I am a fanfiction writer.
While reading that earlier thread about fanfiction, I was absolutely shocked to see such an amount of negative replies, and I was more than a little bit hurt. So I decided to write this about fanfiction.
Fanfiction writers are not plagiarisers. We (the best of us anyway) know full well that these are not our absolute very own characters we're using, and we say so right there at the top--or at the bottom in an author's note. "I do not own these characters." Very often we toss in a joke about how we don't get paid, or we say that we're just doing it for our own enjoyment so PLEASE don't sue us.
And in fact, fanfiction writers do NOT get paid and they ARE doing it for their own enjoyment. It is very, very rare for a fanfiction author to get his or her work published in a solid book form (Star Wars, anyone? What about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and her line of fanfiction books?).
But then, we don't want it to get published. We don't want to get agents, we don't want to go through all the hassle of editors and hate mail and fan letters with complete nonsense--we just do it because we like to.
We write fanfiction because we have something in common. We are not islands in the fanfiction community--we are not the solitary writer in a cafe. We are basically a group of friends who gather around the table with beat up old notebooks and pens.
We learn to handle criticism--because these are not our characters we are working with, after all, and we are held to standards based on how well we know our fandoms. We do research and ask questions about our fandoms. We get beta-readers (the equivalent of editors/critics), we spend hours hammering our fics to fit perfectly so one character will not be portrayed wrongly, and for what?
Not for money.
We like poking fun at people. We poke fun at a lot of things--mostly bad fanfiction, which we learn from. We don't see bad fanfiction and go, "Oh, fanfiction is terrible. It should never be allowed." We see it and say, "That's what I need to avoid."
Often in certain fandoms there are legions of homosexual fiction, and while roughly half of it is badly written the other half says something: We tolerate homosexuality. In fact, we tolerate a lot of things. Mostly people who think that just because we are not making up our own characters we are the spawn of the devil and should never be allowed to pick up a pen.
"I would be disgusted if someone used MY characters."
Well, they ARE your fans. They like you enough to explore the world you made and try to take a stab at expanding it on their own. I, personally, would not mind if someone used my characters in a fanfiction. Fanfiction is an interpretation of the original, essentially a 'what if.' And if you don't allow fanfiction to be written, then fine--we won't write any.
We are young. We are often girls, and we are often intelligent. We are, perhaps, even more sensitive to criticism than the average writer, because at least they are your own characters and you can make them do whatever you want. Fanfiction writers have very rigid boundaries and lines, and we handle other people's characters quite carefully.
You have seen the worst of fanfiction on Godawful.net. What really made me wince was the fact that even there, even on godawful.net where the whole purpose is to make fun of bad fanfiction, there is a spot where you can find links to GOOD fanfiction, too.
Until I meet people that are not as blatantly insensitive to a legitimate, if not acknowledged, medium, I don't suppose I will be posting here more often.
You have seen the worst of fanfiction, and your reaction is quite understandable.
But I have seen the best.
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