'Training wheels' my ass

[branchandroot]

Brief rant, apropos of a passing remark that broke the camel's back.

I am sick and fucking tired of fanfic being presented as "training wheels". That's a load of BS. Fic is its own practice, with its own locally variable stylistic and presentational rules and its own systems of distribution and compensation, all of which are thoroughly distinct from commercial writing practices. Authors may enjoy writing both. They may write both sequentially. But fic is not somehow an annex of commercial publishing, nor is commercial publishing some kind of evolution of fic. Face it. Those first hundred thousand words are going to be crap no matter how you slice it; if they're written as fanfic instead of drawer-fic, it may appear that writing fic helped one get better. In fact, writing period helps one get better. Do not fall into the logical fallacy of mistaking the venue for the mechanism.

What pisses me off the most is the fanwriters who naively embrace this myth because it offers fast validation. Do they not see that this is the same political maneuver (albeit on quite a different scale) as saying "give us rights because we can't help being deviant" instead of "give us rights because we're human beings too, fuckers". No, of course they don't see it, never mind. The point is this "validation" is only available to writers who implicitly agree to denigrate their fanfic work, to be a shill, a practitioner of fanfic who presents it as of lesser value than commercial work. This offends me in purely logical terms, the two not being commensurate in the first place. It also gets me wound up in defense of my community, even considering that I want to give the vast majority of my fellow community members a good trouting on a regular basis.

So rather than being bamboozled into apologizing for our activity, try this one: "I write fanfic because I like it."

Comments

[kenllama]

♥

[branchandroot]

*laughing* A very pretty llama.

[dancing_serpent]

I wrote original fiction long before making an attempt at writing fanfiction and to me both are a completely different pair of shoes. And maybe it's just me, but I think writing fanfiction can be a lot harder than writing original fic sometimes - for example when it comes to keeping someone else's characters IC. So, looking at fanfic as "training wheels" seems kind of weird to me.

[branchandroot]

*nodnod* I've written both and find them equivalent in difficulty and skill-demand for totally different reasons. They require different skills to do well.

[annotated_em]

*standing ovation*

[branchandroot]

*wry* It just hit maximum this morning, you know?

[nan]

I'll say that writing fanfiction helps me write technically (because, you know, it helps me focus on grammar and punctuation and blah and blah) but I never understood the training wheels thing either. I mean. Fanfiction is harder. Sure, you already have the world and the characters and whatnot, but they're someone else's world and characters and you're having th play by their rules. And I find that more difficult than playing by my own.

Of course, original fiction comes with it's own set of difficulties, but you know. So not the point here. XD

[branchandroot]

Exactly. Writing helps you write better! Any writing! All writing!

And seriously. One of these things is really not like the other, and you can't use one as en entre into the other, not effectively.

[haruka]

I wrote fanfiction throughout my teenage years, then for ten years afterwards I wrote about thirty original manuscripts, then I went back to fanfiction again and have stayed with that.

I write whatever I'm having fun with at the time. I'm not even writing to 'get better' -- after thirty-four years of writing, I must be as good as I'm capable of getting. I'm just obsessive-compulsive and I NEED to write, so whatever inspires the words to come out, that's what I'll go with. :)

[branchandroot]

*grins* Likewise. I've written original stories and novels and I just like fanfic better in the long run. There's so much of it to play with, and so much scope for experimentation, too.

[haruka]

On an unrelated note, I like the color schemes for Transmogrified that you just posted in the Dreamscape comm (found this post through that one. XD)

[branchandroot]

Thanks! *pleased* Transmogrified is a hard one to theme, I'm glad they came out well.