Tuesday, February 04, 2003

I didn't plan on blogging (when will blogging be an offical verb?) today since I have to study for my Phil. Lit. midterms but well, browsing through Neil Gaiman's journal, one of the Feb. 4 entries mentioned him being pelt by fanfiction fans.

For those of you who's too lazy to read the link, Neil Gaiman is asked if he reads fanfiction. He straightly says out no but he says that all forms of writing (including fanfiction) hones a writer's skills (Gaiman also wrote a potential funny LotR slash which features Gollum and Smeagol). He then clarifies that he follows the "write the story only you can tell" philosophy and that fanfiction are just training wheels. I don't get what the fuss is about.

Maybe I'm just itching to get flamed but I agree with Gaiman. Fanfiction does contribute to a writer's skills and a lot of writers probably went through that stage. But there's a "next level" to the craft of writing. When you write something original (be it a short story, script novel, etc.), you are a step closer to writing the story that only you can tell, which is what some (well, I'd say all but then not everything that's available is good) writers are famous for.

When I think about it, a writer (and probably artists as well) goes through the first stage of mimicry. They read (or see, in the case of artists) something they like and they start getting curious. They try their hand at it and copy the writer's style, or sometimes just copy the writer's text outright. I think this is common when we were all kids. This I like to call the first stage.

The second stage would be fanfiction. You're not copying the writers words but using your own. However, there is still an element that doesn't belong to you. Be it the setting, the characters, or their reputation, when writing fanfiction, you are relying on someone else's piece. When I come to think of it, all those slash (like Harry Potter and Malfoy, or say, Frodo and Sam) are enjoyed primarily because people have seen the original (be it the books or the movies). It's seldom (maybe I should rephrase this to infrequently) that a person reads fanfiction before knowing the original work.

Of course to me, fanfiction is different from adaptations or retellings. The former is aware of it being separate from the original and tells a story that happens either before, after, somewhere in between, or an alternate universe (which I call the what-ifs and what-should-have-beens). The latter recognizes that it can tell the story in a different manner, perhaps employing different techniques or different perspectives, and in the process reinvent itself.

Mr. Yuson tells me that since a lot of stories have already been written, it's difficult to come up with something wholly original. We can't expect each and every writer to come up with something that has not been thought up before (which is why a lot of stories get tied up to genres). However, that doesn't mean we can't tell a story only we can tell.

As Gaiman said, he isn't against fanfiction. It's good in fact since it gets people into the act of writing. If you're a fanfic writer, be proud of it. But anyone who considers himself a serious writer must step out of that mold eventually. I'm not saying you do it now, or tomorrow, or the day after that, but at a point in a person's life, it's time to do the hard stuff: writing what "we can give to the world and no one else can".

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