The big issue of the last week or so was the case of Lori Jareo, who self-published her Star Wars fanfic and put it up for sale on amazon.com. She's probably the most notorious fanficcer in the world by now. Most of Star Was fandom and the ficcing world is talking about her, generally using synonyms of "stupid" and "idiot".
The responses I wanted to talk about weren't from ficcers, who were mostly concerned about the bad name this fool would give to the rest of fanfic. I was surfing a couple of blogs which have a wider audience, and I kept coming across comments like these:
She should have replaced the names and called it a homage, like real first-time writers do
Er, no. If your hero uses "the Power" to hypnotise people and move rocks around, is an orphan from a desert planet, with a long-lost twin sister and a mysterious enemy with a bad breathing problem, then no publishers will touch it, and even if they did, Lusasfilm would slap you down so hard, you bounce. Do you think it's going to fool the BBC if your thousand-year-old alien with as many lives as a cat travels through time and space in a red telephone box called the SIDRAT, and his mortal enemies shout "ANNIHILATE" before they zap people dead with their dishmops?
You can probably "file off the serial numbers" until the story is about "war in space", "crazy time travellers", or "wizards at school", but by that time, will it be interesting? People who want to write about Yoda or Daleks won't be satisfied with producing generic SF. The "serial numbers", the instantly recognisable characters and settings, are what draws them. They want more Doctor Who or Harry Potter, not something vaguely reminiscent of it. Anyway, even if all the bits that employ copyright lawyers are removed, what's left is probably as derivative as The Sword of Shannara.
Fanfic is a waste of time. It's not even any good for teaching anyone to write original work
You know, I've never met anyone who says, 'I want to write an original novel, but I've used up all my writing ability on fanfic!' Of course there are people who keep saying they're going to do an original but never start (like me), but are they any different from all the people who talk about their great novel idea they've never got around to writing? If you really want to write an original, and have the ability to do so, fanfic isn't going to stop you. And it might be a better novel. Beginning writers often perpetrate annoyingly flawless protagonists, purple prose, sloppy plotting and poor characterisation. However, if it's do as Malfoylvrr88, the situation is not irretrievable. If you are a writer, if you are becoming a writer, then you write and you write and you write. If you are trying to improve as a writer, it doesn't matter if you're practising on fic or originals. All right, fanfic isn't going to teach you worldbuilding. The backcloth is already in place. But the mechanics of writing, on the levels of prose, plot, characterisation, and structure—yes, if your betas know their job, and you are able to view your own writing with a critical mindset.
The thought of a first novel written by a twenty-four-year-old does not tend to inspire confidence. But a twenty-four-year-old who's been writing fic for ten years—Writing fic gets you past the Mary Sue stage. It can teach how to produce coherent prose in a recognisable language, how to avoid the azure orbs school of descriptive writing, how to structure a paragraph, a chapter and a novel, how to handle several subplots, how to write an action scene, how to gain readers' sympathy, how to write a consistent character. It doesn't matter if the character was originally written by someone else; if you can write Hermione Granger of the Fifth Doctor so that they're recognisable as their canonical selves, then you can probably create a self-consistent character over the length of a novel. At the very least, it's a stretching exercise, like writing 500 words in the style of Hemingway or Tolkien.
That is in the best case, where a writer wants to improve in fanfiction, where betas and concrit do their proper job. We've all seen little ego-stroking societies of mutual adoration, or authors who treat criticism like an attempt to mutilate their children, or mediocre writers with hundreds of fans. But this isn't confined to fanficcers—Ann Rice? Dan Brown, anyone? No matter how bad your fic is, there's always an archive that will take it (the Pit of Voles, for one). It doesn't have to rot in 87 slush piles, and you needn't get any rejection letters, unless you submit it to a moderated archive. But the rules of the real world still apply to some extent. If it's crap, people usually won't read it. If it's ludicrous, it will be mocked. If you submit it to a an archive, you may get an email saying 'it's plagiarised/dreck/we don't take Pokemon cross-overs'. Such is life. Bounce off that a few times, and hopefully you won't send death threats to publishing houses that turn down your magnum opus.
Fanfic 'dilutes' the original creation. It will lose the original creator money.
Oh, tosh. The writers and readers of fanfic are the ones with borderline-obsessive interest in the source material. They're the ones who've seen the film 18 times, own all the DVDs, the collectable figurines, the magazines....Fanfic is the methadone they go for when they can't get enough of the real thing. It fills in the gaps and extends into the happily-ever-after and past into the past, explores the scenarios that never happened. It's not going to replace the original work; it's always still there, and the vast majority of the money-paying public don't even know it's there and wouldn't be interested if they did. Sure, you can cut your epic Rise of the Sith into 100-word chunks on Powerpoint, shove it into a data projector and try to get people to pay to see it instead of Revenge of the Sith. Good luck.
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