So in the fanfiction world, “muses” are apparently frowned upon. Authors who have convos with the characters in their authornotes are scorned, people who imagine the characters talking to them or whatever are considered stupid and delusional, and I remember someone once saying “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write, only second-rate writers use ‘muses’” (something along those lines).

I admittedly use the term muse a lot in describing my creative process. I even coined the phrase (that I sometimes see on icons that I didn’t design) that “Muses are imaginary friends for grown-ups” after learning that, yes, people look at you sideways when you start talking about your imaginary friends. When you talk about your muses, though, that tends to clarify imaginary activity as having a creative and not social intent. Some people even look vaguely impressed!

Once again, I find the sliver of fandom that I occupy, albeit peripherally, these days, to be at odds with “fandom at large.” But then, I don’t think that the part of Tolkien fandom where I play even uses the term muse in the sense that sarajayechan and commenters discuss in her post. Certainly, I’ve never heard of “soul-bonding” or communing with muses on astral planes. I’ve never even seen an author carry on a conversation with a character in her or his author’s notes.

Instead, I find that I and people with whom I associate tend to use the term muse in different ways.

• It becomes a shorthand for discussing the creative process during which one connects deeply enough to a character to write that character convincingly. I find the idea that “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write” to be hogwash. I was nattering under friend-lock on my journal last week about character writers versus plot writers. This sounds like it comes from the plot writers to me. Just as it is easier or harder to connect with certain people, it is easier or harder to connect to certain characters, in my experience. For example, I relate to Fëanor, with his creative compulsions and sense of injustice in the world, more easily than I do to Fingolfin, who is accepting of the Valar and life in Valinor in a way that I can’t imagine myself being. I can write out the explanation that I just did when discussing how Fingolfin’s PoV chapters in AMC are weaker than Fëanor’s. Or I can just say that I have a Fëanor muse but haven’t found a Fingolfin muse yet. Viola. I think most people in the communities I frequent would understand that this refers to a difficulty connecting to Fingolfin’s character, not that I haven’t started setting an extra place for him at supper.
• The term muse can be used playfully, sometimes to deflect criticism. “My Maglor muse wasn’t happy that you made him flee from battle!” sounds less confrontational than, “I think it’s OOC to have Maglor flee from battle,” which opens up the whole can of worms about canon and interpretation and all that that we’ve been over a thousand times before. I’ve certainly seen the term used in this way.
• It can be used just plain ol’ playfully. I might say, for example, that one day, Pengolodh just let himself in the front door, plopped down next to me, and started dictating “Illuminations.” I don’t actually mean that I imagined the front door opening or even that I imagine an Elven loremaster in the chair next to me (which is perpetually piled too high with books to occupy anyway). It’s just a lighter way to express the sudden out-of-the-blue whallop of inspiration that can feel like getting hit by one of those Shire freight trains: One day, you’re not in the least bit interested in writing a particular character, and the next, you suddenly think s/he is the most interesting character in the world.

Some people have brought up in the comments on sarajayechan’s post that muses are a way for writers to deflect responsibility for their own creativity … or lack thereof. Inspiration and creativity can feel magical, like they come unprovoked out of the ether and recede again just as quickly. My own experiences suggest that my creativity, at least, has a strong neurochemical basis … but it still feels magical, and attributing inspiration or lack thereof to something outside oneself becomes a handy way to explain the inexplicable or (in my case) avoid hard truths like, “I’m not writing because I’m dysthymic or stressed out.” Instead, I’m not writing because Maedhros isn’t back from his Caribbean cruise yet.

So what are your experiences with muses? Do you use the term? What does it mean to you? Have you encountered fans or writers who believe that they actually connect with muses? Have you seen disparagement, in fandom or otherwise, of the term muse? Do you think it’s a cop-out, a shorthand, or something else entirely?

While reading The Stories of English by David Crystal last night for the History of English class I’m taking, I encountered a section on the idea of “language purity,” particularly as it relates to English:

Thre is a curious myth widespread in the world: many people believe that their language can somehow be ‘pure’–comprising a set of sounds, words, and structures that can all be traced back continuously to a single point of origin–and that anything which interferes with this imagined purity (especially words borrowed from other languages) is a corrupting influence, altering the language’s ‘true character.’ In the case of English, it is the Germanic origins of the language, in their Anglo-Saxon form, which are supposed to manifest this character. …

There are certainly important stylistic differences between Germanic and Romance words … but support for any notion of a ‘return to purity’ is misplaced. No language has ever been found which displays lexical purity: there is always a mixture, arising from the contact of its speakers with other communities at different periods in its history. In the case of English, there is a special irony, for its vocabulary has never been purely Anglo-Saxon–not even in the Anglo-Saxon period. (p. 57)

I have encountered the notion of linguistic purity on numerous occasions in the Tolkien fandom. I want to start out by saying that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who want to attempt to draw predominantly from a certain linguistic tradition in their writing, if that is what satisfies them and they feel best expresses what they want their stories to say. Apparently, according to Crystal, they’re in good company with the likes of Edmund Spenser, Charles Dickens, and George Orwell. What I’ve always objected to is the rather snobbish insistence that adopting such a style is somehow the superior choice or, worse yet, requisite for a truly respectful treatment of Tolkien’s works.

One of the very first comments I received on AMC noted my use of U.S. English and the reviewer’s distaste with that. I treated it in a rather jokey manner–as the new girl in town, I didn’t know what to expect from reviewers and didn’t want to piss anyone off–but the comment never sat right with me. My initial reaction was to think, “Duh. I write in U.S. English because I was born, raised, and learned to write in the U.S.” I brushed it off, but the remark stuck with me, obviously enough that I remember it more than five years and many hundreds of comments later.

Some years later, on a mailing list for a Tolkien fanfic group, the discussion turned to grammatical and spelling conventions used in fandom, and the following remark was made concerning the use of “American” spellings and grammar:

I am put off reading fanfics based on Tolkien’s work with American spellings, and in particular, American speech patterns.

. . .

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to learn British spellings overnight, but it baffles me when I see people go to the trouble of doing long and complicated Quenyan [sic] or Sindarin translations but can’t be bothered to stay true to Tolkien’s style of spelling and speech patterns.

. . .

I’m sorry for suggesting then that [a] site about fanfiction written based on works by a British Professor who worked for the Oxford English Dictionary might want to use British spellings.

This conversation became quite heated (not that I played any part in that *ahem*) and lots of interesting revelations came out of the woodwork. Several U.S. writers acknowledged that they had tried to train themselves to write using British spelling and grammatical conventions, with mixed success. Others noted that they didn’t read stories that used U.S. spelling and grammar conventions. I later learned that this was apparently a big issue in some corners of fandom, with authors not only avoiding U.S. conventions but attempting to avoid vocabulary with etymologies that did not hail back to Anglo-Saxon, especially French-derived words. I found myself surprisingly angry over the whole thing. The idea that the language with which I had been raised and in which I had written all of my life was not adequate for writing fan fiction was deeply offensive, as was the notion that it was somehow inferior to another set of spelling/grammar conventions. I noted that the language in which an author writes is tied deeply to her identity and that it is troubling, to say the least, to expect people to suppress their identities in service of imitating another writer, no matter how much one might admire him.

Dipping my toe into linguistics has been satisfying in the sense that it has validated my feelings in many ways. For one, yes, language is essential to identity. As a writer, my language is central to who I am, perhaps even beyond the attachment I’d feel toward it if I wasn’t a writer. For another, the notion of one language being “better” or “purer” than another is a load of hogwash.

From a canonical perspective, I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t another example of what I perceive to be a pretty deep divide concerning the motive for writing Tolkien-based stories and the approach taken during the construction of those stories. There seem to be two schools of thought here. One says that stories should be imitative and try to put the reader back into the world exactly as Tolkien constructed it, right down to a perceived “Tolkienesque” style. The other approach says that Tolkien-based stories should be transformative, fill in the blanks, and question or critique Tolkien’s ideas through fiction. I’m not saying that one approach is more valid than the other.

From my perspective, falling squarely into the transformative camp, nothing is more counterintuitive than suppressing my own style as an author in order to imitate a style of writing used by another author. For one, it seems to me an exercise in futility; I best create evocative text in my own language, not a language belonging to someone else, to which I have no emotional attachment and in which I do not perceive the world. For another, it is a distraction to my purpose, which isn’t trying to sound like Tolkien or re-create the experience of reading his books with my stories but expressing ideas related to his writing–again, a task best accomplished, for me, in my native language. As an author, I am not an invisible presence behind the scenes in my stories, trying to create the illusion that I’m JRRT and not Dawn Felagund. No, my stories concern who I am and my beliefs and experiences as much as they concern the world JRRT crafted. That requires the use of my own style, my own language.

I have a whole page devoted to my expectations for this site and other writers who join me. In a nutshell, the HL looks at literature and book-based fandom. You do not have to like or write about Tolkien to write for this site. In fact, I would love some posts on Harry Potter other book-based fandoms about which I know little. You do not have to agree with me on everything (or anything!), although this site looks at literature and fandom from the perspective of people typically oppressed or sidelined in mainstream literature and discourse. All posts do not have to address that angle, of course; just looking back at my posts will show that I ramble about all manner of things. Two posts per month are adequate, though more are welcome, of course. My posts are generally long, but this isn’t a requirement. 500 words would be a good minimum to aim for in most cases.

Email me at DawnFelagund@gmail.com or leave a comment on this post if you’re interested and we’ll take it from there!

(Also, guest posts are welcome, so if you’ve written an essay or meta and think it might find an audience here, please contact me and we’ll see about getting it posted as a guest post!)

Now for my real reason for being here. The other day, I was reading another Metafandom post on remixing, since that has been a recent subject of discussion here. The post itself pretty much agreed with my thoughts on “unauthorized” remixing (and, by that, I mean using the universe or characters created by another fan-writer without permission, not lifting whole sections of story and changing the bits you don’t like). What caught my intention was a rather offhand remark made by Angiepen: “Except for Harry Potter, the vast majority of fictional-person fandoms are based on TV or movies.”

Initially, this provoked a “Bwhuuh?” sort of reaction because I don’t think that over 45,000 Tolkien-based stories archive on ff.net exactly makes it a fandom to sneeze at. However, once my initial surprise at being so casually overlooked wore off, I realized that, yes, actually, Angiepen was completely justified in not mentioning us. Tolkien-based fandom is somewhat isolated from fandom in general. It’s not that we’re invisible. It’s more that, in the big noisy banquet hall that is Fandom, we’re off in the corner playing by ourselves.

I’ve always wondered a bit at this. I’ve even talked about it before, in comments here at the HL and on LiveJournal, with some of you. Tolkien fandom seems to differ in a lot of ways from fandom in general, the majority of which is media-based. Here are a few differences that I’ve observed. I’d be interested to know of any others that people can think of.

• Reliance on fandom-specific archives versus LiveJournal (and clones, most notably, lately, Dreamwidth) and general fandom archives like ff.net and an Archive of Our Own. The whole LJ strikethrough incident that happened a few years ago sent far deeper tremors through fandom in general than it did Tolkien fandom. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if most Tolkien fan writers either didn’t know about strikethrough when it happened or didn’t really care, as it didn’t affect independent archives where most work is kept.
• More authors and artists are single-fandom. Reading on Metafandom, it seems to me that in most fandoms, people either create work for multiple fandoms or move on fairly frequently as their tastes change. In contrast, many people I know who create fanworks based on Tolkien’s books have never participated in another fandom and/or have no interest in participating in other fandoms. (Both would be true of me, for example.) Those who do seem to choose fandoms similar in nature to Tolkien–Harry Potter and Chronicles of Narnia, for example.
• Motives for writing vary. A reason I hear Tolkien writers give a lot of times for why they write and read fiction based in his world is a love of the world and a desire to stay there a bit longer. I’ve never seen this reason given for why people write in other fandoms. I’m sure it exists, but it doesn’t seem to be such an overwhelming reason as it is in Tolkien fandom. Instead, other fandoms seem to focus more on issues like social justice that are touched on by only a small contingent of writers in Tolkien fandom. Sexual expression also seems a much stronger motive in general fandom than in Tolkien fandom. While there are certainly Tolkien authors who write primarily for reason of sexual gratification (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, for the record), the vast majority do not. Again, too, fandom in general seems much more open to exploring contemporary issues relating to sexuality (gender identity, for example) than we Tolkien writers are.
• Critical discussion or “meta” has an internal rather than external focus. Tolkien writers tend to focus more on “canon” and how to interpret and communicate details within the texts. I’ve seen exhaustive (and exhausting!) conversations on character hair color, eye color, family trees, and timeline nitpicks. There are certain questions occurring within the texts that we will never have an answer to and never tire of arguing over. How long did Maedhros hang on Thangorodrim? Was Legolas a blond? Was Celegorm? Did Fëanor & Sons go to the Everlasting Darkness? Et cetera. In contrast, most fandom discussions focus on how fictional universes and our depictions of them communicate about the world beyond the fictional universe. Tolkien fandom does not often discuss issues of race, gender, sexuality, and ability, or of oppression and privilege, and when it does, does so only with great discomfort. In other fandoms, these discussions happen much more frequently and willingly.

What are the reasons for these things? I think there are a few.

• Tolkien fandom is old. Many fans have been active for years, so there was already an infrastructure and some community ties in place when the Internet became more widely available and gave more people access to fandom and allowed new fandoms to be created. Other older fandoms–Star Trek and Star Wars come first to mind–also tend not to be involved in general fandom, at least not that I’ve seen.
• The source material for Tolkien fandom is much more complex than some other fandoms. I do not intend that to insult or diminish other fandoms, but we are talking about, literally, a man’s life work which was, in turn, built on centuries of myth. The published source material itself is complex and contradictory, to say nothing of the reams of unpublished or hard-to-find materials. And then there are the works that are clearly related and cast light on Tolkien’s canon, like looking at Celtic myth to better understand the Elves. It’s no wonder that much of our discussion focuses on resolving our own understandings of those works.
• Because Tolkien fans don’t tend to participate in other fandoms, we are less aware of discussions or issues affecting fandoms outside of our own.
• There tend to be more conservative fans in Tolkien fandom than elsewhere. There are pockets of fans who prefer to look at Tolkien from a Christian perspective and who expect stories written about it to reflect conservative values. These people are also less likely to want to participate in discussion about oppression, and their presence (even if they are a minority) in the fandom make starting such discussions much more challenging when participants aren’t even on the same page about whether or not oppression exists or is important to discuss. When you’re arguing with one person about whether homosexuality is a choice, it’s hard to maintain a discussion with someone else about whether slash fiction is exploitative. So we argue about canon, where the same progressive-conservative divide can also be seen but occurs at one extra remove and, to many, probably seems less uncomfortable. After all, we’re arguing about whether sex between half-first cousins would have been acceptable in Elven culture, not about whether it’s okay to write Maedhros/Fingon in the first place.

Am I missing anything?

I am less certain about whether I would want Tolkien fandom to have more involvement in discussions and issues that are considered important by fandom in general. On the one hand, I think that many of the issues discussed by fandom in general are deeply important and need to be discussed. I have learned a lot from reading meta posts written by people in no way involved with Tolkien fandom. And because I don’t tend to mind confrontation, I wish that we could confront some of the biases in our own fandom rather than having to cloak everything in canon discussion all of the time.

At the same time, I like becoming deeply involved in the discussion of this world. Must the two be mutually exclusive? Not necessarily, but one is likely going to distract from the other.

(ETA: I want to clarify that remixes without permission of the original author are what is being banned.)

Now, I want to be perfectly clear that I am not criticizing the group owner’s decision about what is and is not allowed on a particular group or archive. I remain strong in my belief that this right belongs to group owners; anyone who doesn’t like it can vote with their feet and move on to another group or archive or start their own. There are groups to which I do not belong because I have strong objections to their fundamental principles and rules. I am not objecting to this particular rule. If I was, I would simply leave the group and skip writing a post about it.

What I find curious is the outrage that people feel toward “remixed” fanworks and what this says about our ideas about the ownership of artistic works. This is not the first time that I’ve encountered this idea, although it’s the first time that I’ve seen it incorporated into a group’s rules. Not too long ago, while doing maintenance on one of the sites I manage, I found a user profile that took similar umbrage to people using her original characters without her permission. (Whether this is because someone actually had used her characters or was a preemptive warning I don’t know.) And, in discussing the legal and ethical basis of derivative and transformative works, I have seen authors make similar avowals, that though they write stories based on another author’s work, they would not want stories written based on their own work.

Of course, no one who makes these claims is disingenuous enough to avoid the question of hypocrisy. Generally, this is resolved by pointing out that 1) Tolkien indicated in his letters that he wanted his work carried on by other artists and 2) the Tolkien Estate has made no move to shut down derivative and transformative work based on his books. To the first, yes, this is true:

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
~Letter 131 to Milton Waldman

More on that in a moment. To the second point, I hesitate to interpret the Tolkien Estate’s relative silence on fanworks as tacit approval. Since derivative and transformative works currently occupy a vast legal gray area and since lawyerly types provide good rationale why a challenge to the legality of fanworks quite possibly would expand protections of those works, then it seems just as likely to me that rights holders that currently wield some power to control works created at the fringes of that gray area don’t want more distinct legal definitions to make legal what they’d rather repress.

Personally, I’ve always been entirely laissez-faire with respect to my Tolkien-based works and published original works. I am stricter with respect to my unpublished original works simply because allowing aspects of those works to be made public would “use up” my first rights, which would eliminate most markets–and almost all of the good markets–where that work could be published. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written anything based on my original work. However, plenty of other Tolkien writers have used aspects of my stories–from details, like names and timelines, to wholly lifting the universe as a setting for their own stories–in creating their own work. Do I care? Nope. I’ve never discovered my work being used without my knowledge. Would I care if I did? Nope. When people email me and ask if they can use details or the whole universe, I always grant permission and tell them that they don’t need to ask me again in the future. Credit is nice because that is the expectation whenever using someone else’s creation, but I don’t expect people to ask for permission to name Maglor’s wife Vingarië or to have Caranthir skilled in osanwë-kenta. Nor do I care if they decided that I did everything all wrong and decide to provide their own take on the questions my stories address. In fact, Another Man’s Cage was borne out of a desire to show the Fëanorians’ side of the story, which at the time wasn’t being widely addressed on the sites where I read. I have always felt that this community’s ability to use art and fiction as a means of expressing opinion and engendering debate is one of its virtues. I would much rather every hateful reviewer on fanfiction.net devote her energy to crafting the stories she’d like to read, to contributing her own perspectives to the ongoing discussion of canon. In fact, I’ve suggested to more than one of them that they do just that.

Given all of that, I find the opposition to using existing fanworks to develop one’s own stories a curious but ultimately illustrative perspective about our perception of the “ownership” of creative work. I’m sure that some of the people who declare their fanworks off-limits have also criticized authors like Robin Hobb and, more recently, Diana Gabaldon who voiced very vocal objections to people writing stories using their characters and universes. Both authors have been mocked by members of fandom for having unhealthy attachments to characters and scorned for their desire to control the way readers think about their stories. How do you reconcile criticism of published authors holding those views with acceptance of fan authors who experience similar horror, disgust, and disapproval at the notion of having their stories “used” by someone else?

I think it shows how close many of us share Hobb and Gabaldon’s views, whether we like it or not. It’s easy to tell a creator to get over the use of her work in ways she doesn’t expect or approve of. It’s a bit harder when it’s your precious character or your well-reasoned perspective that is being “trashed” by someone else. I say this with full admission that my own laissez-faire attitude doesn’t come easily. I can’t say that I would be happy to discover a canatic’s version of AMC up on the web. Or my original stories reduced to porn. I would feel that my work and its purpose were being misunderstood. But, ultimately, I would accept the author’s right to “misunderstand” my work however much she wanted because I believe deeply in the importance of this right.

It is the right that underlies all derivative and transformative work. It is the acknowledgment that creative people will usually respond creatively when faced with strong emotions, be that love or loathing, and that to place some works off-limits to creative transformation is repressive of creativity. It is recognition of the fact that, as humans, our first response to art has always been to redo it or retell it, to personalize it to our own beliefs or experiences, to make it our own.

Judging by the letter above to Milton Waldman, Tolkien knew that. He knew that great myths and stories didn’t arise from a single source but became part of the cultures to which they belonged, which required giving access to those stories to all members of that culture. If we choose to believe that our stories, poems, and art based on his books are carrying on his legacy rather than robbing him of it, then I think we need to think as well about how we respond when others take the same freedom with our own work.

ETA (16 June 2010): Nora Charles has this post on Dreamwidth about remixes, including links to a remix challenge posed by the original creators that went horribly wrong when a story was posted that was unexpectedly critical of the original universe. It’s an interesting look at some of the issues that arise from writing in a shared universe, as we all more or less do.

It is becoming a perennial thing here on the Heretic Loremaster to declare that fan fiction is fiction. As in the fact that fan fiction is the same as regular fiction (if there is such a thing), only it goes under a different and derogatory name. And as in the fact that treating “fan fiction” and “fiction” as separate is itself a fiction.

I must confess a growing weariness of pointing out to people smart enough to know better (like Ms. Gabaldon) that fan fiction is fiction. Until relatively recently, what would today be termed “fan fiction” was the norm, not the exception. In the Middle Ages, for example, it was more common than not to lift ideas, characters, and whole stories from existing, often contemporaneous, works. This doesn’t even begin to touch on how many stories are derived from myths. In fact, if you think back to the root of creating fiction, there is a knot of people gathered around a fire as one tells a story … or I should say, retells a story. The art was as much–if not more–in selecting, recasting, and expanding upon existing details as it was in adding original changes. I believe that it is a human drive to respond creatively to what moves us the most.

So what happened? When did “storytelling” become “fan fiction”? Ms. Gabaldon’s posts get to the heart of this: when we began to commodify creativity, when we began to draw boundaries (in the interest of making money) around my ideas, my characters, my stories. Interestingly, Ms. Gabaldon–like notorious “fanfic” detractor Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg*–used to make her living writing other people’s characters. Watching her justify that in the face of her ignorant stereotypes of fan writers as oversexed, lazy, bad writers too stupid to create their own fiction is unsightly. You see, like Robin Hobb Lee Goldberg, she wrote her own version of fan fiction for those who “owned” those characters already. There was money to be made for someone, so that made it okay.

* I originally–and mistakenly–identified Robin Hobb as the author who had tried some rhetorical gymnastics in justifying a career spent writing other people’s characters (Monk and Diagnosis Murder) alongside an utter despise of “fanfic.” A blog post discussing this can be found here. Lee Goldberg and Cathy Young have a very interesting (and more than a little wankish!) back-an-forth across multiple posts. Anyway. I misidentified Robin Hobb and apologize to her and to my readers here for being lazy and relying on my memory rather than digging up links to back myself up. Robin Hobb’s original rant against fanfic, via the Wayback Machine (having gone the way of Ms. Gabaldon’s anti-fanfic posts) can be found here. Thanks to Mervi for asking the questions that turned up my mistake!

Now, I will pause to say that I do not oppose in any way a creator’s right to make money on her or his creation. In fact, contrary to many citizens of the Internet and many members of my own generation, I believe strongly that if you like an artist’s work enough to want her or him to create more of it, then you owe that person a fair payment for that work.

But this is a different issue. No one is arguing Ms. Gabaldon’s right to make money on her books, and no one is trying to cash in on her creations; people are responding as people have responded to creative work since the first group of people crouched around a fire to swap hunting tales. That intelligent, creative people fail to understand the need to respond creatively to the stories of others is astounding. That intelligent, creative people make the sorts of slanders against those who respond in such a way–as Ms. Gabaldon makes against “fanficcers”–is disgusting.

In her essay What Fanfic Is (and Isn’t) to Me, Dreamflower points out the difference in how most people respond to creative work and how artists (which includes writers) respond:

You can pick up a book or turn on the TV, and you can sit there and consume what you have been given, and then close the book or turn off the TV and forget about it. Or you can interact with the book or the show, by imagining new scenarios or new ways of looking at what you’ve been presented with.

Most people consume the creativity of others. They buy books and pay for music downloads and sit through television programs that are 25% advertisements and maybe talk at the water cooler the next day about what they’ve read/heard/seen but, otherwise, never move much beyond consumption. Ms. Gabaldon herself points out that creative people find inspiration anywhere. For pity’s sake, I find stories in the swirls of fake marble on my bathroom wall. I can’t help but to lift an eyebrow at the notion that, in Ms. Gabaldon’s perfect world, we would legally and morally be able to respond only as consumers to the creative work of others.

Responding creatively is in us. And, culturally, I believe that we remain a species whose very nature assures that creation will, in part, be a collective act. Until fairly recently, that was just creating; we didn’t need any special or derogatory names for retelling another person’s story. When creators and the companies that profited from them realized that they could inscribe tight boundaries and claim “ownership” of stories that, in fact, are the product of the thousands of collectively derived myths, stories, and archetypes that define our culture did we end up with the sneering term “fan fiction,” the heart of which is fanatic, implying instability, obsession, hysteria (the latter particularly interesting given that “fanfic” writers are predominantly female). In reality it is, and will always be, just fiction.

Last week, the New York Times published an article by Taffy Brodesser-Akner on anonymous commenting that makes the same observations as I did some years ago on Fanfiction.net. Brodesser-Akner considers the theory that anonymous online snarkiness arises because we have evolved mechanisms to control our social interactions based on face-to-face interactions. Online, without the facial and body-language cues of our conversation partners to tell us when we’ve crossed the line (and the attendant negative emotions that come with such disapproval from a fellow human), we’re left in the dark and can say things that we’d never dream of saying in a face-to-face interaction.

I’ve often observed the same of people in cars. Most people won’t even shush a chatterbox in a movie theater, but the meekest granny will give you the finger for cutting her off. I notice my own perception changing as I drive and become irritated: Suddenly, I am not annoyed with other people but with cars. I perceive the behavior as coming not from a person but from a car and, likewise, any of my own aggression is aimed at a person but at the car, an insensate and lifeless hunk of metal from which I don’t have to fear censure or disapproval.

The same happens online. I know many of the people with whom I regularly communicate. Some of them I have even met. When I read their comments and their emails, I hear their voices in my mind and see their faces. Sometimes, I know what a person looks like from pictures; other times, I have communicated so much–often in more spontaneous forums like instant messenger–with a person that I have developed a voice for that person, despite having never heard her voice. But an interesting thing happens with people whom I know online but do not know well. Just as I come to associate my friends with a face, a photo, a tone of voice, so I come to associate acquaintances with the icons that they use most often. I see that person’s name, and her icon flashes into my mind. Perhaps this is my mind’s way of making sense of faceless communications: by creating a face of whatever handily associates itself with a particular name.

Anonymous comments allow none of that. I have received the rare unsigned comment on my work on LiveJournal, and without any clue as to whom I communicating with, the voice takes on a flat, featureless quality as I read. And it is difficult to respond to such comments too. Everything that I say feels insincere or, if I’m simply talking shop about my writing, overly clinical. I am no longer talking to a person but a blank white box with no notion of who sits on the receiving end.

The NYT article links to a related post by Connie Schultz that delves even deeper into the effects of anonymity online:

It makes for many an ugly day, discouraging thoughtful discussions and repelling readers who don’t have the stomach for the daily dose of vitriol. … Some argue that allowing anonymity is a way of outing the bigots among us. But reading multiple posts, often by the same person using a variety of identities, amplifies voices and exaggerates numbers. The haters are small in number, but they are tenacious, and the resulting echo chamber fuels a growing climate of fear and rage born of false impressions.

Or: sockpuppetry, as we’d call it in fandom. One person with abhorrent views and a lack of civility can create the impression of consensus where none exists. Suddenly, those who play nicely, who are “only here to have fun,” feel like they are marooned on an island in hostile waters. I remember when it seemed people were quitting Fanfiction.net in droves due to the general tone of uncivility there propagated by a few people with multiple accounts; the heads on the hydra that, lobbed off for ToS violation, would spring back in a newly vicious permutation. We still get the occasional registration on SWG from a writer who’s never posted off of Fanfiction.net and wincingly asserts that she can “take concrit” but “doesn’t flame.” Since policies both allowing concrit and banning flames are codified into SWG’s rules, these assertions, to me, speak far more about writers who have become hand-shy in a toxic environment that makes no attempt at insisting on accountability.

When we were working to open the SWG’s story archive, we were faced with a number of choices about what we would and would not allow. I was and am open to many different possibilities, but one thing I continue to insist upon is that anonymous comments will have no place on our site. If you want to communicate with an author, then you can register for an account. It takes ten seconds, and you need never visit us or be bothered by us again. But it creates accountability, however little, and associates comments with an identity.

In Schultz’s article, she notes the same thing. She has experienced with a Facebook page to connect with her readers and finds greater civility there. Now commenters have names and most have pictures associated with their names as well. Though she “knows” very few of them, they nonetheless possess an identity. She writes, “A not-so-amazing thing happens when people feel safe: They start to speak their minds. Dozens, mostly women, tell me they have never before expressed their opinions so publicly.” Does that sound familiar to anyone else but me?

I don’t often mention SWG’s begetting day because it seems irrelevant to anyone but me since the group was inactive until its birthday in July. But this is the SWG’s fifthbegetting day so enough of a milestone that I thought, what the heck, I’ll mention it just this once. The SWG came into being on the night of March 14th into 15th when I couldn’t sleep. (Insomnia being a generally dangerous thing for me, creatively, considering that I also invented my o-fic universe the Midhavens one night after taking stimulant cold medicine and lying awake until 5:30 AM.) It occurred to me that night that there were a lot of talented Silm writers yet, aside from the Silmfics discussion group, they had no place of their own to call home. And this being soon enough after the LotR movies, Silmfic tended to get drowned on general Tolkien archives by stories written by enthusiastic though largely ephemeral members of the fandom drawn to the sources by the movies. Since I didn’t have much interest in LotR-based stuff, the lack of a centralized place for discussion and stories relating to the Silm was frustrating for me, so I took on that dangerous middle-of-the-night and quintessentially Dawn way of thinking: “It does not yet exist; therefore, I must create it.”

So create it I did. I had no idea how to use LiveJournal, but I signed myself up for an account so that I could set up SWG there, and I created a Yahoo! group too. That was March 15th, the Ideas of March, SWG’s begetting day.

It sounds cliche to say it, but five years seems simultaneously a short a time ago and an eternity. I was a very different person when I started SWG than I am now. Of course, I was a complete n00b in the fandom and really not qualified to be taking on such an ambitious project. I was also incredibly insecure as a writer. I wasn’t sure I was any good at all and thought there was a good chance that I completely sucked. That first year of posting Another Man’s Cage on a weekly basis nearly gave me a peptic ulcer, I was so convinced that, at any moment, someone would denounce me as the fraudulent writer I was sure that I was. Likewise, SWG was a tender part of my fannish self just waiting to be wounded … and it would not take long for that to happen the first time. (I remember my first unsubscription notice to this day and how much that bothered me that my group had clearly made someone unhappy enough to unsubscribe. I won’t say that unsubscriptions don’t ever bother me now–it really depends on the person and/or the circumstances–but this was someone who never spoke once; I really shouldn’t have cared that much. But I did.) In January of 2006, one of SWG’s members (and we were just an LJ community and mailing list then, though we were discussing our website and archive) became most unhappy with me over a perceived insult on the mailing list that she felt that I’d ignored and started a public campaign against my infant Silmarillion group and me personally. That was … distressing, mostly because while I perceived the unfairness of her accusations, I wasn’t sure that my and SWG’s reputation would withstand them, no matter that they were not true. My grandmother–my last surviving grandparent–died right around the same time, and that was a slap in the face to bring me back to reality. My grandmother was a stubborn Polish lady who once rear-ended a car because the driver didn’t go fast enough for her after the light turned green; it felt like, with her death, Nanny was giving me a shake and asking me when I had begun to care so deeply and allow myself to be hurt so much by lies spread by someone who was known to be both unkind and a magnet for drama. When the SWG’s first begetting day rolled around on the Ides of March, 2006, one could say that I was already a much tougher person than I had been just a year ago.

I could sit here and spout many such examples of how the SWG has enriched my life in the past five years and shaped who I am today, but in truth, my experiences as a group and archive owner have been ambivalent. I don’t think I’d ever unwish my insomnia on March 14, 2005, and the subsequent creation of the SWG, but neither have my last five years as the group’s owner been all honey and roses. If I am being totally honest, there are times when I have considered giving it up. When I think of the time for my own writing and art that I have sacrificed to learning web design and building the site and maintaining the site and coming up with ideas to keep the site active and interesting … well, I think, “I am a writer; this isn’t what I had in mind when I started this group.” I have sacrificed most of my Tolkien-based writing and a lot of my o-fic writing too in order to run this group. If I am being perfectly honest, there are days when that breaks my heart. And I would be lying too if I did not acknowledge that there are days when undertaking the sort of effort that it takes to keep such a project afloat (”launching the lead balloon,” as I recently said of B2MeM) does not seem worth it “for love alone.”

But, of course, there are the friends I would not have made, the stories that would not have been written, the things I would not have learned (including web design!), and the experiences I would not have had if, at this precise moment five years ago, I had deleted my nascent group before anyone knew it existed.

So happy begetting day, SWG. I am grateful to you for bringing me to a point in my life that, five years ago, I could have never imagined. I wonder where we’re going next.

My ambivalence toward awards has been discussed before. Clearly, I have come to terms with my own participation in the MEFAs since I have participated as an author, reviewer, nominator, and volunteer at various times in the past four seasons. But my ambivalence remains. How so? For me, nomination in the MEFAs is the award. A nominator has the chance to choose her or his twenty favorite stories for the year and chose one of mine; that is really high praise to me. The reviews only sweeten the deal. By the time the actual winners are announced, my emotion towards it is largely one of curiosity. In the end, though, no matter how well they’re matched in categorization, I don’t believe that you can judge one work of art against another. That my story about Maedhros was somehow deemed better than her story about Elrond but not quite as good as his novella about Gil-galad really doesn’t say a whole lot. It may well be that the majority of readers did agree with that arrangement but it may well be that the next batch of readers will disagree completely, to say nothing of the myriad factors that influence votes and have nothing to do with the readers’ actual preference for one story over another. (Like I have time to read one of the three and pick the shortest or the one about Elrond because I like him more than the other two characters.)

I don’t say this to diminish the satisfaction or pride of this year’s (or any year’s) winners. The meaning I attach to the awards is mine alone and surely not the only–much less correct–way to look at things. It comes back to that ambivalence: The fact that some people will inevitably walk away from the whole experience with a decreased sense of enjoyment in this community, a lessened view of their work, or a diminishment in desire to be involved in future events (not just the MEFAs). And while I know that is not the intention or even necessarily the dominant experience, it exists, and it makes me wonder, not for the first time, what role awards should have in art.

I don’t write this because I have answers. I have been wrestling with this question since my first exposure to the MEFAs came through a fandom friend who, despite several nominations, did not receive a single award and was hurt by that. And seeing similar experiences every year after. I have been wrestling with this question since deciding to participate as an author and reviewer, then a nominator, then a volunteer. I think I might be even further now than I was then from finding an answer, if such an answer can even exist. Part of me thinks that those who end up bitter just have the wrong outlook. Part of me thinks that works of art should never be pitted against each other; that that misses the point. Part of me thinks that the collateral benefits of recognizing our favorite stories each year and creating an easy means to find new authors make the enterprise, in itself, worthwhile. Then part of me replies that we don’t need awards to do that.

I can only congratulate again those who were nominated this year, thank those who wrote reviews and administrated the awards, and remain ambivalent.

The post scathes tech companies (like Yahoo!) that continue to engage in behaviors and practices unfriendly to women, such as having strippers at trade shows, which to the writer “implies that there are no women in the audience [and] certainly sends the message that the tech world is the He-Man Woman-Haters Club.” What about other facets of geek culture? Do you, HL readers and most trusted fellow citizens of geekdom, think that males that identify as “geeks” tend to be more overtly sexist than those who do not?

I’m a woman so, of course, I’ve experienced sexism in its myriad forms. For example, at work (in a male-dominated profession), I often feel that I have to stand on my desk and jump up and down and scream in order to get my (male) supervisors to hear my thoughts and ideas on policies relating to my job, policies that often involve knowledge or skills that only I possess. (Fancy that!) And when I worked in the same office as my (male) supervisors, I got mistaken for the secretary an awful lot. But I’ve been lucky that workplace outings have never taken place on The Block, I’ve never been sexually harassed at work, and if my coworkers make off-color jokes and remarks about women, then they do it well out of my earreach. Good thing too.

But now geek culture … I am, of course, part of the Tolkien writing fandom, which is predominantly female, and I’m not going to go into whether sexism/misogynism exists in that community … not in this post anyway. And I’m in the SCA, which is a pretty equal mix of men and women. I’ve had a few SCAdians make comments about my looks, but they were always people I knew well enough to know that they meant them playfully and not offensively, and they knew me well enough to know that I would take them as such. Fair enough.

I also spent a few years as part of the subculture surrounding a popular tabletop game that shall go unnamed. I built and painted models while my husband and friends played the game. It was not uncommon to walk into the small store where we played to find it packed with twenty or thirty people and yet be the only woman in the store. (A few moms and wives would drift in and out but, in my years there, I knew only one other woman who participated as actively as I did.) I used to tell my husband that I sometimes felt, walking into the store, like half the heads would pop up from the tables, noses would start twitching, and the guys would begin gleefully muttering, “Estrogen! We smell estrogen!”

The gaming models primarily represented men, but when women were depicted, they were always buxom to the extent that hauling around that much extra boobage would make walking difficult, much less weilding a sword and exacting fancy fighting manuevers, and they were usually scantily clad or–in a few instances–unclad entirely from the waist up. Needless to say, we few female participants didn’t get the same eye candy from the gaming models that depicted men.

What of behavior? Well, possibly the most blatantly offensive act of sexism I’ve yet faced occurred in that store while I was working on a painting project. I was minding my own business, working on my current project with a few other guys at the table with me. I was wearing a knee-length dress with a halter-type top that tied behind my neck. At one point, I realized that one of my table-mates was crawling under the table. Thinking that perhaps he’d dropped something down there, I looked underneath the table at him and realized that he was trying to look up my dress. Spurred on by his behavior, the fellow beside me took the opportunity to reach behind me and try to untie the halter top to my dress.

I don’t believe that these guys were trying to frighten me much less assault me; they thought that they were being funny or perhaps paying me a compliment. That didn’t make it right, and when one of my friends who was a store employee later heard about it, he was livid. He was much angrier than I was. Interacting with most of the participants in this particular game always felt like instructing young children in the proper ways to behave in public. The two incidents that afternoon were much the same: No, guys, it is not okay to behave that way toward a woman. Even if she is your friend. Even if you’re just playing around. If you like how I look, telling me that my dress is pretty or that I look nice in it it is a much more effective and civil compliment than trying to take it off of me.

I don’t know if it ever sunk in. My husband and I both grew frustrated with that particular community in a large part because of the rampant immaturity and asocial behavior, and we no longer participate. I still have a closet full of models that I would like to paint someday, but then illumination scratches that part of my brain that demands fine motor skills just as well. I might live out my life quite happily with a bucketful of unassembled Elves in the closet in my study and my old paints mainly serving to provide convenient pop-top containers for gold-leaf sizing.

But when I read that post today, my years with this group came back. And I wondered how typical my own experiences (and, apparently, those of female employees for some of these companies) really were. Anyone have thoughts, insights, or anecdotes on this? How do other predominantly male geek communities treat female participants? What do you think is behind this tendency, if it exists?

All thoughts and opinions are welcome. The only rule I have for this place is that I ask that people remain civil to each other. It is one thing to disagree with a point or idea and quite another to attack a the person expressing it. The first is okay; the second is not.

Finally, although this is a continuation of the LotR Genfic discussion, and although I am the webmaster of the Many Paths to Tread archive, my website is affiliated with neither, and this discussion is occurring independently of the list on which it originated. So, if you find yourself annoyed or angered by the conversation here, please don’t take it out on either of those groups.

My door, however, is always open to questions or concerns at DawnFelagund@gmail.com.

For those of you on the LotR Genfic list, you can find the original discussion thread here.