fanfic, copyright, plagarism, cha cha cha

All the hoopla about Opal Mehta has resulted in some really good discussions about the nature of storytelling. Over at Making Light, Teresa Nielson Hayden's comment (transmuted into a post) on fanfic gets to the heart of the matter:**

[...] In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.

Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

This really is a basic impulse.

Which brings me back to the discussion in the comments to my post Genre - Literature. I made some similar points regarding storytelling as a basic human impulse to de Rien, and now I'm thinking of A.S. Byatt's essays on this subject. I can't put my hands on the particular one that comes to mind, but I believe it's in Imagining Characters, which is an attempt to capture in print a discussion about literature between Byatt and Ignes Sodre, who is a psychoanalyst.

de Rien asked me if I was saying that storytelling as a cultural good was primarily a vehicle for educating children and less relevant for adults. That's a huge and really interesting question. My short answer: no, not just for children. A longer answer (or at least part of one) I'll try to put together today.
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Thanks to murgatroyd for the headsup.

Posted on April 27, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (2) | TrackBack (0)

wassup

I've been writing pretty well just recently, but I don't want to talk about that because I'm a superstitious Italian.

So here's what's new otherwise: tomorrow the first galley proof pass of Queen of Swords is supposed to land on my doorstep. With a large thump. I have until May 11 to get it back to them. This means the bound galleys (or ARCs, or advance reader copies) are just around the corner. Six weeks, maybe eight.

Today I drove two hours to get my eyes scanned. For a couple years now I've been thinking about laser surgery to correct my (deplorable) eyesight, and I was on the brink of actually doing it... but. My bottom line was this: only if I was eligible for the most advanced technology available, which right now is wavefront. And the only way to know if I was eligile was to get in the car and go all the way down to the surgical center, and then I spent ten minutes staring at lights while computers hummed, and after all that:

Nope. My corneas are too thin and my prescription too strong. And after I got my nerve up and everything.

Tomorrow I hope to have more great writing news not to tell you about. And by the way, it's FOUR MORE DAYS until the end of the pile o' books drawing. So get your rear in gear if you haven't already.

Posted on April 26, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (1) | TrackBack (0)

sloppy sloppy sloppy

Every once in a while plagarism raises its head outside of the classroom. This time the accused is a young woman whose a Harvard undergrad, whose first novel (How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life) apparently borrows pretty directly from Sloppy Firsts, a novel that came out a year or so ago.

The sad details, if you care to look, are here, along with a comparison of the contested passages.

I see the similarities, and because there are quite a few of them, my guess would be that the courts are likely to decide in McCafferty's favor. Which would mean considerable difficulties for Viswanathan, beyond legal and financial ones. Will she write another novel? Will she get it published?

What bothers me is how it all came to happen. This is obviously a bright kid, but then she was seventeen when she signed her first book contract. Seventeen. Seventeen is Mars. Seventeen is a universe all its own, no matter how smart you might be. And how does a seventeen year old working to get into Harvard even think about selling a novel? Where is the motivation? WHO is the motivation?

What I find really interesting about this is not so much the plagarism, but Viswanathan's backstory.

Posted on April 24, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (9) | TrackBack (0)

At Amazon

The Queen of Swords cover is up. I still love the art work, but on the whole it looks rather odd, I think, because the bands at the top and bottom will be in gold foil, but here they come across as kinda offensively tan/brown.

Posted on April 23, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (15) | TrackBack (0)

brains! we need brains! = odd little meme

I was reading and I fell asleep and had the strangest dream. A kid came to the door selling subscriptions. I said: sorry, we don't need any more magazines and he said, but what about brains?

Sidenote: In one or another of the dead/zombie movies, an older woman undead is trapped in a basement and they called down to her: what do you want from us? And she whines in a high pitch: brains! we need brains!*

This line is a family standard.

So now back to the dream: the kid hands me a brochure, divided into categories: musicians, artists, writers, scientists, politicians. I can subscribe to any of the brains that are listed. I don't remember many names beyond Madonna and Clinton. The kid tells me I can get all the back issues if I'm really interested.

And then I woke up, but I've been thinking about this dream ever since. Would I want everything Madonna knows about music in my head? This one is easy: nope. Clinton about politics? Hmmmmm. So I've come up with a short list. If I could magically have the specialized knowledge (and understanding, I guess) from three different people's brains, who would I want?

1. Chomsky. The NYT called him arguably one of the greatest minds of our time. What he doesn't know about history and politics and linguistics is more than I already know about that stuff. So Chomsky, my first choice.

2. Picasso. None of his personality quirks, but what he understood and saw about art? Absolutely.

3. [name to be researched] The very best female professor of psychiatry this country has to offer.

Jump on in if you are so inclined.

*anybody know which movie?

Posted on April 22, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (8) | TrackBack (0)

how the money works in publishing: the real skinny

Anna Louise at LiveJournal provides hard facts. The tag on this post is "demystifying publishing" and indeed, it is a very very detailed and for many probably very sobering account of how advances are calculated and where all the money goes.

My take on all this: I don wanna. I won't even read my royalty statements. I call up my agent and ask for a three sentence summary/bottom line, and then I let all that go. In my case, too much exposure to Numbers results in a shut down in the writing process.

Posted on April 22, 2006 | link 2 this | Your 2 cents (2) | TrackBack (0)