…on fanfiction, but I lied.

I write fanfiction. I was pretty vocal about how stupid and amateurish it was, for awhile. And then, I began reading it. I also began to read about the history of fanfiction and became quite educated upon the scores of works that had been published by notable authors.

An excerpt from a really fascinating article titled I’m Done Explaining Why Fanfiction is Okay:

You think fanfic is a personal affront to the many hours you’ve spent carefully crafting your characters. You think fanfic is “immoral and illegal.” You think fanfic is just plagiarism. You think fanfic is illegal. You think fanfic is cheating. You think fanfic is for people who are too stupid/lazy/unimaginative to write stories of their own. You think there are exceptions for people who write published derivative works as part of a brand or franchise, because they’re clearly only doing it because they have to. You’re personally traumatized by the idea that someone else could look at your characters and decide that you did it wrong and they need to fix it/add original characters to your universe/send your characters to the moon/Japan/their hometown. You think all fanfic is basically porn. You’re revolted by the very idea that fanfic writers think what they do is legitimate.

We get it.

Congratulations! You’ve just summarily dismissed as criminal, immoral, and unimaginative each of the following Pulitzer Prize-winning works:

* Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres, a modernized AU (Alternate Universe) retelling of King Lear and winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. King Lear is itself a hybrid of multiple folk and fairy tales

* Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Tony-Award-winning South Pacific, which was based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific and is the only musical to win the Pulitzer Prize that is based on *another* work that also won a Pulitzer.

* Geraldine Brooks’ March, a parallel retelling of Little Women and winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for literature

* Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In the Park with George, which is half-original fic, half-RPF (real person fiction) based on the artist Georges Seurat, and winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

* Jonathan Larsen’s Rent, which is an AU fanfic of La Boheme (much like the movie Moulin Rouge, an AU hybrid crossover fanfic of La Boheme and La Traviata) and winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

* John Corigliano, 2001 Pulitzer-Prize winner for Music, who wrote the opera Ghosts of Versailles, a postmodern fantasy RPF/fanfic crossover AU about Pierre Beaumarchais and the characters from his play La Mère coupable.. Those characters were previously fanficced twice over, in two separate operatic masterpieces: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, both based on the other 2 Figaro plays by Beaumarchais.

There are literally hundreds more like that and it doesn’t include the many movies that have been made from books, comic books, games, and Disney Rides. Did you know that even the Harry Potter movies, to a degree, are considered a fanfiction type of work because the movies are an expression, or interpretation, of what the director thought the book was.

We have Michael Gambon as Dumbledore in the later movies, not because he was the best old guy picked to portray the Headmaster after Richard Harris’ death, but because the director felt that in the later books Dumbledore was a much more powerful wizard and wasn’t like the grandfatherly one the Harris portrayed!

The Pirates of the Caribbean – based on a Disney ride that really had no story until someone thought up a story. Of course, it’s great publicity for Disney and their rides and their parks, but the movies are, essentially, fanfiction which have, of course, spawned their own fans writing their own stories.

So, I think you get that.

And I’m a fairly happy little storyteller writing my stories, publishing them on FF.net, and hearing from fans of Harry Potter how they like my stories. I’m not just getting “oooh that’s cool!” (although I have my fair share). There are people that review every chapter, that point out sections they liked, or that caused them to laugh out loud, to hold their breath, or even to cry. I think one of the best letters I received was from a college student, fresh in her first year, away from home, family, and friends, and she was really feeling terrible about being in such an unfriendly place. She was reading the epilogue to my story, Back In Time, in which Snape speaks to his eldest daughter who is afraid about leaving the only home she’s ever known to go to Hogwarts.

The college gal read this, and the advice that Snape gave to his daughter, and wrote to me:

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for writing about Eowyn’s fear of going off to Hogwarts. I’m a Freshman at a huge college in a city several thousand miles from home where I know only my 3 roommates and a girl at another college. Your description of Eowyn sounds just like me: quiet, a bookworm, afraid of seeming ‘uninteresting’ to people, everything. I’ve been called ‘weird’ and ‘too quiet’ by many people.

Snape’s words of comfort to Eowyn really struck something inside me. When I read his dialogue with his daughter, I felt like someone had heard how I felt, how afraid of being friendless, how intimidated I was by the vast amount of new people I had to meet at school, and decided to comfort me; when I read “but we all must bear many things we don’t like in order to attain that which we desire” and “You are different, though, and you may not appreciate that this moment, but you will sooner than you think. All of us are different,” I cried.

Can anyone who writes tell me that if you got a letter like that you wouldn’t feel good about touching someone in such a divine way???

So, it makes me laugh, or shake my head, or kick my desk (not a wise thing to do) when some idiot comes along and tells me that I am “evil” for having turned Snape into a soppy Slytherin who “cares” about children. He’s really just an “evil, greasy git”, who “gets off” on bullying children and killing Dumbledore. “The idiot even got killed by a snake! How dumb was that?”

You’re dumb.

And so it goes.