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vulgarweedI feel guilty writing such a long meta post when I still owe so many emails and comments, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom was rich today. I particularly liked this post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bottle_of_shine about picking up ideas from reading like lint on Velcro, and this post by owlmoose on fanfic, ownership, and Creative Commons.
I have seen a lot of wibbling in a lot of different fandoms about what does and does constitute plagiarism…A lot of people seem to think it’s much grayer and murkier than I do.
I’ve been plagiarized exactly once that I know of, and it was a case with no shading at all. It wasn’t a matter of similar plot elements, or some dialogue that was familiar, or a description that, shall we say, showed strong influence. It was literally a copy-and-paste job, with someone else’s name on it. And yeah, I got angry. Very angry. Fortunately, I belonged to several yahoogroups in LOTR fandom at the time, and it wasn’t hard to call up a horde of Furies to flame the fucker crispy. But the anger didn’t last very long, because it was just so pathetic. The excuses added to the comedy, and eventually I just laughed a lot harder than I raged. I hang on to the memory now as more of an initiation rite into fandom and a can-you-believe-this-shit? anecdote than as a real grudge – I don’t even remember the username involved.
The funny thing, though, was that the story in particular was one I remember writing specifically because there was a particular dirty darkfic scenario I wanted very much to read, and months of searching convinced me that this story just didn’t exist, and if I wanted it to, I was going to have to do the heavy lifting myself. So I did. And the way I found out about it? I was cruising FF.net, and I saw a summary for a story with this pairing and this theme, and I thought, “YAY!! Someone else tried it – I can’t wait to see what they did with it! Will it be kind of like mine or totally different?” (Either would have been fine.) Aside from the shock of discovering that “their approach” was, well, very much like mine, I was also totally disappointed that once again, no one else had taken up the challenge really. If someone had told the same plot but in their own words, I probably would have loved the story, recruited them for my Nazgûl –centric mailing list, and wanted to be their BFF for having the same freaky kink as me. If they’d been obviously riffing off my story but saying something new with it…well, even better, because then I get the ego-stroke of being influential. (Which, for a NNF in a tiny niche, would have been BIG.) Even if it wasn’t all that good, I’m still always up for Tolkien villain smut.
Anything less clear-cut than that, I have a hard time seeing as plagiarism. Here’s where I admit to something that should be perfectly obvious: I’ve never had a truly original idea in my life. No, this isn’t me being low-self-esteemy, or hair-shirty. I think very few people ever have truly original ideas. Maybe Leonardo had one or two. What most good writers are is gifted synthesists; people who are good at absorbing wildly disparate ideas from vast and diverse sources and integrating them in a way that’s fresh and says something worth saying about the themes and characters. (Example: Morbid memories of sickly childhood + vampire tales popular at the time + Victorian xenophobia and sexual anxieties + random fascination with a figure from Romanian history = something indelible from Bram Stoker’s talent for synthesis.) Re-tellers and re-contextualizers of stories. Re-interpreters of culture. This, for me, is what fanwriting in particular is all about. Whether with serial numbers filed off or not: I know the writing of people I emulate in fanfic, your Tolkiens and Rowlings and Gaimans and Pratchetts, will cheerfully admit that what they write has sources galore—they will show you their sources with geeky glee--that it is engaged in a dialogue with other texts across centuries, that someone from Planet Xdfth with no knowledge of earth culture or mythology or literature or history will miss 9/10s of the allusions in their tapestries, because they all play with intertextuality. The box of crayons we all play with is vast, but I’m not sure it’s infinite. That doesn’t matter, because a great artist can make a masterpiece with just red, yellow, and blue—it’s all in how you mix them. And any two artists’ work is instantly distinguishable from each other, even though they might all be painting the exact same scene from the Bible, say, or classical mythology.
And when we write fanfic, stands to reason that other people’s fanfic is part of the intertextual conversation. Hell, I wish more of “my” stuff got into the trope machine. (Here’s where I confess that a small part of me wanted, for example, John Dee to become a recurring character in GO historical fic. Would I have felt “ripped off”? Hell no – I nicked the idea of using him and Kelley and Bruno that way from John Crowley (no relation, one presumes) anyway, and I said so in my writer’s notes. Of course my Dee isn’t the same as Crowley’s and neither of those is the long-dead real one; and someone else’s would have been someone different still. I confess, I have a selfish desire to read things perfectly suited to my quirks and kinks and geekeries without having to do all the work. And what better way to get that than to have people rip me off, er, I mean, be inspired by me? It should happen MORE often, as far as I’m concerned. (And I could never get all stompy-foot about it and still look at myself in the mirror…hello, fanfic.)
And if I want to riff off someone else’s tale, it’s for the same reason I write fanfic in the first place: because I want more of the story, because I want to zig where the original writer zagged just to see what happens then, because this story starts a fascinating conversation and I want to add to it, because I think this story is almost perfect but just doesn’t have enough sex in it, etc.
In rock and roll, the lifting of a riff wholesale is noted with a winknudge, and sometimes an acknowledgement of the lifter’s good (or bad) taste, or taken as a clever homage. (It’s often assumed the audience knows the source material, or should.) Almost nobody gets too up in a wad over it; the high-profile, expensive lawsuit is the exception, not the rule—that’s why they make the news. Granted, a band who does this chronically from only one or two sources is derided as someone who ought to just form an honest tribute band, the same way I’d respect Terry Brooks a lot more if he wrote honest Tolkien fanfic. It is assumed, though, that there is a finite number of notes. And that music is made in a conversation with other music. And that every generation can do a bit of stealing, but is also karmically obligated to come up with enough fresh re-arrangements for the next generation to have something to steal in their turn. There’s no dishonor in it. Everybody learns by imitating the masters, and they learned by ripping off the blues. (Which is made dishonorable by the way many white rock musicians got filthy rich stealing from very poor black artists, but indeed, money changes everything.)
So in short? (Yeah, right.) Creative Commons, baby. I’m a public utility and proud of it. My username endorses both meanings of "vulgar." (But if you write something riffing—or ripping—off something I wrote, I want to see it, because I might really really like it. And I might riff back, and there’s a reason circle jerks are popular—they’re fun. Fanfic may be masturbatory, but that doesn’t mean it should necessarily be done in isolation.)
And another thing: I don’t talk about RL work here, but I do have journalism experience. Accidental plagiarism definitely does happen. All the time. Usually in a small, inoffensive way—but people who read a lot, which is most writers, do on occasion absorb things in such a way that they cannot remember the source, and it might pop up weeks—or decades--later as if he or she thought of it herself. In fanfic, where everyone is working out of the same small crayon box with the same characters and themes, it is all but inevitable—and that’s without even getting into the fandom hive-mind and quasi-Jungian manifestations of collective unconscious and synchronicity that happen all over the place. That’s why I also believe in erring on the side of ‘benefit of the doubt’ for pretty much anything that isn’t straight up copy-and-paste.
That was slightly Aquarian of me, wasn't it? (With a spicing of Aries grandiosity. I put it on everything, like Tabasco.) Thoughts?
metafandom was rich today. I particularly liked this post by bottle_of_shine about picking up ideas from reading like lint on Velcro, and this post by owlmoose on fanfic, ownership, and Creative Commons.I have seen a lot of wibbling in a lot of different fandoms about what does and does constitute plagiarism…A lot of people seem to think it’s much grayer and murkier than I do.
I’ve been plagiarized exactly once that I know of, and it was a case with no shading at all. It wasn’t a matter of similar plot elements, or some dialogue that was familiar, or a description that, shall we say, showed strong influence. It was literally a copy-and-paste job, with someone else’s name on it. And yeah, I got angry. Very angry. Fortunately, I belonged to several yahoogroups in LOTR fandom at the time, and it wasn’t hard to call up a horde of Furies to flame the fucker crispy. But the anger didn’t last very long, because it was just so pathetic. The excuses added to the comedy, and eventually I just laughed a lot harder than I raged. I hang on to the memory now as more of an initiation rite into fandom and a can-you-believe-this-shit? anecdote than as a real grudge – I don’t even remember the username involved.
The funny thing, though, was that the story in particular was one I remember writing specifically because there was a particular dirty darkfic scenario I wanted very much to read, and months of searching convinced me that this story just didn’t exist, and if I wanted it to, I was going to have to do the heavy lifting myself. So I did. And the way I found out about it? I was cruising FF.net, and I saw a summary for a story with this pairing and this theme, and I thought, “YAY!! Someone else tried it – I can’t wait to see what they did with it! Will it be kind of like mine or totally different?” (Either would have been fine.) Aside from the shock of discovering that “their approach” was, well, very much like mine, I was also totally disappointed that once again, no one else had taken up the challenge really. If someone had told the same plot but in their own words, I probably would have loved the story, recruited them for my Nazgûl –centric mailing list, and wanted to be their BFF for having the same freaky kink as me. If they’d been obviously riffing off my story but saying something new with it…well, even better, because then I get the ego-stroke of being influential. (Which, for a NNF in a tiny niche, would have been BIG.) Even if it wasn’t all that good, I’m still always up for Tolkien villain smut.
Anything less clear-cut than that, I have a hard time seeing as plagiarism. Here’s where I admit to something that should be perfectly obvious: I’ve never had a truly original idea in my life. No, this isn’t me being low-self-esteemy, or hair-shirty. I think very few people ever have truly original ideas. Maybe Leonardo had one or two. What most good writers are is gifted synthesists; people who are good at absorbing wildly disparate ideas from vast and diverse sources and integrating them in a way that’s fresh and says something worth saying about the themes and characters. (Example: Morbid memories of sickly childhood + vampire tales popular at the time + Victorian xenophobia and sexual anxieties + random fascination with a figure from Romanian history = something indelible from Bram Stoker’s talent for synthesis.) Re-tellers and re-contextualizers of stories. Re-interpreters of culture. This, for me, is what fanwriting in particular is all about. Whether with serial numbers filed off or not: I know the writing of people I emulate in fanfic, your Tolkiens and Rowlings and Gaimans and Pratchetts, will cheerfully admit that what they write has sources galore—they will show you their sources with geeky glee--that it is engaged in a dialogue with other texts across centuries, that someone from Planet Xdfth with no knowledge of earth culture or mythology or literature or history will miss 9/10s of the allusions in their tapestries, because they all play with intertextuality. The box of crayons we all play with is vast, but I’m not sure it’s infinite. That doesn’t matter, because a great artist can make a masterpiece with just red, yellow, and blue—it’s all in how you mix them. And any two artists’ work is instantly distinguishable from each other, even though they might all be painting the exact same scene from the Bible, say, or classical mythology.
And when we write fanfic, stands to reason that other people’s fanfic is part of the intertextual conversation. Hell, I wish more of “my” stuff got into the trope machine. (Here’s where I confess that a small part of me wanted, for example, John Dee to become a recurring character in GO historical fic. Would I have felt “ripped off”? Hell no – I nicked the idea of using him and Kelley and Bruno that way from John Crowley (no relation, one presumes) anyway, and I said so in my writer’s notes. Of course my Dee isn’t the same as Crowley’s and neither of those is the long-dead real one; and someone else’s would have been someone different still. I confess, I have a selfish desire to read things perfectly suited to my quirks and kinks and geekeries without having to do all the work. And what better way to get that than to have people rip me off, er, I mean, be inspired by me? It should happen MORE often, as far as I’m concerned. (And I could never get all stompy-foot about it and still look at myself in the mirror…hello, fanfic.)
And if I want to riff off someone else’s tale, it’s for the same reason I write fanfic in the first place: because I want more of the story, because I want to zig where the original writer zagged just to see what happens then, because this story starts a fascinating conversation and I want to add to it, because I think this story is almost perfect but just doesn’t have enough sex in it, etc.
In rock and roll, the lifting of a riff wholesale is noted with a winknudge, and sometimes an acknowledgement of the lifter’s good (or bad) taste, or taken as a clever homage. (It’s often assumed the audience knows the source material, or should.) Almost nobody gets too up in a wad over it; the high-profile, expensive lawsuit is the exception, not the rule—that’s why they make the news. Granted, a band who does this chronically from only one or two sources is derided as someone who ought to just form an honest tribute band, the same way I’d respect Terry Brooks a lot more if he wrote honest Tolkien fanfic. It is assumed, though, that there is a finite number of notes. And that music is made in a conversation with other music. And that every generation can do a bit of stealing, but is also karmically obligated to come up with enough fresh re-arrangements for the next generation to have something to steal in their turn. There’s no dishonor in it. Everybody learns by imitating the masters, and they learned by ripping off the blues. (Which is made dishonorable by the way many white rock musicians got filthy rich stealing from very poor black artists, but indeed, money changes everything.)
So in short? (Yeah, right.) Creative Commons, baby. I’m a public utility and proud of it. My username endorses both meanings of "vulgar." (But if you write something riffing—or ripping—off something I wrote, I want to see it, because I might really really like it. And I might riff back, and there’s a reason circle jerks are popular—they’re fun. Fanfic may be masturbatory, but that doesn’t mean it should necessarily be done in isolation.)
And another thing: I don’t talk about RL work here, but I do have journalism experience. Accidental plagiarism definitely does happen. All the time. Usually in a small, inoffensive way—but people who read a lot, which is most writers, do on occasion absorb things in such a way that they cannot remember the source, and it might pop up weeks—or decades--later as if he or she thought of it herself. In fanfic, where everyone is working out of the same small crayon box with the same characters and themes, it is all but inevitable—and that’s without even getting into the fandom hive-mind and quasi-Jungian manifestations of collective unconscious and synchronicity that happen all over the place. That’s why I also believe in erring on the side of ‘benefit of the doubt’ for pretty much anything that isn’t straight up copy-and-paste.
That was slightly Aquarian of me, wasn't it? (With a spicing of Aries grandiosity. I put it on everything, like Tabasco.) Thoughts?
