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Okay. I have to confess that I haven't read the responses to this thread since I last posted, because I'm responding over-emotionally to it and I don't want to get myself all wound up & throw a hissy fit. But I really want to get this on the record, and then when I'm feeling a bit calmer I'll come back to the thread and read it properly. Sorry for being so lame.
Here we go. Now, I don't want to have a go at you, Jack, but I do want to explain why I object to what you've said here, in case it might help you understand.
So you, yourself, don't respect fanfiction, Jack. Fine; I can't really argue with that, and I don't mind that you don't respect what I do, partly because we don't know each other's work very well, so your respect isn't integral to my sense of my work's worth: I do a bunch of things that a bunch of people don't regard as valid or worthy of respect, and I'd go insane if I insisted that everyone in the world validate everything that is of importance to me, obviously.
The thing that I object to is that you haven't stopped at "I have no respect for fanfiction". You seem to be speaking from a position of authority, as the guardian of literary standards for writing, when you say that fan writing isn't "real" or about people's "real lives" and that it is only useful as training for "real" fiction. In my own experience and my own understanding of my work, this is both entirely untrue and easily refuted - though I'm cautious about saying this since you have pre-emptively cast any argument against you as "self-serving".
Anyhow, my very close friend, collaborator, and beta-reader on Blake's 7 slash was a pro fiction writer (award-winning, multi-genre, blah blah fishcakes) and mentor of younger writers for several decades before she started writing A/B (another example is Joanna Russ, who started writing K/S long after she was an acclaimed realfic writer), and we are both fully aware of the ways our fanfic is a way of making sense of our lives and the real world as well as of canon. (I don't really see how else it could work: you need some knowledge of the real world in order to make sense of any canon in the first place, anyway. It's not like Blake's 7 or Harry Potter exists in a vacuum to which you bring no real-world knowledge or thinking about your own life or experience.)
It does come across to me as a bit arrogant for you to imply that your take on fanfiction is more valid than the myriad takes of people who are engaged in it - many of whom are, even by what I am inferring to be your own standards of what "good" or "real" writing is, extremely talented and intelligent women. (Mainly women, which is, by the way, another reason why anti-fanfic arguments often leave a sour taste in people's mouths: they so often repeat the kind of arguments historically levelled at all kinds of women's writing.) Again, there are many reasons why you, yourself, might not respect fanfic, but the way you've approached it in this thread, as far as I can see, can only be read as meaning that you also don't respect the way that fan writers understand themselves, their lives, and their work; that you don't believe that any of our understandings of what we do has any merit, and that your understanding of what fanfiction is is more valid than any of ours. I'm not entirely sure on what grounds you think you have that authority, to be honest: because of your understanding of literary merit? Which is greater than (for example) Joanna Russ's? And if you don't like bad or meretricious or cheap or emotionally manipulative writing, shouldn't you be having a go at a lot of realfic as well?
Oh, and a final thing which I was going to say in this thread anyway is something that came up on the "Bad fic! No biscuit!" panel at the Red Rose slash convention this summer: sometimes standards of "literary" fiction aren't appropriate for fan writing, because it's not always trying to do the same things as literary or non-fan-fiction does. Some people consider themselves to be working much more in a quasi-oral tradition of storytelling, and the contribution to the community made by their fic works on a different level from the kind of "good" writing legitimated by contemporary realfic/publishing/"literary" standards. I mean, I draw really fucking badly, but I still draw and I still show my pictures to my friends, and I'd just think it was entirely inappropriate for someone to come along and say that there was no point in my drawing because I was bad at it compared to a pro artist/illustrator. Maybe we don't all want to succeed at writing on the terms you seem to be using, Jack: and maybe our own understandings of writing and life merit a little more respect than you are giving them. |
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