Rated M for My God That’s a Lot of Swearing

OK, so, I have this two litre bottle of sake that I opened for a samurai movie night and it never got finished so I’m drinking it. And posting. Drunk posting. It’s like drunk dialing, only the shame lasts as long as the internet does.

So my post tonight was going to be a well thought out and highly articulate argument about why fanfiction should be considered a legitimate and acceptable form of writing (I can hear some members of the SFWA screaming softly in the distance. Keep screaming, guys, it only gets worse from here on in). I was going to talk about how Doujinshi is a great example of derivative fiction that does not negatively influence the value of the original creation and in fact enhances its appeal and the spectrum of audience exposed to the work. None of that’s likely to happen, but what I will say is this.

I believe we writers in the west are suffering a dark ages. I’ve stated in earlier posts that it’s not possible to write or produce any art, for that matter, without using what has gone before. Reasonably intelligent human beings should get that all art is the distillation of human existence and is therefore cannibalized from life, from other works, from those who have gone before. And I mean this in terms of not only form but also content. Am I wrong? Jump now while you can. If I’m not, read on.

The root of this stagnation in the culture seems to be a generalized and nebulous fear of lawsuit. No one does anything because they’re afraid of a lawsuit (Imagine for just a sec if Andy Warhol had worried about that. Let’s just take his work right out of the cultural milieu shall we?).

This fear of lawsuit seems to have crippled writing. There’s a definite and frightening trend among established authors to refuse to take on pupils or read manuscripts and critique for fear of lawsuit. To you frightened authors, those who are told by agents not to read submissions, not to read letters that contain plot ideas, not to interact with your fans, I say this: Tell your agents to get stuffed and get a spine. Seriously. Someone mentored you and got you there, do you goddamned duty and do the same for the next generation of writers. This doesn’t mean writing a fucking book about writing, this means taking someone on, reading their shit and saying things like “That paragraph doesn’t work because there’s a point of view violation in it”.

This fear of lawsuits reminds me a lot of this fear of terrorism; the ratio of generalized fear to likelihood of danger is mega to mini. Name one person who’s been taken to court over intellectual property issues stemming from mentoring and I’ll show you the one person in the world who’s got a right not to have an apprentice.

To those authors who try to prohibit fanfic, I have this to say: Fuck you.

Seriously, you guys, seriously. Check your ego. Remember what your job is? You’re a writer. Your job is to connect with people by telling a story. Stories are not lengths of wood or ipods. They are not static things. Books are static things so you’re forgiven for making the mistake, but trust me, stories are different. Stories are alive. They change the way people think and feel, and they do this differently to every person that hears or reads them. Stories are intensely personal things. What you put on the page belongs to you, the book with your name on it, six percent of that cover price belongs to you, but the way it makes someone feel – that belongs to them. Don’t try to own it.

I’m not implying that all writers are greedy bastards (I can only speak for myself on that one, and yes, I am) who want your mon-eh, I’m saying that writers make so little money from their own work that they cling to the only thing they have, and that’s their intellectual property ownership. This is fucked up.

It’s fucked up because IP law is skewed on the side of big corporations like Disney and it’s throttling cultural expression. It’s fucked up because it makes writers behave like cowards rather than innovators. It’s cowardly to pursue fanfiction writers and cowardly not to take on young authors, to prevent other authors from using intetextuality in their writing. Cow-ard-ly.

I hope to god that one day someone thinks enough of my work to use a piece of it in something that’s not a review about how not to construct a sentence (phew, that’s a great example right there). I hope that someone might one day love a character I created enough to write a story featuring him or her. I hope people point out connections I never saw, laugh at the jokes I never noticed and connect with the characters enough to want to write fanfic or do fanart or ship them, or produce Doujin or play them in role playing games.

If people like my work that much it means the stories, the characters, the events have resonated with enough people strongly enough that the story I wrote became a living thing for them. And that’s mythic, that’s cultural. And that’s magic. That’s writing with just the right combination of exposition and withholding, with just enough cultural and personal, with the perfect balance, an umami of text and reaction. What’s wrong with this? Isn’t writing a cultural thing, a way to connect with people, to embiggen our culture? If it’s not, what the hell are we all writing for?