Author's take on fanfiction

[mandragora]

I've written before how much I enjoy Michelle West's work. And if you haven't read any of her books, what are you waiting for? They're wonderful. She also writes as Michelle Sagara BTW, although these are earlier works and less mature as a result than her later novels. They're well worth reading, though, IMO.

My impression of Michelle as a person is nothing but positive, as shown by her sympathetic response to the Anne Rice debacle. She's now posted her views on fanfiction here.

She's obviously sympathetic to the fannish impulse and if I felt the calling to write fanfiction about her novels I'm pleased that she'd have no problem in my doing so. In fact, though, I find her stories so densely layered and satisfying in themselves that the fanfiction impulse doesn't move me when reading them as I'm content to wait and see what she comes up with next, secure in the knowledge that anything I come up with won't be as good as anything Michelle writes. I just wish she could write faster so that the next instalment was now ready to be published. Sigh.

Comments

[akaspeedo.livejournal.com]

What kind of thing does she write?

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Fantasy novels. Very intricate and detailed with superb world building. Her characters all feel very 'real' to me, both the men and the women. She isn't comfortable writing explicit sex scenes but does write good relationships. Most are het but there's at least one same sex.

[fledge.livejournal.com]

Is Michelle the author you told us about at the con, with the Hobson's Choice chess game and the family sword?

The only impulse I've ever felt to write fanfiction from the literary media was an elvish h/c in the dungeons of Angband (the Silmarillion). It didn't last long, and I always feel slightly uncomfortable about author fanfiction, in a way I never have about televisual fanfic. Why should that be? I think most TV serials and films are put together, to an extent, by committee; even in the case of something like Babylon 5, which was written and directed by one person, there is still the involvement of the scriptwriters, actors etc. So it doesn't feel like theft to add my own storylines.

Whereas an author has invented their whole world themselves, and so it is much more personalised. I think other people are entitled to their individual interpretation, and to write fanfiction if it does not hurt the author in question either financially or by reputation; but their ideas are much more likely to conflict with the original canon. This can be interesting, maybe even enlightening, and I'm not by any means condemning the practice; it's just something that doesn't, on the whole, appeal to me. Books are sacred. TV much less so.

Of course, it could also be as you say for Michelle, that a good book doesn't leave much room for additional interpretation, whereas TV (particularly popular shows) often leaves plenty of room for the imagination to wander.

[mandragora1.livejournal.com]

Is Michelle the author you told us about at the con, with the Hobson's Choice chess game and the family sword?

No, those are the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. I'm re-reading the six novels in the sequence at the moment and coincidentally have just started the book with the chess game. These novels are, like Michelle's, so dense and layered that I notice things I didn't pick up on earlier readings each time I read them.

I share your views to a large part about literary fanfiction, as opposed to TV series or films, which are not the creation of one person. That said, I don't have any problems with Harry Potter fanfiction but I'm wondering if that is because JKR draws so much on archetypes that her stories don't feel sufficiently 'original' for me to think of them as a unique creation. Plus, there are lots of gaps in them that the fanfiction writers probably itch to fill. I don't feel the urge to write HP myself but can understand why other people do.

I think why so many people write HP fanfiction is because of those gaps, whereas Michelle's novels and those of Dorothy Dunett, for example, are so complete in themselves that fanfiction feels to me to be rather superfluous.