Training Wheels and Covers

When I visited Paris, and I wandered the halls of the Louvre or the Musee d’Orsay, I saw a ton of student artists standing before masterworks, blank canvas in front of them, paintbrush in hand, copying down the lines and colors and shadows of the geniuses that preceded them, teaching themselves how to do it by tracing the work of the best.

Back in St. Petersburg, Florida, I visited the Dali Museum to check out Dali’s juvenilia, painstakingly collected by the Morse family. Fine pictures, but you’d never guess they were his. You could see his thought process as he painted. I wonder if I could paint like Cezanne, like Picasso, like Miro. Dali doing cubism, for fun. Dali trying his hand at impressionism. Dali training himself to figure out what Dali works looked like by seeing how he differed from the artists that came before him.

I think writers develop in much the same way. I look back on stories that I wrote in high school and college, and can see how much the voice of my juvenilia was cribbed from whatever writer currently held me in thrall. An old fashioned epistolary novella meant to sound like Richardson. A sad, lilting, introspective short heavily influenced by Binchy. I was the student artist, paintbrush in hand, tracing the words of the masterworks, trying to see how they did it. I was the young Dali, trying to write like Richardson to see if I could.

One of my literarture classes was learning about narrative. What a great class. We did things like watch Rashomon and read Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein and watch a Rashomon-esque episode of the X-Files called “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” and Maus and discuss the limitation of certain forms of narrative and how the expectations of narrative have changed over time and blah blah blah… anyway, one day, we had this awesome assignment. Rewrite one of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries as an X-Files episode.

I was assigned fanfic. Cool beans. Now, I love fanfic. I think of it as literary training wheels. When you learn to ride a bike, you get training wheels to spot you the balance while you learn the other bike skills — pedalling, steering, stuff like that. When you write fanfic, you’ve been spotted a premise, or characterization, so you can learn to write while concentrating on plotting or pacing, or something else.

One regular reader of this blog hates fanfic, full stop, because she had a bad experience in which one of her novels was lifted wholesale and posted on a website as a piece of fanfic. I’ve made this argument before and I’m about to make it again: That ain’t fanfic, it’s plagiarism. And it happens in both the muddy and unregulated waters of “posting fiction on the internet” as well as in the world of legitimate publishing. (Watch me neatly sidestepping the current events.) Just because the plagiarist called the story fanfic, and just because that was the author’s only experience with it, that doesn’t make it fanfic. It’s still just plagiarism.

Fanfic is using another creator’s world and characters and premise to write your own story, using your own words. The assignment I did for my Literature class reimagined the Holmes story as if it had been Mulder and Scully showing up to solve the mystery, rather than Holmes and Watson. The only words in common were from a letter which was a piece of evidence.

The thing about fanfic is: you can’t publish it. You can’t sell it. The characters don’t belong to you. If you are using it for training wheels, or a school assignment, that’s one thing. You can’t go listing your crap on Amazon. Unless, of course, it’s out of copyright.

Tor editor Theresa Nielsen Hayden had an excellent post on fanfic recently, which pointed out an interesting fact: this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a piece of fanfic. March, by Geraldine Brooks, is published by Viking, and follows Mr. March, of Little Women, during the war years.

Brooks is not alone in her reimagining. The shelves of my local bookstore are crammed with “sequels” to Pride and Prejudice, and I studied Wide Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre from the point of view of the mad wife) in college. Sometimes, fanfic is training wheels, and sometimes it wins awards, rocks the literary world, and serves as the benchmark for a whole new genre. They don’t call these things fanfic (because fanfic is, as TNH says, a modern definition born of legal issues). But that’s what it is.

There is a story that I would love to write in the vein of March or Sargasso — taing a minor character from a piece of fiction and imagining their life beyond the purview of the story in which they appear. It’s there, somewhere on my multitude of back burners, simmering away. As for fanfic as it is currently considered, I stopped writing that when it began to be more about my character than the copyrighted characters I was using. When they were relegated to minor roles in my story, i knew I was ready to take the traiing wheels off.

And when I had written enough to stop sounding like other writers, I knew I was ready to start submitting my work. Development is necessary, at whatever pace, at whatever age. (watch me sidestep current issues again).