The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: fan fiction

  • Covers

    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.
    Johnny Cash covers NIN. Hurt is the best cover of the last 20 years.

    There’s a tradition in rock music of learning your favorite songs note for note and then playing them for money in a bar band. Freebird. Smoke on the Water. Johnny B. Goode. I learned ‘em all. Smoke was the one I liked playing best and these were the tip of the iceberg for me as a bass player learning my instrument. I loved Sting, Geddy Lee, Chris Squire, Paul McCartney and I tried to learn from all of them and more.

    I learned a lot of songs. All the ‘standards’ of rock music. I got pretty good at playing the bass guitar in a number of different styles. I wasn’t on par with any of my heroes, but I was okay. Later, after years of playing I wrote songs and my bands played them. We even played them in popular venues alongside the covers. One band did a whole set of covers at an open mic night, closing with Werewolves of London much to the amusement and consternation of the hipsters in the audience. That was fun but it didn’t win us any fans. Didn’t matter.

    As a writer of prose, that kind of ‘covering’ of someone else’s material is called plagiarism. It’s frowned upon.

    So where do writers get the same kind of training and trials by fire as musicians?

    Fan fiction is a start. And that got me wondering if there were professional ‘covers’ like Rob Zombie doing We’re an American Band or Johnny Cash doing Hurt and making it his own?

    Stephen King covered himself by approaching the same story as himself and as his alter ego, Richard Bachman. (I preferred the Bachman story, by the way.) And retellings of origin stories are commonplace in comic books. Marvel Comics even relaunched their entire universe as Ultimates which spawned their current slate of very, very popular films. Essentially these are ‘covers’. So are remakes of films.

    But the writer of prose doesn’t get to do this. Why? Wouldn’t it be interesting, say, to have an entire collection of short stories where various writers retell selected short stories of Ray Bradbury?

    Probably not. See I think readers are more protective of their prose than any other artist or creator. Well maybe not as protective as the fine art world where those who ‘cover’ a painting are called forgers. Anyway, you see the point?

    It’s impossible for writers of prose to learn in the same way that rock musicians do, except for fan fiction. Maybe. Can you think of a popular example in fan fiction?

    How about Fifty Shades of Grey? Fan fiction cover. Completely.

    There’s no begrudging here, there’s no sour grapes over any of this. I’m asking questions, looking for answers. I’m talking about the differences between the arts. Comedians are allowed impressions, actors channel other actors who’ve played the role before but writers aren’t supposed to cover stories that have inspired them. At least not in public.

    Is that fair?

    No, it isn’t. But that’s part of what makes writing so much fun, the challenges that we have to overcome to tell the story we want to tell.

  • All My Best Writing Starts Out as Fanfic

    I am scheduled to give you a flash fiction today. It’s not going to happen.

    About a month ago, I discovered the TV show Supernatural, and immediately became obsessed [0]. All of my non-work, non-sleep time has been spent catching up on the glory of all things Winchester. There’s eight and a half seasons just in canon, and I haven’t even started looking at fan sites yet.

    The upshot of all this is when I sat down to start outlining a flash fiction, the only story screaming to get out of my head was a Supernatural fanfic. Which I will not publish, post, or allow to see the light of day. Ever. Don’t ask. But I’m writing it anyway, because it needs to be written.

    The truth is, all my stories start as fanfic. Worse, they’re the most horribly self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment, Mary Sue-riffic kind of fanfic. Take every trope of bad fanfic, and it’s probably there. It’s frankly quite humiliating, which is why I refuse to release it into the wild.

    I’ll write it, though. I’ll write it to get it out of my head. I’ll write it for the daily discipline of writing. I’ll write it to hone my craft. I’ll write it because it’s making me absurdly happy. I’ll write it because it is naked, and raw, and true.

    And someday I will take it apart and use the pieces in something that is completely mine. I’ll never be able to use the name Winchester, or an iconic classic muscle car, or making deals with crossroads demons [1]. But I’ll be able to write the secondary characters I’m finding. I’ll be able to write a Wild Hunt emerging from a crystal cave in the mountains of northern New Mexico. I’ll be able to write three teen boys, drunk for glory, and thoughtless for it, too [2]. I’ll be able to write a Model 1913 Patton saber as an iconic weapon for a lady. I’ll be able to write the role of quartermaster in the war between good and evil. I’ll be able to write business cards sporting titles such as Senior Combat Folklorist [3] and Research Teleologician. I’ll be able to write a dog with sacred symbols marked in the brindle of her fur, where after you chant a blessing over her, drools demons to death. I’ll be able to write a hero who says, “I’m not saving you this time. You’re just going to have to suck it up that terrible, terrible things are going to happen to you because you are stupid and you make bad decisions.”

    These things are mine. They’re only inspired by intellectual property theft. This is how the creative process works for me. I steal stuff from other, better writers, edit out their characters and voice, throw it in the mixmaster with a couple dozen other similarly hijacked ‘verses, sign my name to the bottom, and there it is. An “original” piece of art.

    [0] Yes, I know. I’m way late to this particular party.
    [1] I am stealing one idea—using LARPing as a practical training in urban fantasy combat skills.
    [2] They are provisionally named Kenny, Kyle, and Kartman—Kenny dies, of course.
    [3] Hat tip also to Charles Stross on this one.

  • Fanfic++

    I am a huge advocate of new writers cutting their teeth by trying out fan fiction. Fan fiction can be a great playground. For starters, so much fanfic is truly awful, so the bar is set really, really low. Whatever your fandom, somebody, somewhere, has a fanfic forum where you can, if you choose, post your work, get feedback, and cultivate a stable of beta-readers. You will be practicing foundational skills such as plot development, dialogue, character motivation, story and emotional arcs, etc., without having to do all that tedious world-building first. OK, so it’s not “original.” When you think about it, what is?

    So without further ado, I would like to thank everybody who made this year’s Nanowrimo novel possible. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

    The concept for a race of randomly and inexplicably immortal humans is lifted whole cloth from Robert Adams Horseclans books, which I purchased by the dozen in the mid-1980’s from the how-can-you-read-that-crap shelf at the used bookstore for around seventy-five cents a pop. The idea that maybe they don’t rule the world because been there, done that, hated that job, is entirely mine.

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  • With Friends Like These, Who Has Energy for Shame?

    This is probably one thing that doesn’t bother me about writing — there is at not point where I’ve been ashamed to admit what I write.

    Okay, that’s actually a little bit of a lie, but I didn’t want to talk about fanfiction for, what, the sixth week in a row? I can’t help it; the bulk of my experience in writing fanfiction. It’s just what I did do.

    I’ve never been, precisely, ashamed or worried about what I’ve written. I went through a phase in college where I deleted accounts that hosted the most pornographic of the stuff I’d written, worried that it would hurt my chances of becoming a “real” writer. (If only I could have known that 2012 would make a fad out of porn written by emotionally-immature women, I’d’ve kept it up!) And I sometimes sort of hedge around the topic of fandom, though less and less as I realize that I don’t want to fragment my experiences like that.

    But when I was 17? Oh man, I was mortified of the very thought of people finding out what I was writing during classes. I used to hedge around it with phrases like “alternative fiction” and “character-building stuff.”

    I think this might have even continued, if I hadn’t moved to Madison right out of high school to live/work with a good friend of mine. She’s a poet and very bohemian and all that stuff, so filters were things for other people. She knew I was shy and horrible around new people, and thus introduced me to her friends (and people we had just met) with, “Hi, this is Ashes — she writes gay anime porn!” And I mean ALL THE TIME. A friend of hers from her hometown (who is now published, so, hooray for him!) brought her his manuscript one afternoon, and she’s like, “Ashes wants to be a writer too — she’s writing anime porn right now!” And he’s like, “Cool, fan fiction is pretty rad.”

    Or something like that. I was 18 and literally terrified.

    But you know what? I realized quickly that no one gave a shit what I was writing. (And in the right hippie circles, it was actually interesting.)
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  • What the Internet Taught Me About Submissions

    I have a weird relationship with sharing work and submissions. I’ve done it; I have my little pile of rejection somewhere in a box and I’m totally okay with it. For one: there’s something funny about how after something is rejected, you start to look at it and go, “Oh yeah, that totally wasn’t ready.”

    But my opinion of the submission process is very much affected by the way I’ve been sharing my writing since I was 17 — the Internet! (Ooooooooooh.) When it comes right down to it, the handful of submissions to small magazines and the single experience with sending a novel query is a minor experience compared to how I handle sharing most of my writing.

    Allow me to make this point with math! (Ahhhhhhhhhh.) Then I’ll tell you what the Internet has taught me about the submission process.
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  • Have You Ever Written Fan Fiction?

    Fan fiction. The mere mention of it can send people into paroxysms of rage or ecstasy. People either Love it or Hate it, with capital letters. Usually fanfic is the bailiwick of the dedicated fanatic who believes that a story MUST be told, whether it fits into the canon of the world someone else created or not. According to Wikipedia, the first fanfic might have involved Don Quixote. 

    The ultimate fan fiction is probably doing work for hire on a company-owned character. Ask anyone who’s written a Star Wars novel or one of the major superheroes for DC or Marvel and you’ll likely find they were a fan of the characters before they started typing things up. For us, here in the Cafe, every week we get asked a question that may further enlighten or illuminate the week’s topic here. Below you’ll find our confessions as to whether or not we’ve written it and even what we think about it. Pull up a chair and see what you think.

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