(And, ironically, I’ve yet to have Feanor explain to any of his children about why they use the thorn! I have one textual fact about my favorite time in the lives of my favorite characters, and I can’t bring myself to use it!)

I suppose that, in part, explains my irritation with the disparagement of “fanfic” compared to “o-fic.” I know from personal experience how much time, effort, and thought goes into a story like AMC. Readers have told me that, if I changed the characters’ names, I could publish it as an original work because it required characterization and world-building well beyond the building blocks that JRRT gave us. I know that I am not alone in that; other authors have put the same thought and effort into their “verses,” only to have those stories inherently inferior to formulaic and poorly written–but original–crap that finds its way onto the shelves at B&N.

The more I study literature, the less and less I want to draw genre lines based on how derivative a particular work is. Which is why I agree most strongly with you that what matters in the end is the quality of the story (quality, of course, being each person’s subjective judgment). I’ve read published, bestselling fantasy novels that would be blown out of the water by the stories written by many Tolkienfic authors that I have the luck and pleasure of knowing.

I can’t get my brain to express it as neatly as I’d like, but I *think* I see a different between (say) a gapfiller that explains a certain passage of the Silm on the one hand, and a more general story that incorporates canonical factoids but doesn’t try to expand the canon story per se on the other hand. I think the difference in my mind has to do with how well defined the source work was (does it tell the complete story or just outline events); whether there is one version of the work; and to what degree the derivative work branches off from the source.

I’d say Gaiman’s short story falls in the first grouping. Another Man’s Cage would fall in the second grouping; IIRC you’re using Tolkien’s characters but telling a story he more or less left untold. Pande’s Apprentice definitely falls in this second category. I’d also say my Boromir/Theodred stories inhabit this same domain – using Tolkien’s societal mores and some basic biographical info to tell a totally new story arc.

This distinction affects a lot of things, but story quality isn’t necessarily one of them. Neither is originality. A gapfiller may write a close space, canonically, but I’ve found that there’s still room for originality. (Have you read Thundera Tiger’s While the Ring Went South? Prime example.)

What I’m trying to say is, while I see a distinction between what might be called fan fic (stories engaging directly with an already-told tale) and quasi-fanfic (stories telling a whole new story using the basic facts established by the author), I do agree that fanfic isn’t the best word. Because even if you’re trying to expand Tolkien’s story rather than tell your own, the need for quality is still crucial.

Very interesting points all around.

Arandil: Notice the careful use of “very little” with regards to leaping about.

I pretty much addressed your point in my comment to Oshun above, so I’ll just raise my glass to you and say, “Me too!”

Mmm hmm. Yeah, right. Not even when Maedhros was involved?

I agree. Fanfiction is looked down on, which is a shame because in order to write in “someone else’s world” you have to study that world very carefully. You have a set of constraints to live within. And you still have to be creative within those constraints.

Boo to all the naysayers.

How about historical fiction? I’ve thought about that as perhaps a less intimidating point of transition than to simply create a whole new world.

Dawn: I’d say that writing fanfic because one can’t invent one’s own world or characters is pretty on par with what I meant when I spoke of disparaging it for its lack of originality

Actually, personally, I find fanfiction challenging because it takes a lot of imagination to use the canon and still tell a story that is different and original. On one level it appeals to my nerdy appetites to not simply let loose and ignore the canon, but to try to make a story fit into it, in many ways more difficult. (One of the reasons I found people wanting to call my stories AU so annoying.)

The flip side with fanfiction is that it was the canon characters and events that inspired me and set my imagination churning.

The argument that fanfic is inferior because it is not publishable or that women (who are the primary writers and readers of fanfic) are doing themselves a disservice by choosing a creative medium that can’t be published makes me want to scream. I started writing fanfic in a large part because it couldn’t be published, because I felt that I had to worry less about changing my stories to fit what I felt publishers wanted of me. I suppose my distrust and distaste for the publishing world is nothing new. Probably because I recognize my own desire, as a writer, for recognition being strong enough to warp my creative efforts. But that is a ramble for another time!

That is a really interesting point about Marion Zimmer Bradley. I am, unfortunately, not familiar with her work at all. She’s on my reading list. I’ve seen the Mists of Avalon miniseries; that’s about as far as I’ve gone.

On copyright and non-fiction, I think you’re right on that. It’s more along the lines of scholarly research, even though I’ve heard that publishers have started cracking down even on quotes and recaps of popular media that fall within the bounds of fair use because they’re so bloody afraid of being sued.

On font sizes, I will change the font size in the style sheet later to make it bigger, unless WP has a font-size widget (along the lines of the font-size button on eFiction sites), in which case, I will look into adding it to the site. (And, before you say that you don’t want me to go through the trouble, if the font is too small for you, then it is probably too small for most everyone else, they just aren’t saying anything about it. )

MithLuin: I had to smile at your remembrances of making up stories with your sister because my sister and I used to do pretty much the exact same thing. We used to take books or TV shows we liked–I particularly remember the show Hey Dude that used to come on Nickelodeon–and pretend that we were the characters and make up stories about them. As we got older, we started inventing our own characters, although they were often inspired by or adapted from books/shows or history. I channeled one of the officers on the Titanic for a while, put him in the modern world kind of like an AU. Even now (at the risk of publicly declaring just how weird I am!), my fictional characters are a part of my life, and people who are close enough to me associate with them as well as me. I did this for years before learning that other people did much the same and called it “role play” and were thought of as extremely nerdy (versus just strange!) for doing so. It’s always been a part of my life; I can’t imagine–and don’t want to imagine–living differently.

In getting involved in the fanfic community, it awakened me to the realization that many, even most, writers report similar experiences, kind of like how I could relate so easily to your post here. I remember talking with a fellow Silmfic-writing friend once, and she said she couldn’t imagine how so-called “normal” people got by in life without a regular store of entertainment and friends to keep them company on lonely bus rides and such. As I like to say, muses are just imaginary friends for grown-ups!

Anyway, all that aside, I think you make a good point in how Silmfic–unlike much other fanfic–is not really fleshed out. To me, it is only a hop, skip, and a jump from original fiction in terms of how it is created (as I noted above, I am not trying to argue for the write to publish and be paid for my Silmfic) in that we do have a good amount of characterization and world-building to do, even if the building blocks are already in place. But, as was evidenced by the discussion on my post about whether Maedhros would threaten to kill Elrond and Elros, even those building blocks are set on shaky ground. The characters are so skeletal that I think you can flesh them out in many different ways and be perfectly justified in doing so.

So, personally, I’m not ready to declare you as unoriginal. In fact, something I’ve always wondered, is why fanfic writers are disparaged for unoriginality because they use the world or building blocks of a world (in the case of Silmfic) created by another author … but those who write fiction set in our own world are not similarly condemned. Why is this, I wonder? It seems to me that nothing could be less original than setting a story in our own world, where we’ve figured out much more than even the best-realized fictional world and one doesn’t have to work to create believable cultures or religions or worry about how changing one detail of nature as we know it will screw up the whole world. Even characters, in literary fiction, are often transported from people we know in life; I used to do it all the time, and I know I wasn’t the only one who did. So I think “originality” is very much a gray term, depending on how you define it, and I think it’s possible to argue that a story like “Lessons from the Mountain” is far more original than most of the literary stuff I’ve read (and also important in terms of what it says about life, before someone makes that argument.)

Okay, so other fanfic writers *are* original – I am only talking about myself, not implying anything about other authors.

My sister was always a very creative storyteller (from the age of 3 on). Even her dreams were involved sagas. Me? Not so much.

My father told us stories in which he allowed us to request one character and one plot point, and then he put them all together into a wacky story with some hippy moral of ‘they all became friends and lived happily ever after.’ So, inventing characters for those stories was my first attempt at originality, but saying ‘a bunny who is afraid of carrots’ was sufficient.

My sister and I told each other tag-team bedtime stories when we were older, in which we adapted a story (okay, I’ll admit – it was Power Rangers…we had little brothers, okay?) and came up with our own plots and took turns speaking for the different characters. We never plotted them out in advance, so if we were trying to take the story in different directions, it resulted in lengthy in-character debates. I guess this was a form of role-play, though we had never heard of that. We invented our own villain (creatively named the Super Bad Guy) and also added a female character named Arda (gee, I wonder whose fault that was?) Eventually, we decided to turn this into an original story, and we started fresh with our own original characters. That didn’t really go anywhere, though I did finally write down a few pages of it at this point.

Fastforward 10 years and I make an attempt at writing my first story. Yes, of any sort. I never had to write stories for school after freshmen year of high school (and that was only a 2 page creation myth). It was fanfiction: http://www.storiesofarda.com/chapterview.asp?sid=4609&cid=18383

The story has a bit of a theme, but no real plot. It’s more like: ‘oh look, hobbits, yay!’ So, even a derogatory meaning of fanatic applies I had to invent very little – characters, setting, major events…all already written by Tolkien.

I went on to write about Snape’s backstory for Harry Potter. http://occlumency.sycophanthex.com/viewstory.php?sid=4839 Again, this brilliantly complex double-triple-agent-to-the-nth-degree was already written for me, as was the love triangle he was part of and the politics of the world he was growing up in. Names, events, timelines, motives – all predetermined by the ‘real’ author. All I had to do was flesh it out in a story, and try to keep him in-character.

When I moved on to the Silmarillion, I had to do a bit more work; the characters are not already fleshed out, and the settings do not have detailed descriptions or floorplans already in place. But again, here, the rich history of the world is just *there* waiting for me. I might invent a few rules of my own, but the rules of Middle Earth are already written.

Maybe someday, I’ll write original fiction. But I doubt it will be any time soon. I can write a story within proscribed boundaries much more successfully than I can invent my own. And here in fandom, I have a ready-made audience, people who are interested in my stories because of who they are about. I like it that way.

I missed that because I actually never saw that on the list of things that are wrong with fanfiction–other than stealing someone else’s World and characters because they can’t or won’t invent their own.

The first people I told I was writing fanfiction in my circle of close friends and family simply suggested I chose something that wasn’t under copyright, then it could be published (there, the implied criticism I took from that was: publishable = OK; not = publishable = not serious). Their attitude meant to me: you are far too old to do this as a hobby.

I recall when The Mists of Avalon first came out that it was touted in publishing and literary circles as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s big play for legitimacy after writing sci-fi/fantasy all those years. (I actually never cared for the Avalon series, but I did love her sci-fi/fantasy world of Darkover.) So the implication in that case was original sci-fi = trashy books; derivative of a long literary tradition = classy stuff. Actually, the first series was groundbreaking on the woman question, sex and gender, and highly original and the second was, to me, and I know some people love them (apologies to them for being critical here), overly didactic (sort of preachy feminism) and unoriginal. So in that case, her invented world was far better than her fanfic of the Arthurian legends.

Pet peeve! On definiing copyright! Fanfic writers who put a disclaimer on historical fiction relinquishing their rights to publish it to someone who made a film in the last few years. (Oliver Stone does not own Alexander the Great; not even Mary Renault does!) I am also pretty sure that our bios of the Silmarillion characters are also copyright free.

Technical question: is there anyway you know of that I can make the print on this website bigger on my screen? It is about tiny type on my screen and I already have my computer setting about as high as they will go and still be able to comfortably use most sties.

All the same, the more time that passes, the less I believe that I will ever see one of my longer stories published through traditional means. Assuming I am good enough to start with, I’m just not sure I want my work to ever be a part of that.

Taking on authors like Rice and Hobb (Martin is new to me as a fanfic opponent, and I have one of his books on my bookshelf right now, boooooo) is a bucket of worms that often tempts me. However, I’m not sure that it would ever reach an audience where it would do any good since my humble ol’ Heretic Loremaster blog never attracts the likes of those authors. Aimed at fellow fans, it would be preaching to the choir.

Oshun: I had no delusions of originality on this point, but I’m glad that you’ve pointed me in the direction of authors who are publishing o-fic and also speaking out against shoehorning fiction with the intention of using the categories into which it is forced to pre-judge it. I am definitely interested in checking out their work, and I thank you for the links!

On the second point, I want to be clear that I am not talking about drawing a line between “original” and “derivative” with the intention of profiting from anything that falls close enough to “original.” My point concerns more the subject judgment of various types of fiction using “originality” as a litmus test, as though it is a matter of is or is not. I don’t think it’s that simple. But a lot of fanfic naysayers will disparage the genre because it’s “not original,” ignoring the fact that plenty of award-winning books are actually less original than many fanfics. So putting fiction on a hierarchy based on its originality makes no sense.

As far as publishing/profiting goes, I’m a staunch defender of an artist’s right to make money on her or his work, enough that some of my opinions on using an artist’s work put me at odds with fandom and Internet users in general.

I don’t like to take positions on legal issues, for various reasons. But taking the work of a living author and publishing a re0write of it and profiting from it seems an entirely separate question from fanfiction to me. That writing is still writing, still trying, often with some difficulty to make a living on that work. I see a subtle moral question here that does not exist in taking Jane Austin and writing a film script about a silly girl in L.A. Knock yourself out. But if I were to write a sequel to your first published novel and have it printed, where does that leave the one on the harddrive of your computer?