards — or perhaps not a crutch, perhaps training wheels instead.
Most people begin to learn to do art by imitation: they copy, or trace, or imitate the style of another artist. Some beginning illustrators cover ground already covered by others, and only then branch out and find a new style. Even under the old master-apprentice system, apprentice artist were studying the master’s forms.
Writing is no different, really. The technique of pastiche, as I said, is a long-accepted form of writing where an author imitates the style and subject matter of another author, usually treating the original material with respect.
Although much fan fiction is pastiche, not all of it is — I think we can agree that some fan fiction fails to take the original material with sufficient respect to qualify.
It’s storytelling Made Simple: it avoids the really difficult parts of writing a story – creating memorable characters and (in science fiction and fantasy, at least) backgrounds.
It is something of a cheat, but can be a type of practice – as long as you get away from it and start writing something original.
What about the case of comic book fanfiction? Different writing teams have written all the Batman books, for example, for years now. Is only the original Batman writer the “true” author, with all the later ones writing fanfiction? If not, then essentially the only extra thing the later writers have is the approval of the owner of the character’s rights (in this case, DC) which essentially only ensure that the writing is up to a good standard (well, most of the time) and means they can’t be sued for selling it.