Inara: I think she looks adorable. Mal: Yeah, but I never said it.

'Shindig'


Fan Fiction: Writers, Readers, and Enablers  

This thread is for fanfic recs, links, and discussion, but not for actual posting of fanfic.


Rebecca Lizard - Dec 22, 2002 1:39:09 pm PST #1843 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

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.


Am-Chau Yarkona - Dec 22, 2002 1:48:17 pm PST #1844 of 10000
I bop to Wittgenstein. -- Nutty

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.


Rebecca Lizard - Dec 22, 2002 1:50:09 pm PST #1845 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

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.


Rebecca Lizard - Dec 22, 2002 1:50:58 pm PST #1846 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

Could I have used more asterisks in that last post.


Fay - Dec 22, 2002 1:51:53 pm PST #1847 of 10000
"Fuck Western ideologically-motivated gender identification!" Sulu gasped, and came.

... 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.

Yes. I'd agree with that. I find the concept of presuming-to-write-from-real-person-X's-viewpoint so gobsmacking that I just don't accept it at all. So I've got this whole mental disconnect going on - 'Such-and-such story-isn't-actually-about-Person-X'.

Which is crazy as hell, isn't it? 'Cause ostensibly it totally is about Person X. But I'm not reading it and thinking that it is about Person X, because I'm not interested in Person X's intimate details, be they his favourite sandwich (or lollypop) or how he looks when he climaxes. None of my gosh darned business.

But it's like watching an impressionist on the TV, or that made-for-TV-tug-of- love-true-life-drama guff. It's not real. It's just using some of the trappings of reality to make fiction. And if fiction is interesting enough & well written enough on its own merits, then I can't just dismiss it out of hand.


Rebecca Lizard - Dec 22, 2002 1:54:50 pm PST #1848 of 10000
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

It surprises me how many people I've read talking about RPF don't seem to think that. Or to have thought of that.


§ ita § - Dec 22, 2002 2:03:09 pm PST #1849 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

I guess I just don't see the danger.

I read The Alienist a few weeks ago. It's got some RPF in it. Every time the real character showed up, I was distracted wondering "Did he? Would he? Is this fact?" Him being whoever-the-fuck-he-was didn't help me enjoy the story at all. Broke me out of the fourth wall every time. Now, if he'd been Joe Bloggs instead of Roosevelt would have let me enjoy the story *more* not less.

And that's a core component of how I feel about RPF. I don't want to be able to have my own wondering. I don't want to be able to think "Well, you didn't read that article where he said he was afraid of chickens, did you?"

I'd be as guilty as the next person of reading reportage about celebs. It's fun, up to a point. If it's true. If there's no wondering (by me) and manipulation (by the author). Once it's not true, it's more like a trip into the author's head (more so than with an OC or a fictional character), and it's a trip with embarassing (to me) scenery. Because of the invasion of privacy.

So I don't think it daring or naughty or anything. It's another exercise, is all.


Connie Neil - Dec 22, 2002 2:07:59 pm PST #1850 of 10000
brillig

It never occured to me to be concerned about RPF being intrusive on someone else's life. If someone's sitting at home imagining my day, I'm more likely to snicker than anything else. "I, Claudius" by Robert Graves is RPF, and that's one of the great literary works.

I'm not trying to be snippy or anything, but the major reason I don't read RPF is that I don't have time to read all the fic out there, and the show plots are generally more interesting than real life. If an actor were musing about his character, that could be fun to read.


§ ita § - Dec 22, 2002 2:12:10 pm PST #1851 of 10000
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

"I, Claudius" by Robert Graves is RPF, and that's one of the great literary works.

I don't feel that's either here nor there. I don't think anyone's saying it can't be extremely well done, just that some of us don't want to read it.

And the minute someone writes about me doing anything I didn't do, and publishes it for others to read, my privacy has been violated. I do play my space close to my chest, but not exceptionally so, and I do know other people (some marginally exposed to the public eye) who feel the same way.

But even if someone stood up and said "Write about me! Read about things I never did!" I'd still not be interested. It's not all about privacy for me. While I might slightly be interested in Viggo's offscreen adventures (but I'm not), I'm even less interested in someone else's ideas about what he does when he's not being someone else. I see absolutely no pull there. If I were a Viggo fan, I'd be looking for the real deal.


Theodosia - Dec 22, 2002 2:31:20 pm PST #1852 of 10000
'we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn't end any time soon"

The difference between historical fiction like The Alienist and RPF-fanfic may be that in the first case, the writer and the audience are in tacit agreement that the story and depicted characters are based on real people and real events to a greater or lesser extent, but are clearly speculation-based. Also, historical fiction tends to be about 'safely dead' protagonists, enough removed so that even their direct descendants aren't likely to be reading about their parents doing X when clearly the real parents would have done Y instead.