Fenced-In Acre

So every day I have to deal with FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. I’m a bookseller. 

And here is my response. Really, I can’t stop the world from buying it, and I can’t force my will on them. To try is futile and just makes me tired and mad, and if there’s one thing I’m trying to do, it’s to be less mad. Holding anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. 

But here’s what I do make sure to do: I tell people exactly where it came from. Not that it was a serial book posted on the net and “inspired” by Twilight. That it is a direct interpretation of Twilight, with BDSM swapped for vampirism. That the plot progression is from Twilight. That it quotes the canon over twenty times. That it was posted with Christian Grey listed as Edward Cullen, and that’s why he has red hair and plays the piano. That Ana’s rickety car was once a rickety red truck. 

And then I suggest they read the fanfic before dropping their money on the book.  The books aren’t going anywhere—they’ll be here tomorrow when you decide that you can deal with “Oh Jeez” every other word and ellipses in every sentence. 

I can’t make people agree with me that what James did was to spit in the face of another author. But I can sure make certain they know exactly what she did, not just the media spin, so that they can decide for themselves.

So I was giving a paper this Friday and trying to see if I can get presenter view to work on my tablet PC. “Extend monitor” option hates me and struggles to project the right screen.

When windows can’t figure out what to project, it defaults to your desktop image—which in the case of my laptop is the very eye-fuckable image of Carlisle from the Twilight Illustrated Guide. So…I projected a 5 foot tall image of a sextastic vampire while sorting out my slides.

At least it wasn’t as bad as the time I accidentally put a sex scene from MoTU on a seminar handout…

I dislike the term “original fiction.” Actually, I hate it. For a lot of reasons. 

For one, it implies that fanfic is unoriginal. This is a problem both in terms of the pull-to-publish argument (which is not what I want this post t be about, so I’ll touch it briefly), because authors argue that their fic contains so many original ideas that it isn’t derivative any longer. A fic which holds completely to canon can be highly original in nature, a fic which makes the characters human and substitutes another deviance for vampirism can borrow everything but a handful of details from the source and be completely unoriginal in its structure. So implying that fanfic isn’t original muddies that argument in an extremely unhelpful way. 

But importantly, it sets a distinction between two types of writing that isn’t real, at least not to me. I write a lot of things. Letters to the editor, reading passages for standardized tests, articles for academic journals, blog posts for multiple blogs and exhaustive comments on others’ blogs. 

And I also write novels and short stories. Some of them use characters that I’ve borrowed from others. Some of them don’t. Some of them are intended to be consumed widely and for free; some of them aren’t. 

I dislike “original fiction” because it implies there’s some sort of division, and often a progression between fanfiction and original fiction. The idea is that you practice by writing fanfic and once you know what you’re doing, then you take the training wheels off and leave fandom. That fanfic is where you go to “learn” but that once you’re any good, you’re wasting your time doing it. 

It leads to questions like, “Would you support them? Do you like them? Is it okay?” 

Well duh. Of course it’s okay. But it’s okay for a writer to put time and energy into a fic just to give it away for free, too, without it needing to be practice for something better. 

The distinction between fanfic and quote-unquote ofic is one of audience and intent. I don’t spend less time or effort on fanfic; it’s not “starter” or “practice” or something to build my audience or something I’ll move away from when I get “good enough” to publish something. (I may have less time for it, for any number of reasons—I have less time for it than I did three years ago as it is, and that has jack shit to do with any “original fiction” I have going.) 

I write fanfic because it’s fun to write fanfic. And I’ll write fanfic as long as it continues to be fun to do. I’ve never not had my own stuff running alongside my fic—I started writing fic seventeen years after I began seriously working on my own stuff and ten years after receiving my first paycheck for my writing. I have stories with my own characters, and stories which use worlds and characters which belong to others,  and neither one is any less a product of my effort and time. There’s just not a division in my head that one leads to the other or stems from the other. The only division is that one I give away for free, and the other is not going up on the internet because I intend to keep it safe for things I might choose to do with it later. 

But everything I write is original. If I didn’t think I was injecting anything new into the wider world of literature, why would I bother to write? 

I do write stuff that I hope to get paid for. I do write stuff that has nothing to do with anyone else’s world. I do write stuff that I won’t get paid for but I’ll get a lot of prestige for having published, if it gets accepted in the right places.

The fanfic—well, I write that to share with you. And that’s the joy in it, and my sole, and entirely adequate, reward for doing it. 

I write because for me it’s like breathing. I’ve never been able to keep myself from doing it, even when a lack of spelling and handwriting skills otherwise should have stopped me. When I was four, my preschool teacher appeased me by teaching me how to staple a “spine” into sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper so that I could “publish” my books. I wrote RPF—well, real pet fic, I guess, since the characters were anthropomorphized versions of the classroom gerbils.

The GEBILS [sic] series was a hit. At least with my mother.

I’ve been alive for thirty years. I’ve been actively writing fiction for about twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven of those, depending on how you define “writing.”  It’s something I can’t not do, at least not for any stretch of time, and feel healthy.

Three years ago, I read a book that honestly, I loved. I thought the writing was pedestrian at best, but the characters, especially the secondaries, and the world? Wow.  And then I stumbled across a site where people were sharing their own stories about those characters and thought, ” I gotta get in on this!”

In Buffy and Harry Potter fandom, I used to be one of those fanfiction sideline people. The ones who read a little bit in different fandoms, the ones who never review. Who are like, “Eh, this fanfic stuff is kinda interesting, but not so much that I’m going to give it my time and energy.”

In Twilight, it wasn’t that way. I fell in love with a character, his world, his worldview. I wanted to know him from the inside out, in the way I know my own characters. In the way I know myself.  I poured my heart and my soul and god knows how much of my time into this. I poured my passion and every bit of who I am into it. Because I loved it. And moreover, because I believed in it. 

And then people started publishing their fic. That website I was so excited to find at first? Became a conduit for fanfiction to get a wash and wax, an odometer rollback, and go out on the lot as though they were brand-new. And in doing so, those authors, and their supporters, said, “This thing? This thing, g, that you’ve poured all of yourself into? It is not a worthwhile endeavor unto itself.  And even though we’ve read you and supported you, what we really feel is that it’s really not real unless you do something with it, like these other people do.”

Honestly, yes. I think P2P is abhorrent. And I think Fifty Shades is the worst possible example of the worst possible practice. But this has never been about one fic for me, or even one practice. It’s so much bigger than that. It’s about the attitude that goes with it. This idea that writing has no value unless it goes somewhere, that fanfiction has no value unless you’re able to take the parts that are yours and run away with them and get seven figures.

And that’s flat-out, fucking, completely, for-the-love-of all that is holy not true. I will NEVER buy that stance. I will fight it until the day I die. I think taking characters that belong to another writer and calling them your own is the worst kind of theft. I’d sooner support someone who stole a car. It breaks my heart that people who call themselves creators would want to do that to another’s creation.  It breaks my heart that people don’t see the amazingness in these characters unto themselves, and want to steal them from Meyer. It breaks my heart that others, who ought to be giving those authors words of caution out of their own appreciation for our source material, are cheering them on instead. And to those who would say, “Hey, just choose not to let it bother you,” well, I’m glad you can turn things off that way. I can’t. I simply find I can’t write with a broken heart.

I write because for me it’s like breathing. But over 2010 and 2011, I’ve been having a very slowly advancing asthma attack.

I HAVE to write. And it’s clear to me that this mess is just going to continue and continue. And, frankly,  I don’t buy it. I don’t believe you when you say my fanfiction is worthless. I don’t believe you when, by your support of authors who steal, by saying fics are “languishing” on FFnet instead of getting published, by saying that fanfiction work shouldn’t have to be “just fanfiction” (as if any artistic creation is ever “just” anything!), you implicitly, and sometimes quite explicitly, tell me that I’m wasting my time. 

But just because I don’t believe those sentiments doesn’t mean I’m going to sit around in places where people are spouting them. I’m not going to put myself places where that line of thinking can poison me.  I have been alive for thirty years. If I’m very lucky, I’ll get another sixty. I have too many stories—a few fanfiction, many not—clamoring for my energy as it is. There’s no way I will live long enough to write even a fraction of the things I want to write in my lifetime.  I find I can’t afford to have a single minute, much less an ongoing stretch, in which I find myself unable to write.

So I’m reaching for an inhaler.

Because I can’t breathe anymore.