10369 réponses à ce sujet

[mousestalker]

@Sarah1281, well if they have any taste at all they will love it.



As for the meta issue of writing fanfic. I'm an attorney. I am paid well for what I write. I am known in my area of expertise. I write fanfic because writing for publication would involve a reduction in pay. Writing fanfic also allows me to walk about in a character in an already existing structured world. It's a way for this grown up to play in between projects. It's how I allow my imagination to run free.



A very bright man once pointed out that there is a class of people dedicated to preventing escapes. They are called jailers. The worst possible prison is the one created by yourself for your own mind. Fanfic is one of the tools I use to stay free.

[Sarah1281]

DreGregoire wrote...

Sarah1281 wrote...

Someone I know discovered my penname and is about to read one of my fanfics. This should be interesting...

uhoh *I'm keeping my fingers crossed that all goes well* 

mousestalker wrote...

@Sarah1281, well if they have any taste at all they will love it.

Thanks, guys.

[Miri1984]

Sarah, let us know how that goes!

[LupusYondergirl]

@Sarah: I know how you feel. One of my friends knows I write fanfic but not my pen name. I've been avoiding telling her...
I wouldn't worry, though. Your stuff is great. (I'm just one of those psychotically paranoid private people about my writing IRL. Even my published stuff didn't get shown to friends until it was published. If even then.)

Here's my take on fanfic.

Right now I have two books on my nightstand. One is Le Mort D'Arthur. The other is a Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery. Sometimes, I'm feeling very Malory and want to read some dense early Brit lit. And sometimes I want to read about Sookie and vampires and werewolves and so on all running around being crazier than all get out.
And you know, there's nothing wrong with that.

I've got a novel I'm working on. I've published short creative and academic pieces. Sometimes that's what I want to write. Sometimes I'm in that sort of mood.

And sometimes I want to write, since writing IN AND OF ITSELF is fun, but don't want to deal with research, or worrying about my world-building for my original fic, or anything like that. So, I visit Ferelden and write about mages who kill monsters and screw around in their off hours.

And you know, there's nothing wrong with that, either.

Not everything is going to be Finnegan's Wake. Not everything has to be. I'm not harboring any illusions about what I do. I write because I enjoy it. That a good number of other people enjoy reading it is just gravy.

Modifié par LupusYondergirl, 20 août 2010 - 01:55 .

[maxernst]

JHByrne wrote...

Wow. So, I just read through all the 'I hate JHByrne' posts. Amazing. Here's one naysayer, and it starts an avalanche of protest. Methinks you doth protest... too much?

With that said, I will admit, I've not read one sentence of fanfiction. Sure, I'm familiar with Chaucer. And De Sade. And Ben Franklin. In the course of playing a dark fantasy computer game, however, it never occurred to me to dwell overmuch on the romance/sex aspect, as I'm well aware that the game itself is 95% 'kill the baddies' and 5% 'romance'. It just perplexes me that people would spend that much time focusing on the 5%, particularly considering that there are so many other interesting plotlines to explore, rather than who is 'pairing up' with whom.

History, as written by Herodotus, Xenophon, Tacitus, Gibbon, Tuchman, Churchill, et al, does feature sex/romance, but it doesn't focus on it. Fantasy/Heroic Fantasy, as written by RE Howard, Wagner, Lovecraft, Haggard, L'Amour, Verne, etc, also doesn't focus on the sex lives of the protagonist. I mean, does anyone REALLY want to read about Conan the Barbarian reading poetry like some fruity Aquilonian? It's the focus of current-day fanfiction that surprises me.

-- JHByrne

It perhaps wouldn't surprise you so much if you had read anything that had been written in the past 50 years.  Okay, you've read Barbara Tuchman...but I can't help noticing that your list of both historians and fantasy/SF writers is very old-fashioned.  Most of them wrote in times when quite frankly they couldn't write about sex if they wanted to publish their work.  And they were writing in a time when the dominant audience for SF/fantasy was teenage boys who tend not to be much interested in romance.

As soon as censorship rules were relaxed in the sixties, science fiction and fantasy grew up and began dealing with sexual situations.  I can't think of a major modern fantasy or science fiction writer who doesn't...some writers (Guy Gavriel Kay, for example) have very strong romantic themes in all their work.  Even darker fantasy writers like Stephen R. Donaldson, George R.R. Martin, Steven Erickson, and R. Scott Bakker use romantic subplots.

Modifié par maxernst, 20 août 2010 - 01:55 .

[Sarah1281]

Update:
I just got a text from her saying "Ok so I just read your fanfic "No thank you" and I am entirely amused at how a 7 book saga was simplified so much."
 
I think that's promising.

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

JB - Just about anyone who comes into this thread saying 'why do you bother writing fan fiction? it's just porn/trash and you're not even getting paid' hasn't even tried reading any, and you have admitted you haven't, thus it seems a bit judgemental to come in making assumptions and generalisations of a media you haven't even tried to sample.



Here are some facts, though I don't know if you'll read them or just gloss over them as 'hate mail':



1) Some fandoms do publish fan fiction and the authors get paid.

2) Some people who write fan fiction do it for fun, as a hobby. Getting money is a nice idea, but they don't require it to enjoy just writing and sharing that writing.

3) Not all fan fiction is focussed on sexing up Grey Wardens. Those that do, well, it's the author's choice to write about such things, and your choice whether or not to read it, but it's extremely bad form to protest about the existence of sexually active Grey Warden stories when you haven't even read one. It's like having an 'opinion' on a movie you've never seen.

4) A story that was 95% killing the baddies would be extremely boring IMO. A book is not a game. Have you read David Gaider's books, on which Dragon Age was based? That had romantic elements. It had Grey Wardens with sex lives. And I'm sure it wasn't 95% combat or discussing how to kill things.

5) Yes, there are many plotlines more interesting than who's going to pair up with whom. Many stories have plotlines like this. Both kinds are popular and attract different, but no less devoted, readers.



A lot of fan fiction is based around sex, yes. People like to write porn (good or bad), and other people like to read it (good or bad). Why do they focus on it? Because they want to. They get a kick out of it. They enjoy having people read their stuff and write reviews. Is it going anywhere financially? For some people it's practise until they work on something worthy of publication. For others it's just for fun, they don't have to get paid to enjoy it.



Why does it have to go anywhere? Does playing Dragon Age get you anywhere? Why can't writing what you like be as much entertainment as a computer game?



(I'm curious about your entry for the Leliana competition now. I'm practically *expecting* it to be a love letter because you're arguing about Warden sex so much.)

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

*after looking at the competition winners on the podcast website...*

Hah, you totally *did* write a love letter, or a letter bemoaning the Warden dumping Leliana. Wow.

Congratulations, sir, you have written something based on Warden-sex.

Modifié par Shadow of Light Dragon, 20 août 2010 - 02:31 .

[jackkel dragon]

Shadow of Light Dragon wrote...

*after looking at the competition winners on the podcast website...*

Hah, you totally *did* write a love letter, or a letter bemoaning the Warden dumping Leliana. Wow.

Congratulations, sir, you have written something based on Warden-sex.

At least it wasn't a "I wuv you" clone...

[SurelyForth]

You guys are all making such eloquent and intelligent posts in defense of fanfiction, I've expanded my list of internet crushes quite a bit this evening.

However, in the end, I have to go with Patton Oswalt for my opinion on the matter: I don't give a sh*t where the stuff I love comes from, I just want to love the sh*t I love. I adore many, many horrible things in this world. I consume way more than my fair share of mental junk and am, for the most part, happy as can be about it.

Full stop.

I don't need a deeper motivation for anything, and I don't need my hobbies to be About Something to feel fulfilled. I'm writing Dragon Age fanfiction because there are characters that I adore who I thought could be more thoroughly explored, and there were potential storylines that I wanted to address.

I write almost 100% romance and interpersonal relationships. You can say I'm missing the point of the game, but romance (and not just steamy bits romance) and personalities and personalities interacting are what made Dragon Age the best damned game I've played in years and, since that's the sh*t I love, I'm going to roll around in it and write horrible sex scenes and not give a damn because, seriously, it's not like we live or die by the quality of this stuff. We just find bits of happiness and entertainment and trying to shame people for that is pretty much as big a waste of time as anything really can be.

Modifié par SurelyForth, 20 août 2010 - 02:44 .

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

Preach it, SurelyForth!

[LupusYondergirl]

We just find bits of happiness and entertainment and trying to shame people for that is pretty much as big a waste of time as anything really can be.

Seriously. Why does it have to be FOR something? I mean, what do we get out of PLAYING video games? Not everything has to have a greater purpose of making money. Not everything in life is about money. Sometimes we just want to have FUN.

[jackkel dragon]

SurelyForth wrote...
since that's the sh*t I love, I'm going to roll around in it 

There's an image.

Good post, I'm not sure if JHByrne is coming back though. Don't scare him off too bad, he's my co-writer for "Scars of War." It's like fanfiction, only playable! (It's a standalone module about a Gwaren soldier/mage, it's in my BSN projects.)

[Miri1984]

 I feel like we have to burst into gospel songs right about now.

[LupusYondergirl]

Somehow I would feel VERY wrong singing anything gospel at the moment.

With apologies to the dude who neither reads nor writes fanfic and yet feels somehow qualified to give advice, I'm writing smut. AGAIN. (Still?)
Seriously, I'm tempted to have someone gives maggie a "you're not a healer and outside your closed environment where most people WERE healers there are diseases" speech. I think that would be out of character for Duncan, though.

Modifié par LupusYondergirl, 20 août 2010 - 06:35 .

[Maria13]

Aggrgh... I miss out so much on being British because of the time zone thing...

But JH Byrne,  HP Lovecraft,  I had a Lovecraft crush as a teen but the guy and his coterie, including Howard, the Conan guy right?  were seriously sexually screwed up....  HP's mum dressed him up as a little girl as a child and he never could have a normal relationship with the opposite sex.... The Howard guy, didn't he commit suicide shortly after mum died?

I'd rather be normal and write FF, thanks.

[JHByrne]

Oh, this is great. If I'd ever known that a couple of choice words/sentences could ignite such a firestorm of protest, I'd have been 'trolling' (was that the term?) far earlier! Actually, do you think 'trolling' is the right word? I'd say it was more akin to 'chumming', as in setting a school of sharks to frenzy with a couple bits of raw fish. Whee!



But, hey, don't hate. Well, okay, go ahead and hate, it puts a bit of dynamic tension in here, maybe it'll help improve your fan fiction. Admit it, some of you had to laugh when you heard Morrigan tear up Alistair in verbal sparring -- hilarious!



Special thanks to:



Corker -- hey, you need to get laid more. You've got so much tension in your life!

Mousestalker -- you might appreciate some thoughts by Zulfaqir Bhutto on escapism. He spent years of his life in prison after being deposed from the presidency of Pakistan, and entertained himself with meticulous retrospection (Memoirs of Be****r Bhutto).

Lupus: hey, you don't have to explain yourself to me. If you want to write fanfiction as a hobby, go for it. No, I'm not being 'patronizing', etc. My suggestion to make a dollar at it was simply a lighthearted suggestion, not the nefarious plot to sabotage your writing that Corker suggests.

Jakkel: thanks for the protection offered, but I really don't mind a bit of antagonism stirred up now and again. It keeps things interesting.



Sure, I wrote a 'Leliana's Letter', which revolved around that same issue... that Leliana was a syrupy sweet, girly-girl... but also a liar, who lies to herself more than anyone else. The character is all about pretense. So, my letter was about a pom-pom girl being rejected, and not understanding HOW it could have happened. Unrequited love and all that.



Lastly: sure, I suppose that participating in working up a script for a proposed module qualifies as fanfiction. It is, after all, about filling in blanks, just as writing prose is. I stated something to the effect that while I understood fanfiction, I didn't understand the 'pairing up' aspect of it. If you look back on the original posts, you'll find that I'm not the only one who questions this aspect. Also: I never 'offered advice'. I simply made some observations, from what I'd gathered here, from various posts. It seemed to me that most of the posts were revolving around the proposed sex-lives of the characters, and leading off of that, I initially dropped something like 3 sentences of commentary. And from that tiny 'seed of inquiry' all this protest started.



Did I hit a raw nerve, or what?



More to the point, if I DID hit a raw nerve, why is the nerve so raw?

[JHByrne]

Hey, wow... I just re-read my above post. In it, I mentioned some writings by Benazzir Bhutto, but originally, I wrote the name with just one 'z'. The online editor apparently can't stand the notion of the term describing German fascists of the 1930s, so it deleted those four letters, even though it was part of another word entirely!



A quote from Mousestalker springs to mind:



"A very bright man once pointed out that there is a class of people dedicated to preventing escapes. They are called jailers. The worst possible prison is the one created by yourself for your own mind. Fanfic is one of the tools I use to stay free."



It is positively surreal, that Big Brother is now so pervasive that a word is thought to be so repugnant that we are literally forbidden from putting together four little letters, even if they form part of another word/name entirely! So much for freedom of expression, freedom of the internet, freedom to write... if it does not fit into a prescribed notion of politically correct.



We have met the enemy, and it is us?

[LupusYondergirl]

More to the point, if I DID hit a raw nerve, why is the nerve so raw?

Because at least every month, if not more often, someone else comes in here stirring up the same hornet's nest. It's neither new nor original. We've heard it... oh... dozens of times. Or more.



So maybe, instead of asking us why we're annoyed with yet another guy posting here to give us **** for writing about romances you should be wondering why, if your intention was innocent, your comments are identical to so many trolls we've seen before?



But... like it or not, your initial post WAS patronizing. Absurdly so. You've been backpedaling like mad ever since, but you do know what they say about first impressions.

[Maria13]

JHByrne wrote...

Hey, wow... I just re-read my above post. In it, I mentioned some writings by Benazzir Bhutto, but originally, I wrote the name with just one 'z'. The online editor apparently can't stand the notion of the term describing German fascists of the 1930s, so it deleted those four letters, even though it was part of another word entirely!

A quote from Mousestalker springs to mind:

"A very bright man once pointed out that there is a class of people dedicated to preventing escapes. They are called jailers. The worst possible prison is the one created by yourself for your own mind. Fanfic is one of the tools I use to stay free."

It is positively surreal, that Big Brother is now so pervasive that a word is thought to be so repugnant that we are literally forbidden from putting together four little letters, even if they form part of another word/name entirely! So much for freedom of expression, freedom of the internet, freedom to write... if it does not fit into a prescribed notion of politically correct.

We have met the enemy, and it is us?

Yes and it's the same with S***, W****, F***, ... Which I (and others) use in my FF, frankly it's not all girly stuff... 

Modifié par Maria13, 20 août 2010 - 09:27 .

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

JHByrne wrote...

 It seemed to me that most of the posts were revolving around the proposed sex-lives of the characters, and leading off of that, I initially dropped something like 3 sentences of commentary. And from that tiny 'seed of inquiry' all this protest started.

That's maybe because the most recent discussion we had was about an aspect of FF.Net. We weren't so much discussing pairings as a function in a fanfiction site that allows you to tag two character names to your story (eg. Cousland/Leliana) so people looking for stories could filter them and find stories about the characters they prefer.

We were discussing the point that some people use this function to designate pairings while others use it to identify two main characters.

But has pairings/sex been spoken about often in this thread? Yes. But it's a thread full of randomness. Just because we talk about a lot of crap in a thread doesn't mean our fics are the same.

You'd do better to judge fanfiction on its own merits than take this thread as a representation of what's out there.

[Shadow of Light Dragon]

BTW, I used to play in a MUD that censored 'jew'. I figured this out when I tried to type 'jewel'.

[JHByrne]

MAXERNST: "It perhaps wouldn't surprise you so much if you had read anything that had been written in the past 50 years. Okay, you've read Barbara Tuchman...but I can't help noticing that your list of both historians and fantasy/SF writers is very old-fashioned. Most of them wrote in times when quite frankly they couldn't write about sex if they wanted to publish their work. And they were writing in a time when the dominant audience for SF/fantasy was teenage boys who tend not to be much interested in romance.



As soon as censorship rules were relaxed in the sixties, science fiction and fantasy grew up and began dealing with sexual situations. I can't think of a major modern fantasy or science fiction writer who doesn't...some writers (Guy Gavriel Kay, for example) have very strong romantic themes in all their work. Even darker fantasy writers like Stephen R. Donaldson, George R.R. Martin, Steven Erickson, and R. Scott Bakker use romantic subplots."



Maxernst, as per my readings of history -- my 'historians' quoted were, by and large, participants. That's why they're 'old fashioned'. Call me crazy, but I like to go to the source of information, rather than reading some modern interpretation. Mousestalker might recognize the theme, as called 'the Original Source Rule'.



As per my readings of fantasy/sci fi: I dont read a lot these days. There's not a lot worth reading. These days, for instance, 'vampire novels' seem to be in vogue. Funny thing is, all of the vampires seem to be 16 year old pretty boys/girls. Not a lot of credibility there.

Some of you seem to like Terry Pratchett. I tried reading a couple of his books once. Didn't he write the Xanth novels? I didn't think much of them, or his writings. Same for Poul Anderson.



I did read Stephen Cornwall (book about the last Anglo-Saxon King, I've forgotten the name, and another called 'The Archer' or somesuch. Pretty good work. Same for the author of 'Game of Thrones' (was that the title?). I don't agree that older literature was forbidden from discussing romance/sex... (DH Lawrence, Nobokoff, etc). It just seems that it is an overarching theme in contemporary fiction. It's such an overused plot device that it has been played out. If I was really that interested in the sex lives of the characters in fiction, I'd pick up a copy of Cosmopolitan.

[JHByrne]

LupusYondergirl wrote...

More to the point, if I DID hit a raw nerve, why is the nerve so raw?

Because at least every month, if not more often, someone else comes in here stirring up the same hornet's nest. It's neither new nor original. We've heard it... oh... dozens of times. Or more.

Okay.  So?

So maybe, instead of asking us why we're annoyed with yet another guy posting here to give us **** for writing about romances you should be wondering why, if your intention was innocent, your comments are identical to so many trolls we've seen before?

If my comments are identical (I'll take your word for it) then YOU might be asking yourself that same question, no?  Why do so many diverse people, who are presumeably not in collusion with one another, have the same questions?

But... like it or not, your initial post WAS patronizing. Absurdly so. You've been backpedaling like mad ever since, but you do know what they say about first impressions.

Patronizing?  Whatever.  Didn't someone here once make the comment that if a writer can't take a bit of critique, s/he should not be a writer?
Backpedaling?  Not at all.  I stand by what I write, or I wouldn't write it in the first place. 
Why should I be patronizing/insulting, etc to someone I've never met?  Why should I backpedal if I don't recognize it as an insult?

In the case of Corker's commentary, I make exception.  I scoff in his/her general direction.

[JHByrne]

Hey, ShadowOfLightDragon: need a download code for Leliana's Song? I already have the DLC, don't need the code.

It's a pretty good DLC. Delves into the 'why' of Leliana's character a bit, seems like a different writing team put it together than the ones who wrote the character in DA:O.



Anyone else need a free DLC for Lel's Song? Send me a private message, so we don't clutter up this thread.