Fan Fiction dot Nut

[Josh Lanyon]

I don't even know how I came across it, but I happened to stumble over Lee Goldberg's very old (2004ish?) blog on fan fiction. I gather it was part of an on-going rant on the subject, but that one post alone and all the comments it inspired wore me out.

I recently discovered fan fiction myself -- in this case, fan fiction for a 1970s British cop show called The Professionals -- but my reaction was somewhat different from Lee's. I was, in fact, amused as hell. Some of the writing was pretty appalling, I grant you. Some of it was the best GLBT romantic fiction I've read. Ever.

I'm not going to debate Lee's points since the heat of that blog exchange reminded me forcibly of people arguing religion. No one was convincing anyone of anything, people were simply getting madder and ruder with each comment.

Personally, I think it's harmless. No one is making any money off of it, and it's bringing a lot of pleasure to people who apparently need it. And it's an interesting creative exercise, and I'm always in favor of people using their writing muscles.

But Lee did say one thing that struck me:

You don't understand what's offensive about fanfic because you aren't an author who has had your characters stolen... and used in swill like "male birthing" and "slash" stories. You haven't had fanfic authors tell you the characters belong to them because "we're writing for love, and you're writing for money."

Here's an idea. Try writing an ORIGINAL story of your own, using characters YOU CREATE (I know, that's asking a lot). Put your heart and soul into it. Then see how you feel about people taking your characters and doing whatever they want with them. Would you be flattered to see two of your characters having anal sex? Perhaps having a sex change operation? Or urinating on one another?

Aside from the fact that this particular section sounded a tad homophobic (which, hey, we've all got our stupid streaks -- but "slash" or homosexual relationships are not innately horrific to all of us), I actually have had characters from my Adrien English mystery series ficced. (If there is such a word). Yes, my original characters, characters I created, put my heart and soul into -- and depend on for my livelihood -- were taken by some unknown fan and used in an original story.

And, yes, it was a little disconcerting, but it was amusing too. And, hell, flattering.

This fan loves these characters so much, she wants to make up her own stories about them. Does it hurt me? How? I don't think she's going to stop buying my work any time soon, and I doubt very much that anyone else is going to choose her free stories over buying my work.

In fact, she's sort of promoting my work, if you look at it one way.

Maybe I don't recognize a deadly threat when it's staring me in the face, but I see this as harmless.

But I'd be interested in getting anyone else's thoughts on it. Is fan fiction a danger to professional writers? Is it good or eville -- or just not worth getting worked up about?