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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: May 3, 2005 at 9:49 pm by Eve Tushnet

2005-05-03T21:49:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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YOUR VOICE, MY WORDS: Have been thinking about fanfiction, and why I really love it even though I can’t write it. Most of this post will be old news to people who read a lot of fanfiction, but I’ve definitely learned things about creativity and writing from thinking about this stuff, so maybe you will too. …I’ve read in at least eight fandoms (not counting ElfQuest since I was, like, fourteen the last time I read that), but the examples in this post will be from Harry Potter and X-Men fandoms, so possibly unintelligible to the rest of you people. Also, some of these links will lead to stories with disturbingly violent or sexual (or both) content. I’ve indicated those with an asterisk, but… my disturb-o-meter may not be calibrated like yours, obviously.

1. common objections, a.k.a. Is there nothing original in you except original sin?
a) You’re stealing, or cheating, or something, by using somebody else’s characters and world. I’m not going to bother making the very obvious response that everyone’s stealing from someone; complete “originality” would be incomprehensible, a rejection of language. Instead, let’s talk about this: I will agree that fanfiction is alienating. It’s a conscious inhabiting of someone else’s skin, or an attempt to wear two faces at once, to look at the world through two pairs of eyes.

But that’s what art is. Cat Power puts it best:
He doesn’t even notice as the hours go by,
Lost inside a screen.
He watches a film about the evening sky;
It was someone else’s dream.

I submit that our need–and I think it is a basic human need, though perhaps a need that originated in the Fall–for “films about the evening sky” rather than just going outside and looking is significantly creepier, more alienating, and more like “cheating” than the fact that some films about the evening sky are set in Hogwarts, or Gotham City. In fact, fanfiction strikes me as significantly less creepy than the “usual” audience stance (not convinced it is usual–didn’t most of us, when we were too young to be fully conformed, tell ourselves stories based on the stories we loved?). We’re trained to think of audience-hood as passive, a consumer role; that passive role can often become willingly putting on corrective lenses made by mad optometrists. In fanfiction, by contrast, you don’t “lose yourself” in art, nor do you lose the world you see. Instead, you (…sometimes, anyway) try to use whatever media flotsam inspired you as a provocation to delineate more clearly what you actually see when you look at the world. Which bits of the source spoke to you and which were lame or irrelevant?

b) Fanfiction is self-indulgent–wish-fulfillment fantasies, romance novels for the overeducated. And yeah, it can be. Sometimes people need to be overwhelmed, almost possessed, by a work of art, so that it can break through their preconceptions. And some fanfiction is a reaction against that possession, an attempt to make the source material conform more to the reader’s preferences or culture. It’s kind of boringly obvious that this is also true with every work of art: Nobody will ever force you to shake off your self-indulgence or your culture’s/subculture’s cliches. And as with other writing, sometimes the collision of cultural product (the Troilus and Cressida story; or Magneto–if you laugh here, hold on a moment, I’m getting to this) and a determined writer can create something true. Something that translates the world (and yes, I do believe in a world perhaps coterminous with but certainly not bound by language: it’s part of that whole “Creator God” thing) from the reader’s culture into the language of the reader’s heart.

In other words: Yeah, I read some fanfiction and I think, “Dude. People don’t act that way. You’re writing people acting that way because ‘isn’t it pretty to think so.’ You’re retreating into utopia and that is very lame.” But go watch any box-office smash (I dare you), go read any NY Review of Books pet author, and I can guarantee you will see the exact same problem. You want the solution? All I got is Barbara Nicolosi.

c) Are you seriously comparing Troilus and Cressida to… Magneto?

Totally. Y que no?

Look, stories are (often) popular for a reason. Magneto vs Xavier is popular at least in part because at this point in the X-Men mythos, it can easily be understood as a clash between a man with heroic instincts and a bad philosophy (Magneto) and a man with troubling instincts and a good philosophy (Xavier). That’s inherently interesting and important. (It’s also only one way to read the conflict; there are lots of other really cool ways, and–as legions of comics writers have proven over the years–lots of lame ways.)

d) So, but you admit yourself that fanfiction can usually only be understood by a very small slice of the populace. (shrug) Ulysses. ‘Nuff said. Limiting one’s audience is entirely appropriate if the thing you want to do can only be done within those limits. Most of what we write will blow away like ash. If you’re only good, a few generations at most will love you (Walker Percy, maybe?) and then your star will fade, and that’s more than enough. If you’re great, nobody will care how many obscure puns and references you make: They’ll make Folger Library editions and concordances and annotations.

e) Fanfiction is the province of geeks and obsessives. My people!

2. why I like it! So many reasons.

a) I want to spend more time with these characters. I’ll really enjoy pieces that aren’t wildly great writing (usually not bad writing, just not great writing) because the author gives me more of characters I love. Here’s a nice little example for fans of Minerva McGonagall and/or Alastor Moody.

b) Related: How much can a person change? I really like seeing how fanfiction takes a character and shows all these different interpretations. How far can the character be changed before he becomes unrecognizable? What does that say about the character’s actions and representation in canon? Easy example: I believe that the portrayal of Harry Potter and his world found here under the heading “Expectation/Reality” is 100% consistent with canon. Except that it’s more consistent than canon! (Not surprising, as lots of people have noticed that it’s the inconsistencies, silences, and failures of “canon” that provoke fanfiction authors the most.)

I’ve written before about how tripped-out and even frightened I was at the idea that baptism is being “born again,” receiving “new life.” Dude! What happens to my old life? What happens to the person I’ve always known myself to be–the one corroded by sin, but also the only home I’ve ever known? So I’m really interested in anything that explores the limits of identity, or, in art, the limits of characterization. If ethos is the daemon (character is fate), figuring out how much ethos can stretch and shift will tell you how good or bad you can be–how heroic, how craven. And more importantly, in making the shift from canon characterization believable (when they do), fanfiction authors give a hint of what one might need to do in order to change. What makes a change believable in fiction (for readers with their heads screwed on) is what makes change possible in real life.

c) I want to spend more time in the author’s/creators’ world. Here’s a nice Harry Potter example with characters I usually detest.

d) I want to see critical engagement with the source material, but I want to see it in fun narrative form! Hey, stories are often better philosophy than philosophy is. So why shouldn’t stories be better literary criticism than literary criticism is–given that lit-crit is just an especially un-self-conscious branch of philosophy? In Harry Potter fandom, pogrebin* is by far my favorite source for this stuff. Just a brilliant, compressed, poetic, ferocious writer. Here, try “Unsticking the Shadow,” possibly her best thing.

e) It’s just good writing. Minisinoo for structure (especially Climb the Wind* and Special*). This piece, about complicity and how someone stumbles into evil, is really well-paced. C Elisa’s “Nameless” is a lovely X-Men piece that I think people into philosophy of language would especially enjoy. pogrebin has several pieces that… honestly? They’re worth at least figuring out who the characters are, just so you can read them. (I realized, writing my little “Liberty/License” exercise, that it was a total ripoff of her “Sand*”–and so you know, that asterisk is a warning for incest, so click at own risk.) pogrebin’s “Comme la pluie*” (don’t ignore me when I asterisk!) is one of the most chilling takes on pornography I’ve ever read, whether or not she meant it that way.

3. Why I can’t write it.
I don’t really know, actually. I’ve banged out quite a bit of proto-fanfiction for X-Men and HP, but I just can’t hit that precise combination of borrowing and originality, maybe. I want too much control! When I was futzing around with the X-Men, I basically killed off all of them as fast as possible so I could make up my own! I don’t regret the exercise, though. I’ve used a lot of that proto-fic (especially the HP stuff) for my fiction. Here are some examples, just in case you really want to see how thin the line is between “original” and “derivative”:
a) The description of Shepherd Park in the final scene of “Desire” started out as my description of Jean Grey’s parents’ neighborhood. Similarly, I wrote the Music Emporium (based on a real guy, Big Al Sevilla, but we won’t even start in on that debate) for a Scott Summers vignette before it ever appeared in “Kissable Pictures.”
b) “Why Can’t He Be You?”–the Nina Trapetto story, the one that I posted with the title, “A Separated Soul”–started as Snape fanfiction. Here’s a little bit of The Madness That Is Me: The song Nina sings at the end of the story started out as Marc Almond’s “River.” But see, Narcissa Malfoy wouldn’t be interested in a Muggle song! So I tweaked it a bit until it was the song you see in “WCHBY?”. Similarly, the Baptist girl in the “PRINCESS” t-shirt started out as an entire family related to Nymphadora Tonks.

Really, I find this whole question of “originality” funny. Possibly I find it funnier than most because I can’t write straight-up, recognizable fanfiction, but I’m quite aware of how much I borrow from various “source texts.” Example: In “You Will Be Pulled Back” (the sci-fi one with the two boys who grow up together), a lot of Philip Leland’s gestures and movements are borrowed from Alan Rickman in “Dark Harbor.” That’s just true. It’s where I got ’em. Does that change your perception of my descriptions of Leland’s movements? At least one detail in my portrayal of Leland as a kid was drawn from fanfiction pieces showing a young Severus Snape. Is it worse now? Less original? The piece was initially meant to be, among other things, a pastiche of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi entertainments. I don’t think it really attained that goal, but that was part of the point when I started. Is it less original now? The little girl Lee sees painting the base of the lamppost with mud is an actual little girl I saw on Euclid Street in 1998. Is it less original now?

I’m pretty sure “You Will Be Pulled Back” is less original than any of pogrebin’s fanfiction. I’m 100% sure it’s less important than her best work.

That’s why I read fanfiction.

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