Taking care of your health just got easier, thanks to my sponsor Zocdoc — start here at:
https://zocdoc.com/meredithnovaco

when you were talking about authors’ opinions on fanfiction it reminded me how CS Lewis would encourage fans to write Narnia fanfiction to fill in the gaps after he finished the series. esp with Susan’s ending, he told people to basically make fanfictions of how she might have returned to Narnia. anyways I always thought that was sweet, and wanted to share .

I would just like to add that fanfiction is not necessarely just a "writing exercise" to eventually write your own original work. Many fanfiction authors enjoy writing purely as a hobby, and are perfectly content to keep it that way. Fanfiction can be character studies, story analysis and expressions of the love someone has for a piece of media that they want to expand on/dive further into. It's a genre of writing made by fans for fans, and I think that's the beauty of it. Fanfic writers are the backbone of fandom spaces, but imo those works should remain there.

I'm worried this is going to cause a big shift in fandoms where people write for popular ships in hopes of landing a book deal. Publishers are already scouting ao3 now, it's going to get worse.

I hate this stupid trend because the more it happen the more likely it will be for projects like AO3 to get shut down by our evil corporate overlords. Fanfiction has only been allowed to exist because it made no money from it. We only need one fanfic-to-book situation where it's a little too close to the source material for a seething mass of lawyers to come for AO3 like the knights of hell.

TLDR: We can't have nice things.

As someone who was around when Anne Rice was sending lawyers to middle schoolers' houses and lost internet friends to LiveJournal's "strikethrough" censorship spree, publishers advertising books with Ao3 stats and online magazines linking to fanfics makes me itchy. I have no problem with people filing off the serial numbers, but the first rule of fanfic is we don't talk about fanfic! I'm happy we're no longer cowering in the shadows terrified of getting slapped with a C&D, but I would like some boundaries back.

I'd also say that for me, and I believe for at least a good chunk of fanfic writers, writing and publishing original fiction is not the point of fanfic. It's about exploring and expanding on themes and moments and characters and consequences and emotions the source material didn't have the time or interest to. My favorite fanfics COULDN'T have the serial numbers filed off because they're so intrinsically tied to the canon, and that's exactly why I love them.

I personally think fanfic is great. It’s what got me into writing. Some people don’t want to be published authors, they just want to write and share their work with others who are equally excited about more fiction for their franchise. Throwing a mention here to the reader x character writers- they have a clear purpose with their (usually) short one shots, whether it be smutty or wholesome. Those works are never intended to be published, they exist for readers solely. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to call fanfic a transition period. Not everyone has a goal of being a career writer, this is just their creative outlet of choice.

Fanfic is a space to be indulgent, to write something a bit more out-there or to vent frustrations or explore unexplored dynamics and plots. I’ve been writing fanfic since I was like 12, but I’ve also been writing original stories since I was even younger, and as an adult I take care to clearly separate the two. Fanfic is where I can write a fix-it ending or write a crack ship that I think would be fun. My WIPs are about stories and characters and themes that I want to nurture and cultivate and craft into something I can be proud to actually sell and have on people’s bookshelves.

"i would rather be shot" and "literally traumatic" are kinda crazy ways for them to describe that process LMAO

One thing that I think isn’t often discussed in these conversations is that fanfic is unique. It’s a genre or a media type with its own conventions, rules, and expectations.

(Good) Fanfics leverage the existing knowledge and passion of the fan base to do things that original books and stories cannot do. You skip the exposition and development stages of the story because the readers are already with you. You can dig into complexities and relationships and details without having to establish them first, which allows you to get into the story with a depth that is very difficult in original fiction

There’s a level of passion and indulgence that also don’t work in original work because you and your readers are passionate about the same thing.

I love this about fanfic. But I think it’s also why published fanfic can fall completely flat unless there is substantial revision.

Edit: I hadn’t seen the quote by the Manacled author about how hard it is to take an in universe fanfic and make it into an original fiction. I’ve held this opinion for a long time. I write long fanfic (e.g. 250K) and in order to make that original fiction, I’d have to remove so many details the story would completely unravel. It is much easier to write a new book with a similar theme.  I am personally a reader of in universe fic that digs into the characters and the universe. I’ve always felt that those fanfics would never be able to be transposed into original fiction without so much work, you should just write a new book.

For me the funniest "serial numbers filed off case" is Game Changers. It was published on AO3 as a Steve/Bucky fic but only because the author wrote something original but thought it had to be fanfic to go on AO3. So serial numbers were ADDED and THEN filed off for traditional publishing. Idk why but it cracks me up to think about.

"A recent quote" is such a funny thing to say regarding a dead person but I don't know why

Expecting readers to not interpret characters even without fanfic being involved, is insane. I have my own interpretations of the people I know in my own life, and mostly certainly I interpret characters as I experience them, and that cannot be avoided. This was a fantastic video as always, and it was great to have you touch on this subject.

Anne Rice died in 2021, the way she was referred to makes it sound like she's still alive. Nothing changes about the creator's point, just clarifying in case people get confused

I do think my biggest dislike of this — as someome who writes fanfiction and as someome who’s writing my first book — is that the way we write fanfic nowadays is so different to how books work. If we were in the old days of something like Monte Cristo, where it was chapter by chapter updates, it would work better but right now the way we do fics is more meandering, which is certainly fun for fan works but it doesn’t fit the pacing standards of published works. I also think that fanfic has the safety net of everyone knowing the characters and setting, this does get different with AUs but generally, you are safe writing it without much exposition. Which. Does not really work for a first book.

Something you didn’t bring up that also drives me nuts is when a published fanfic went through the trouble of filing the serial numbers off….but then the characters on the cover clearly depict the actors/characters the fanfic was based on. I’m not a big romance reader and I steer clear of anything Reylo, but for a while there I could always tell when a romance novel was based on Reylo cuz the cover gave it away. That doesn’t change the fact that the stories themselves are different (I fully agree that these romance novels are very much their own works), but it always baffled me that the publisher would make that choice to begin with. In fairness, I don’t know how the cover design happened in these instances — I know that authors don’t always have input on what the cover looks like — but still. And now it almost seems like the cover shenanigans were a stepping stone to see if publishers can get away with straight up marketing books as fanfic like the examples you talked about.

I’m a writer who has never engaged with fanfic, nothing against it, just not into it, so I don’t know all of the nuances of the community but I think the biggest difference between something like 50 Shades and Alchemized is the marketing. Knowing 50 Shades was Twilight fanfic was presented like gossip or an open secret. Alchemized and Rose in Chains were explicitly marketed as Dramione. The first thing I knew about 50 Shades is that it was about bdsm.  The first thing I knew about Alchemized was that it was a published fanfic. If Alchemized was published and sold as a dark romance in a fantasy setting and it came out months later that it was a fanfic, I don’t know if we’d be having the same conversation

As someone who’s written quite a few pretty popular pieces of fanfic and who also writes original novels, I cannot fathom why someone like SenLinYu would go to the trouble of filing off the serial numbers from a fic as embedded in the HP world as Manacled is.

She said it herself—it was awful. It would have been so much easier for her to just…write a brand new story in a brand new world.

I get it from a commercial POV I suppose, but a publisher would have to pay me a LOT more than my usual advance for me to take one of my fanfics and fit it into an original world with original magic.

The worst part of the fanfic to published pipeline is that because the fanfic characters are based on real characters that already exist, the fanfic author doesn't need to do any character development, character arcs or add depth to them, because the original author has already done that. Changing the names from the original IP then getting it published and then not putting in the work to develop those characters is what makes published fanfic books so dull, but also so obvious

3:30  Just wanted to point out that it was only The Love Hypothesis that was originally a Reylo fanfic. All of her other books are original works. Ali Hazelwood just spent so many years in the Reylo fandom that her early characters all resembled the two. So, I guess you could say some of the others are also Reylo fanfic for that reason, but only The Love Hypothesis started out as genuine fanfiction.

Actually, there was a huge controversy about Ali Hazelwood’s  second novel, because someone on her team (can’t remember if it was an editor or someone else) said that they had to help her write almost the entire book. She’d never had to write a story from scratch before and didn’t know how to do it. It was quite the controversy at the time.