Tag: words words words

The Fanfic Thing

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

The Guardian (or one of its on-line columnists, at any rate), has discovered the existence of fanfic, and the predictable kerfuffle has ensued.  This moves me to repost here some of my thoughts from the last time this argument came around, which it does every three or four years whether we need it or not.

So:

If you’re a writer, and you don’t like fanfic, either with regard to your own works or in general:

Don’t waste breath and ink and internet connectivity telling fanfic writers that what they do is morally wrong, because they aren’t going to agree with you.

Likewise, don’t bother telling them that it’s illegal, either, because some of them won’t care and others of them won’t agree with you, and these days — because fanfiction in its modern form has been around for several decades now — some of the people in the latter group are in fact lawyers, and will be happy to debate legal theory with you for as long as breath and ink and internet connectivity hold out.

Your best bet is to state plainly that the whole idea of fanfic about your universe and characters really and truly deeply squicks you out, and that you really wish that people wouldn’t do it. This will, oddly enough, stop a lot of people, and will convince at least some of the ones that it doesn’t stop to keep the stuff hidden away where you don’t have to see it. Which is, frankly, about as good an outcome as you can reasonably hope for.

If you’re a fanfic writer:

Don’t waste time you could be spending on writing and reading fic in arguing with vehemently anti-fanfic pro writers. It’s an emotional thing, and you won’t convince them any more than they’ll convince you.

If an otherwise sane and rational writer says he or she doesn’t want fanfic written about his or her work, at least consider not writing it. Or at the very least, don’t go out of your way to write it just because their arguments got your back up, because spite is a lousy reason for writing something. And if the muse is riding you hard and you just can’t stop yourself, at the very very least don’t wave the resulting fic around in places where the writer can’t help but take notice of it.

Also — it’s pretty much never a good idea to send a copy of your fanfic to the author in question. Even if they’re known to be kindly disposed toward the idea of fanfic in general, their reaction to fanfic about their stuff in particular is not to be relied upon — they may find it embarrassing, or may feel obliged to object to it for legal reasons regardless of their actual feelings, or may be concerned that reading someone else’s interpretations of the material will influence them unduly.

Common sense, people.  Exercise it.

Thinking About Criticism

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Writers — as I should know, being one — have a tendency to regard literary critics as, at best, players for the other side.  They spend their time, the writer’s mind insists, in pointing out the flaws and failures of more creative minds; the novelist and poet Robert Graves summed up the writers’ argument most memorably in his poem “Ogres and Pygmies.”

It is, I suppose, an unavoidable problem with literary criticism: without meaning to, it gives pride of place to those texts which are productive of analysis. There’s a lot more that can be said about something complex, knotty, and variously flawed than can be said about something clear and simple and damn-near perfect. “Wow. You have got to read this!” is an honest response, and one most if not all writers would give their eye teeth to produce in their readers, but it never got anybody tenure.

But it helps, I think, to remind oneself that hidden inside every piece of literary criticism, no matter how labored or abstruse, is another voice saying, “This nifty bit of writing — let me show you it!”

On the Danger of Confusing Literary Criticism with Real Life

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There are differences between the two, and they are crucial.

Difference #1: Literary criticism deals with texts; real life deals with people. Texts have no feelings, and can be taken apart and examined from all angles without feeling the slightest pain. People, on the other hand, are apt to find such operations intrusive, especially when performed upon them without prior invitation. Nor does the deconstruction of one text cause sympathetic pain in other texts that happen to share a common author, or reside upon the same shelf.

Difference #2: In literary criticism, authorial intent matters somewhere between very little and not at all. (Since most of history’s authors are dead and beyond interrogation, this perhaps makes a virtue of necessity; but I digress.) In real life, intention matters a very great deal; it is the difference, for example, between accidentally spilling some oil on the basement stairs, and deliberately greasing them.

Wrong Word of the Day

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Today’s wrong word is “smirk.”

Writers — especially beginning writers — use it far too much, and in the wrong places.  They use it in places where a wry smile, or even a plain ordinary smile, would be more appropriate.  They put it on the faces of characters who are meant to be sympathetic and likeable.  And they make me want to yell, “Stop!”

As Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

According to the dictionary, to smirk is to smile in an affected, often offensively self-satisfied manner., and a smirk is an affected, often offensively self-satisfied smile.

Neither of these are things that you should want associated with that nice character you hope that your readers will like and identify with.  That is all.

(All right.  I admit it.  It’s summer and I’m cranky.  But I’ve been carrying that peeve around with me for years.)