Thoughts

[fleetfootmike]

.."out of nowhere, and apropos of nothing..." to quote Sheryl Crow, a couple of thoughts, one shortish, one getting longer by the minute.

People are different...

I've been scanning the Internet, not to mention every crowd I'm a part of, be it a Counting Crows audience or the Saturday afternoon shoppers at Tescos, for a lookalike for a character I'm writing about: just a visual reference I can carry in my head and describe to an artist.

I know this is a stunningly obvious statement, but... people are different. The sheer diversity of hair style, colour, face shape, etc etc is, in some ways a thing of wonder. And with that comes the thought that every one of them has their own story, that every face's expression has a reason behind it, a tale of its own that interweaves with every other, touching each to a greater or lesser extent.

---

I've been reading a fair bit of Xena: Warrior Princess fan fiction of late (among other genres) - I'm a fan of the show, and particularly of the complexity of the interaction between the two principal characters.

I've come to realise a few things while doing this: in no particular order:

- It's amazing how widely different various people's interpretations of the same source material can be: there have been a few stories that I've got a few paragraphs into and gone 'nooooooo, this is NOT the character I watched for 6 seasons of the TV show'.

- Subtlety is a dying art.

The attraction, from my point of view, in the original X:WP episodes is the whole subtext of Xena and Gabrielle's relationship, and the fact that it is very deliberately not made explicit: the whole are they?/aren't they? thing is part of the magic. Way way too much of the fan fiction degenerates into wish-fulfillment on the part of the writer, and (contrary to what some folks might think) it often turns me off the story - not because I don't approve (I'm in the 'of course they are, stupid!' camp), but precisely because it removes that magic, the suspense, the subtlety, in a way that that particular story/writer can never put back.

I guess my problem is the fact that in the TV series, the relationship wasn't the story. Far too many pieces of fan fiction make the relationship the story. Now, OK, that's fine as long as the relationship is changing: the classic X:WP 'first time' story has been written any number of times (to varying standards, but that's my next point), but once you've done that, you can't do it again. If you want to write more X:WP (or anyone else) fan fic after you've popped that particular cherry (I make no apologies for that choice of phrase!), then you need plot, not a flimsy excuse for another not-quite-the-first-time scene. At least, you do if you want me to read it: I don't read it because it's femslash/lesbian erotica/whatever you want to call it - I read it because it has strong female characters in it, and I like well-written heroines.

- Quality seems to be less important in 'minority' writing markets

I admit this is a sweeping generalisation, and I can produce, just as well as the next person, specific counterexamples. I've seen stuff published (as in, physically bound dead trees-type published) by fan fiction authors that, frankly, wouldn't have got past any decent SF/Fantasy agent. In the specific case I'm thinking of (a novel length piece of X:WP "Über" fiction - characters with parallels to Xena and Gabrielle, set somewhere other than the X:WP universe) the writing was reasonable, but some of the characterization left me scratching my head, and the plotting left a lot to be desired. And it's a piece that has both a) been published (by a publisher specialising in lesbian fiction, IIRC) and b) is raved about as being outstanding.

Sometimes, though, all it needs is a bit of editing: there's a superb piece of Babylon 5 fiction which sets out to clean up the loose end that always pissed me off - the Talia Winters/Susan Ivanova relationship, cut off rather brutally when Andrea Thompson (Talia) left the show during Season 2 - and does so in a way that I found respectful to both the official story and the way the two characters were portrayed. Except that it was crying out for some pure and simple copy editing to fix basic punctuation mistakes (one of those authors who believes the only punctuation mark less than a period is a comma).

Phew.

And yes, after all that, you are almost certainly within your rights to say 'But Mike, it's only fan fiction. It's not professional writing.'

Let me tell you a story:

A long while ago, a guest I didn't know at a party back when we lived in Southend made the point, having had filk explained to him, that it was a waste of time, because filkers were basically channelling their creativity into derivative works, rather than creating something original. And with that he also implied that we felt we didn't have to try as hard, as a result.

It make me think, and, for a while, I wondered if he was right. But then, I look along my shelves at albums produced by filkers like Bill Sutton, Bill Roper, Julia Ecklar... And I'm damn sure he was wrong. 'Good enough for filk' is no worse than good enough for anything else.

Now OK, I'm running the risk of being accused of being elitist here, as well as getting embroiled in the age old 'if it's 'professional' it can't be filk' argument that some people seem to espouse. Filk and fan-fiction both are 'fan' activities, done for the love of it: that much I understand, and I no more expect every fan fiction author to be C.J.Cherryh than I expect every filker to be Loreena McKennitt. (Insert your choice of names to taste.)

But I don't believe that should stop any of us from aspiring to do the best we can, and striving to make that best, better. I do firmly believe in the old adage 'if it's worth doing, it's worth doing well'.

Comments

[the-gwenzilliad.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm a filker. :)
What do you say we find 10 people who don't hate me for unrelated personal reasons who'll state for the record that I'm not a professional-caliber musician? ;)

[folkmew.livejournal.com]

I wish I had the book handy to really quote it but - Stephanie Judy, in her fine book "Making Music for the Joy of it" points out that amateur comes from the root for "lover". Therefore an amateur musician is someone who does it for love. Now, I ask you, is that necesarily mean they are crap? No way! Hey, even Albert Schweitzer had some recordings done and he certainly wasn't a professional.

Besides, making money making music is so ephemeral that most of us "professionals" vascilate wildly through the course of our lives as to how big a percent of our incomes come from music.

I admit I haven't sought out fanfic but I am quite sure there is some fantastic writing there just as there is some brilliant writing in filk. As a (sometimes) professional musician I am quite cheerfully happy to mine the hidden treasures of filk myself and bring it to a wider audience. :-)

[annathepiper]

As someone who has both written and made music for her own pleasure--I'm with you. For me, at least, part of the point is to do it right. :) If I don't do it right, I feel like I'm doing the music or the words a disservice.

It's a thing with which, I find, I need to accomplish a happy medium. Because it's the desire to get it exactly right that for so long kept me writing so slowly--rather than focusing on telling the story, I'd be too worried about making sure it's exactly right! Or making sure every note is exactly right, rather than actually playing the song. :)

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

Well, I've written fanfic, in the days before it became an Internet activity, and people liked it enough to kill a few small trees.

I still think it was better than a lot of deforestation projects, but it wasn't great.

What I think matters is that I tried to write interesting stories which broke away from the fanfic cliches of the time. And there were a couple of "professional" novels which were thinly-disguised views of the same characters. I'm a worse musician, but I see filk as something of the same: an attempt to do something with music which we feel matters.

However we express it, we're trying to say something.

Meanwhile, it's been the selection of the British Eurovision entry on TV. They want poppy eye-candy, which rather keeps me out. But it all makes "Amateur music is bad" seem a piece of rather hollow snobbery.

And we'll never see the Hope Eyrie video on MTV...

[occams_pyramid]

it was a waste of time, because filkers were basically channelling their creativity into derivative works, rather than creating something original. And with that he also implied that we felt we didn't have to try as hard, as a result.

Well filkers are hardly the first to do that. For instance there was that German chappie who wrote songs that were nothing more than just retellings of the old Norse myths.

Or that hack playwright back in Elizabethan times who nicked lots of his plots from The History of the Kings of Britain instead of doing original work.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

"Do it properly". Amen. Right with you.

Of course, it is possible to be such a perfectionist that one almost never gets a piece of work finished... A trait I'm proud to share with a number of other hopeless amateurs, such as Peter Gabriel, Douglas Adams... =;o}

[keristor.livejournal.com]

As you mention in part, a lot of the problem in quality of fan-fiction (and, I'm afraid, some filk as well) is lack of editing and in particular lack of negative feedback. Yes, it's nice to have a 'supportive' audience, but if people applaud or buy everything you put out then there's no way to guage whether it actually has faults. I have some filk tapes and CDs which I bought because I knew and wante to support the person, but don't listen to because they are not (in my opinion) of a decent quality. (And no, I'm not saying in a public forum which ones, ask me privately sometime!)

The same with fan-fiction. While there are some fanzine editors who will make sure that everything they publish is of a good technical (at least) quality, and will send material back to the writers marked up until it is that quality, there are many others who will publish anything. And there are many writers who don't even get edited because they self-publish on the web.

Like any activity, it needs negative feedback as well as encouragement in order to improve. And many times it needs an editor who knows rules of grammar and spelling who can explain what the author is doing wrong. I was lucky, in some senses, with my attempts at fanfic (Pern), in that I had editors who were quite willing to send a section back saying basically "this is crap, I know you can write better than that so rewrite it". And on re-reading I found that it was indeed crap and I could (and did) rewrite it better until it was good enough for publication.

Technically, being an 'amateur' (doing things "for the love of them") should result in better quality than being a 'professional' and "just doing it as a job". There was a reason why certain sports insisted on 'amateur' status. It seems to be a particularly British (or perhaps anglophone) thing that 'amateur' means to a lot of people "we don't have to work at it", many other cultures seem not to have that meaning.

[hrrunka]

lack of editing and in particular lack of negative feedback

That isn't a problem exclusively for "amateurs". I can think of a few published works ("just feel the thickness!") that would have been improved had they been given a decent editing....

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed, there are many especially by 'famous' authors who can get away with ignoring editors (and shouldn't). However, they usually get negative feedback in the lack of sales (not always, of course). There is a big filtering factor, even it it does let a load of rubbish through. Look at spam filters...

If you take those filters out, then you don't get Sturgeon's 90% crud, you get somewhere closer to 99% crud. The other 1% may be really good (and I have read some superb fanfic, even some 'slash' which got me hot and I'm not interested that way), but there's even more rubbish to wade through.

Time is another filter. "They don't write music as good as they used to a hundred years ago." Well, actually, they do, it's just that the music which has lasted that long is generally part of the 10% which was non-crud, there are far more composers and writers who disappeared into obscurity (and most of them deserved it).

How much filk and fanfic lasts another century will be an interesting research project for our great-grandchildren. Well, not mine, but...

[hrrunka]

lasts another century

Yeah, speculating on that (say, in the pub over a pint) can be fun, and can be applied to far more than just filk and fanfic too... ;)