Challenge: Fan-Fiction

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews.)

Prompt: Thoughts on Fan Fiction

I'm going to resist the urge to define fan fiction (fanfic) here, because surely anybody reading my blog knows already... and if not, Google is easy. And based on the prompt, I'd assume that this is looking for us to address the question of whether fanfic is... I guess I'd say "legitimate" art, since that seems to be the usual debate around it. You're writing stories about the characters and settings and world of somebody else's stories; is that Art, or is it merely Derivation?

...And that's not a debate I particularly care to have. The idea is that writing stories that feature characters/worlds/magic systems/settings whose traits are already well-defined is arguably easier than coming up with your own characters and world and etc. I'm not honestly certain that that's true. But even if we accept for the sake of argument that it is, well... staying true to those well-defined characters/etc. while going your own way is its own challenge, and very easy to get wrong. And trying to make that work is also an excellent way to develop critical reading skills, not to mention writing skills. 

And on top of that all art is ultimately derivative. There is no new thing under the sun. Creativity, as they say, is the art of hiding your sources. No small number of creative works exist as nothing more or less than reactions to, or expansions upon, earlier works. Northanger Abby really isn't a terribly interesting book if you don't know any of the other books it's making unspoken remarks upon. Robert E. Howard's stories of Conan the Barbarian share the same world as H.P. Lovecraft's cosmic horrors, though admittedly that was more collaborative than "derivative" -- the two were contemporaries, and correspondents. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber have an entire role-playing game based on them -- so does The Wheel of Time -- so anybody who plays either of those is arguably engaging in fan fiction. Or, more directly...  Heck, the books of the Bible build upon and argue against and exist in a sort of constant, fraught dialogue with each other.

So I guess where I'm going with this is that my main thought on fan fiction is that the line between fan fiction and other fiction is waaaaaaaaaaay more blurry than a lot of the modern dialogue or debate would have you believe.What we call fanfiction nowadays is a brilliant and elaborate way of engaging with an author's works (even if, for legal reasons, they aren't allowed to read it themselves). Stories written in reaction to existing works -- or building on them -- may have the serial numbers filed off, but they're awfully close cousins to fanfics. 

And I just finished reading a pair of stories, where the second author had written a story in the same world, with the same characters, exploring a possible situation that the original author never intended, which is published as a legitimate piece of literature. (This eBook includes both the original and the follow-up, and the follow-up is both a perfectly good story in its own right and also fanfiction by any standard definition of the term.) 

So many people start writing because they love reading. It seems abjectly silly to criticize them for writing about the story-worlds that they love.