sigelphoenix

Robin Hobb on fanfiction.

An entertaining and eloquent response.

I find this sad because Robin Hobb, when she came to lecture for us, was very lovely and seemed quite reasonable. But this rant is a more articulate version of the usual arteeste hissyfit that makes me want to tear my hair out.

The response post generally covers my feelings on the matter, the most important of which is this: authorial intent is not divine decree. The legitimacy of fan interpretation is a well-established tradition in pop culture as a way for the audience to increase their love and ownership of a given work. And that's a good thing. Fan ownership does not mean legal ownership (except in the case of a few nutjobs), but rather a greater personal investment in a given work. That means we like it more, and we're more likely to give you money to make more of it.

You can't always convey exactly what you want the reader to see in your writing. That's just the way that writing works. Writers try, through editing and workshopping, to improve the communication of their ideas ... but at a certain point, you have to accept that the reader will just think something different from you. And if the reader is using his or her different thoughts to do something as creative as writing about your work? Well, I don't know about you, but that's a level of energetic intellectual exchange that I would love to see, if and when I publish my own work.

(As for the "personal masturbatory fantasies" ... It is true that a good chunk of fanfic is just that, and has little redeeming value. But fans are imagining this stuff anyway; the fact that they write it down and post it is just a result of the instant gratification of mindless feedback that the Internet provides. It's not a flaw inherent to fanfic.)

Oh, and let me say that yes, writing fanfiction *can* be used as a way to improve one's fiction writing abilities. It's all to do with how you take advantages of the particular challenges and opportunities it provides, in addition to other ways of practicing writing. The statement that "You will learn more from writing one story of your own, no matter how bad it is, than the most polished Inuyasha fan fiction that you write" is very, very false. But that's a rant I've done before, as is the rest of it. I'll just let people read the original, and the response, and come to their own conclusions.