Fanfic vs. Profic

[lunabee34]

When I reviewed The Democratic Genre a couple posts back, some of the comments turned to a discussion of fanfic vs. profic. executrix suggested I take that convo top-level, so here I am. Doing that. *g*

Anyway, I said that I think that fanfic and profic are equally challenging to read and write, and I don't privilege one over the other. I also said that fanfic and profic often have different aims and pull out different tools from the toolbox.

Now, I can't speak very much about the writing of profic, as I've never had anything published. However, I *read* a lot of profic, and some of my RL friends are writers and one of them in particular has been encouraging me to do some writing of original pieces (*nudge nudge* krayat). So, from my position of dubious experience, here's a handful of comments about fanfic and profic.

I think that fanfic provides someone who's not interested in world building a way to write stories without having to worry about or spend time creating from whole cloth a universe for her characters to inhabit.

I think fanfic provides an excellent opportunity for creativity. Because the infrastructure already exists, doing something truly novel and shocking and intriguing takes a heck of a lot of work. Taking those bones and building something unexpected and different from the original model (or even just the original model from a different angle) on top of them makes for damn good reading. And because your readership is familiar with the original model, making it leaner or showing it only from the ass side immediately creates tension. Fanfic is, for me, all about subversion. Taking this thing that already exists and wringing the hell out of it--sometimes as Pugh says to make more of it and sometime to get more from it.

I know with this original fiction story I'm making pages of notes on and creating outlines and Venn diagrams for writing, I couldn't decide what to write about at first. And then I thought, "Wait! I'm an interesting person. All kinds of traumatic interesting things have happened to me. I'll just fanfic my life." And what I meant by that was, okay, I can take the bare bones of an event from my life and then fictionalize around that foundation. And I know it sounds like I'm calling fanfic a crutch here, but I'm really not. I *am* saying that reading/writing fanfic creates a different way of approaching reading/writing profic, at least for me.

Most profic I think also necessarily has to contain more descriptive passages than fanfic. For instance, most fanfic doesn't spend a lot of time describing characters physically because we all know what the characters look like. Same with, oh, the library in Sunndale or the lobby of the Hyperion. (0f course, always exceptions to the rule)

What do you guys think?

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

I feel honor-bound to say something!

Let's not forget that profic is more like fanfic than is often claimed. I mean, a gazillion literary novels are set on small college campuses where sensitive young writers are insufficiently appreciated, and a gazillion genre novels are set in windswept manor houses or spaceships or the Mean Streets of L.A. So not much chuffin' world-building there. OTOH maybe one reason that there are so many sci-fi fandoms is that the options for literal world-building are so broad.

(And my theory is that there are so many far-out AUs in popslash because, well, straightforward canon is "they have a concert" or "one of the guys gets interviewed on TV" so it's understandable that the filler between the sex scenes is something like "somebody turns into a sofa".)

Maybe one reason there are so damn many first-time stories is to give the POV character the chance to give an intensive tour d'horizon?

My personal cri de coeur about mediocre or bad fanfic comes from "The Simple Art of Murder": "it was second-rate fiction because it wasn't about the materials of first-rate fiction." There are so many damn fine fanwriters who know so much about how people behave and how language behaves and can convey it all that it makes me angry, or at least disappointed, to see readers and writers condescending to each other. On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Let's not forget that profic is more like fanfic than is often claimed.

You are so right. Much genre fic certainly builds on established conventions, like the romance novel set on a ranch.

There are so many damn fine fanwriters who know so much about how people behave and how language behaves and can convey it all that it makes me angry, or at least disappointed, to see readers and writers condescending to each other.

This I completely agree with. Some of the fanfic I've read could compete any day against the literature I teach to my students. Some of my favorite writers, period, are fanfic writers and not profic ones. There's brilliant writing and poor writing on both sides of the fence.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

But if fanfic writers think they don't have to try to write anything credible or imaginative because it's just fanfic and anything will do...

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

And fortunately, I haven't encountered any who feel that way.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's like Dolly Parton having to spend a lot of money to look that cheap but hey, all the stories in the Summary Executions got that way *somehow*, and I bet you don't hang out a lot at the Pit of Voles. I can certainly understand fanfic writers having limited acquaintance with some of the more florid aspects of experience, but if they're going to write entirely on the basis of things that were written in the past, without reference to human behavior or physical possibility, they should be sure to pick interesting things to make eighth-generation copies of.