But to return to fanfic. I gather there's been a lot of discussion of the article - in fact she's written a couple more posts in response to the discussion -but I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
To summarize very very briefly, Why Fanfiction Keeps Us Poor".argues that fanfiction, whatever its merits, is a women writer's ghetto in which nobody is getting paid. Moreover, fanfiction tends to be written off as derivative and written by talentless crackpots (by people who don't read it, obviously). So fanfiction turns into yet another way to suppress women's writing.
I think of fanfiction as a study, myself. A supportive place to learn the techniques, to have fun without having to think of it as 'work', unlike pretty much all the other writing I do (or avoid doing). I think for many people - well, let us admit it, for many women, since the overwhelming majority of fanfic writers are women - it's a jumping-off point, rather than a self-limiting self-protective practice. But still, her point niggles at me. Is writing fanfic a a self-imposed suppression of women's writing?
The one thing that makes me uneasy about fanfiction is how many very good (and almost invariably female) writers seem to concentrate on fanfiction; and I cannot help but wonder if it's at least partly because because they, or we, are, or seem to be, afraid to send their stuff out there for (commercial) judgement. So writing fanfic and publishing it to thousands of people on the web becomes paradoxically a method of self-silencing; of self-corralling into an admittedly supportive but unprofitable ghetto.
And then there's the fact that, whatever its advantages, we have to admit that we are playing in someone else's sandbox, with someone else's characters and world. Is this just because it's easier, and guarantees us an audience of other people who also enjoy those characters and that world? Or is it because we don't believe - because we have been taught not to believe - that we're capable of coming up with something on our own?
I write fan fiction too; I'm just finishing a fanfic novelette in fact. And freedom, a guaranteed readership, and immediate feedback, as well as not having to invent the characters and world I write about, are all among the reasons I write fanfiction. As well as fear, not so much of rejection, as of spending all this time writing and then nobody every getting to read any of it because it doesn't get published, so at that point the effort would feel wasted. I have to admit that one problem with writing academic articles - aside from the fact that, to be honest, it's hard work - is that it takes four years for the article to get out there, and then I will never get any feedback at all for another five years or so, unless I happen to run into someone at a conference 3 years later who mentions that they've read the article (and aren't quite sure what I was getting at). And I can't help but suspect that my academic writing has a total readership of five. Where fanfic will get voluminous and usually enthusiastic feedback in 24 hours.
So it is not that I don't see the numerous and manifest advantages to writing fanfic.
But the thing that still bothers me is, why is it that fanfic writers are overwhelmingly women?
You could argue that it was because the men have this weird urge to get out there and wave their phallic pens about shouting 'look at me! look at me!' Mine's bigger than yours! And I got paid more for it too!' and women have generally no such urge (say). So it's the urge to publish and get paid for it that becomes the pathological problem, rather than the tendency to avoid it.
But you could also argue that the reason women find it far, far more comfortable to publish to a mostly supportive community of several (thousand) of their mostly female friends, in a protective atmosphere sheltered by shared interests and an assumption of supportive feedback (that is, we are socialised to produce supportive feedback for fanfic), is because we, women, have been socialized to a) do volunteer work and b) not to step 'out of doors'; to stay inside, in the women's world. And publishing to the wider world and getting paid for it feel uncomfortable for reasons that have everything to do with still, deep down, believing that we're not good enough, or believing that really, it's not nice for girls to show their faces in public.
Internalizing the values of our oppressors, in short.
I think I do truly believe that fanfic is a product of both, or all, of these factors.
1. Commercial fiction is making very few people rich.
ReplyDelete2. There is a new generation of commerical fiction writers emerging from the pool of fan fiction writers.
And finally, speaking as one who has swum in the commercial fiction pool:
3. Fan fiction is fun. Commercial fiction is work.
Agreed to all of this. And I know people (women) who write both commercial and fanfic, for different rewards. Fanfic, for one thing, as you point out, is fun. And I know several women who are encouraged by what they've learned as fanfic writers to send manuscripts out to publishers, something they'd never contemplated before.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, rather than silencing women, fanfic encourages them. Perhaps the reason for the predominance of women in fanfic is that men don't need the encouragement? Or don't like the collegiality?