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Ah. Okay - something spooky happened with your post there, but it's all fine now. As you were.

Sorry. Did you see I edited? Cut-and-paste error. I'm an idiot.

This is where writing attitudes differ, I suppose. I write about characters I know. I know it's a fantasy, but I feel that if I met Spike (or any of the other characters I slash/write) I could guess what he was going to say next and possibly how he'd move as he said it.

I talk to these characters, after all. I basically role-play them. It's very strange for me to do this with a real person, because I have this little nag at the back of my mind that says 'wrong! That might not be how they are' and I just have to ignore that and keep going. And I don't want to do that with a person whose permission I don't have, because I... I... I have a squick about it. Can't explain better than that. It has to be said that when I talk to people in real life, I sit there and I'm fantasing, wondering 'how do they behave when they're not with me? How do those two look in bed? What did he have for breakfast this morning?'

So, for example, a few years ago when I was very into 'The Goon Show', I'd be thinking (and thank the Goddess I hadn't found out about writing RPS, because I'd bet if I'd known about it, the world would now suffer from Milligan/Sellers slash), 'what did they do when they were recording the show? What did they think...?' etc., and I got a little flash of pleasure from reading Harry Secombe's autobiography, and wondering about him and Myra in bed, and the fact that I still know his wife's name scares me a little. And then, because the actors are stronger characters than the characters (storng though they are), I role-played the actors, and I'd wonder even then 'Is it less wrong to pretend you're Peter Sellers, because he's dead, than to pretend you're Spike Milligan, because (at that time) he's still alive?'

It's a strange problem, and not one I know the answer to.

Wow. Wrod to the big differences in pov.

Wrod to the big differences in pov.

I have to say it. Wrod.

Is the rush you get from the idea of RPF because it's naughty? What else gives you that rush, and if Orlando and Viggo stood up and said "Yup, that's exactly what happened -- good job, carry on." would the frisson disappear?

but I feel that if I met Spike (or any of the other characters I slash/write) I could guess what he was going to say next and possibly how he'd move as he said it.

Exactly! Because you're a ficcer.

I wrote this paper, OK. And it's about Elizabeth Alexander's poem "Your Ex-Girlfriend". And the poem *I* then wrote, called "Your X Girlfriend", which, if I could call a spade a spade in front of my teacher, I'd honestly say is fic, fic, fic for her poem.

And my poem is-- as I said in the paper--

In this paper, I will focus on the specific type of co-ownership that occurs when a reader finds a text and loves it (regardless of whether with careful intellectual dissection or simple gut affection) to such a degree that she begins to feel a possessiveness towards the text, a sense that she herself owns the poem. The reader is distraught when the text is quoted in a distorted manner, or maligned (as she believes) unfairly; the reader believes her interpretation of the text is the one the author had intended, as the reader herself sees no other possible viable interpretation.

The next step in this co-ownership is when the reader takes her utter certainty about the original text, assumes authorial rights over its varying details, and produces a new, creative text of her own, meant to fit in as if part of the original text. Stronger in intent than a work that just references another text, this new work is a kind of unauthorized sequel, intimately intertwined with the original text, setting off layers of call-and-response back and forth between the two pieces when they are read in tandem.

it's *very* heavily referencing my specific reading of Alexander's poem. But. Guess what? My professor is actually friends with Alexander, and once I'd told him about my project idea, he told me what Alexander herself had told him the poem was about. And I. was. all. wrong. But that only proves my point!

Forgive me, I'm going to post a little more of my paper, because I can't think of a way to re-phrase anything of my opinion, I've already said it there:

After I had finished my reading of "Your Ex-Girlfriend", I learned that Alexander actually intended very little of what I had read in the poem. The ex-girlfriend was such in a sense that she had used to be the narrator's friend, but they had fallen out. The poem is meant as an indirect, vaguely-feminist rebuke to the notion that women's friendships never dissolve. In my reading of the poem, I had invented the character of the second-person man entirely.

When I read and analyzed "Your Ex-Girlfriend", my personal interpretation of the poem was entirely local to my head. But when I took the information I had gotten from my interpretation (the character of the second-person man; the exact type of conflict created by the presence of the ex-girlfriend) and wrote my own poem based on it, my personal interpretation of "Your Ex-Girlfriend" became true to a text-- the new "Your X Girlfriend"-- on the same level as Alexander's original projected meaning for "Your Ex-Girlfriend". I had constructed an alternate version of her poem, and then wrote a second poem with my alternate version of hers as the bridge between them; and now it hangs in the air like a ghost, suggesting meaning Alexander never intended, having gained validity through the birth of my second text.

In that situation, my poem has unavoidably affected Alexander's, merely by association; there is no room to question whether I deserved to have the power to affect her text, or whether I did honestly by it. It's equally possible that a poem may appear on the literary horizon, claiming to intimately reference Alexander's, written about yellow elephants eating soap-bubble pie. A hypothetical new reader, having read the elephants poem before Alexander's, will be unable to divorce the elephants in her mind from the content of the original poem: the sheen of possibility of elephants is permanently added to "Your Ex-Girlfriend", and, if the two poems are taught together widely enough, a generation of new readers will automatically think of elephants as an established part of "Your Ex-Girlfriend".

Ridiculous as this example is, examples of such re-interpretation co-ownership occur all the time. Last year, I saw a production of James Joyce's famous short story "The Dead" as a musical drama. The plot of the story had been rearranged; characters played out whole scenes not to be found in the original story; all conflict and tension from the original story were carefully resolved and smoothed away; the actual singing was the final straw on the back of this travesty of Joyce's story. Yet, as I left the theater, I was aware the conversation of other people that made it clear they had never read the story, and now felt secure that they knew it.

However much I recoil at the memory of that performance, the difference I perceive between "Your X Girlfriend" and James Joyce's "The Dead": The Musical is one of degree, not category. In the end, the are both acts of co-ownership, equally arrogant with the rights to creative works originally belonging to other artists.

But, of course, when you start doing this *to real people*, not works of fiction, you enter a slightly-different sphere. Which, I said, I find interesting. Sometimes-- often-- authors will get upset to find out that people have written fic about THEIR creative BABIES, but Alexander might, I flatter myself, have been a little interested to find out what I'd done to her poem. But I can't conceive of a situation in which she would be anything but upset to find out that I, total stranger and fangirly reader, had rewritten her own brain.

Alexander might, I flatter myself, have been a little interested to find out what I'd done to her poem.

Having been rehearsing people (alebit very informally) to read some of my poems aloud, I find that to hear about how other people interrept my work is one of the most wonderful things that's ever happened to me. IJS.

Exactly! Because you're a ficcer.

So what that says, as I've read it, that if I know a person well enough to feel that I know how they would react in a given situation, I can write fic about them. And from a purely technical standpoint, that's true. For me, it's a taste-and-decencey boundary: there is fantasy 'this-is-what-they'd-do' that should be kept in my head, and there's 'this-is-what-they'd-do' that I can write down and share, depending entierly on who 'they' are.

Is the rush you get from the idea of RPF because it's naughty? What else gives you that rush, and if Orlando and Viggo stood up and said "Yup, that's exactly what happened -- good job, carry on." would the frisson disappear?

Well, see, I don't know how to answer this. I *don't* get a rush, I discover, from specific fic at *all*, but it feels kind of cool, abstractly and from a distance, to know that other people are doing this dangerous thing, you know?

Which leads into the point about what exactly *makes* it dangerous. And that's not that the story has Orlando Bloom and Viggo Whatthefuck'shislastname screwing, it's that *you the author dared to write them*. A story that just had OB sitting on his bed eating a sandwich, and then calling his mother to ask her how things were going, would be no less offensive than a full-cast writhing screaming orgy on the ground. It's not the *content* that's the dangerous, kicky, invasive thing; it's the whole someone-who-is-not-him-using-him itself.

So, of course, one might think that a story that kept to what OB had said himself, and wasn't out-of-character (whatever we can presume THAT to be, but it'd be assumed that a story about him drinking a glass of water has less potential to be out-of-character than a story about him having sex with somebody), would be less offensive in that way. And I'd say, yeaaah, *but* that's a tiny, tiny tiny thing. You are still writing *in* *his* *head*. A story written about *me* that *followed* a timeline of my day *exactly* as it had gone would *still* freak me out, because no matter how faithfully they'd stuck to what I said and what I reported, they could *never* get exactly who I am, what had happened inside my head. That's because *people are not fictional characters*.

Which is why this Slash the Slashers thing is going to be so bloody interesting. I imagine I'll be reading mine absolutely breathlessly.

Could I have used more asterisks in that last post.