âI think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that itâs derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn. Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I canât speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and theyâre like âOMG Dante youâre so cool.â He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesnât have a single original plotâalthough much of it would be more rightly termed RPFâand then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didnât like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Donât even get me started on Spenser. Hereâs what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude Iâve never heard of? Thereâs a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.) I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorshipâbarriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very realâand blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didnât necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your workâto have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). Whatâs amazing is how many people who didnât fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often werenât discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If youâve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say. I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. Iâll admit I donât read a lot of fic these days because most of it is notâand I know how snobbish this soundsâparticularly well-written. That doesnât mean itâs ânot goodââthere are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. Thatâs why fic is awesomeâit creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what theyâre doing. Thereâs tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. But whether Iâm reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldnât exist. (And then Iâd be out of a job and, frankly, I donât know how to do anything else.)â
amandla
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prguitarman
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