Sunday, May 19, 2013

Fan Fiction

Today I want to talk about fan fiction.

For those of you who don't know what that is, fan fiction, also known as fanfic or just fic, is where writers take established works like the Twilight Saga, the Star Trek franchise and the Dragon Age franchise and create their own works using the world of the work they are fans of. Many times the writer will create their own character from that universe, called an Original Character or OC, and take events from either a film, book, or video game and stick that character in it. The Copyright laws generally overlook fan fiction as long as you put a disclaimer that you do not own the original work.

For example:

Jethro Gibbs, Ziva David, Tony DiNozzo and NCIS in general belongs to CBS.
Agent Jessica Jackson belongs to me.

The first have lets people know that the Chacters of Gibbs, Ziva and Tony and the TV show they appear on, NCIS, are copyrighted to CBS Television and do not belong to you in anyway. The second line tells the reader that Agent Jackson is your OC.

Now this doesn't mean you can go and publish your NCIS fanfic and make royalties off of it. Then you will end up in court being sued by CBS and NCIS' creators for copyright infringement.


Personally, as a writer, I think writing a fan fiction is great practice and a great way to pass the time when you either have writer's block or you're just stuck on what comes next in your original story. I have a whole series of stories based on Bioware's Dragon Age franchise: One very long novel length one with its sequel in the works and several shorter ones.

And for those of you who don't know, Dragon Age is a role play game video game where you take a character that the creators give you and personalize him or her. The player has the choice of choosing the gender, race, class and origin of the protagonist (referred to as Personal Character or PC here). The surnames are given but you have the choice of either going with the first name the game offers or create your own.

Now in the case of Dragon Age fanfic, many fans will write tales about their PC and their adventures in the games. I have seen a few that will create their own characters and stick them in there.

Now, yall know I am one of those fanfic writers. When I first started writing, I broke in with fanfics. My first being based of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film. As the film had been open ended, I wrote a "sequel". Looking back on it now, it was horrible. I also did one for Hellboy (which was never finished) and, don't laugh, a Twilight fic (It was never published and only one person other person read it)

Wait. You said you couldn't publish fanfic...

You can't publish it where you'll get paid for it. There are plenty of sites out there where fanfiction can be read by others. fanfiction.net is the most popular, but other sites like deviantART and Archive of our Own (AO3) host fanfic, the former has art to go along with it.

Now, not all authors like fanfiction are there are some who do not want their works to be made into fanfiction and will take steps to prevent it. Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles) Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern) and Raymond Feist (The Riftwar Cycle) do not allow fanfic to be written with any of their characters. George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire) is strongly opposed to fanfic and believes it's copyright infringment and not something aspiring authors should do

But there are some authors who love the fanfic based off their works. J.K Rawling (The Harry Potter Series) has been noted as saying she is "flattered" by people writing harry Potter fics. Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga, The Host) even posts links on her website to her favorite fics.

In fact, the popular Fifty Shades trilogy was born as a Twilight fanfiction originally titled Master of the Universe. E.L James renamed the characters and obviously did some heavy edits before publishing them.

But don't get me started on that series...


But the whole point of this week's ramble was to talk about the little known "genre" of fan fiction. What do you think?

Until next time, Friends

Happy Writing


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction
deviantart.com
http://archiveofourown.org/
http://stepheniemeyer.com/ts_fansites.html

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