Only you, Diana, have gotten on my shit list for writing this Appallingly incoherent and offensive rant painting everyone who writes fanfiction as, basically, no-talent hacks who are breaking into your house and stealing your furniture and seducing your husband and raping your daughter, &c. And it's ILLEGAL and it's BAD WRITING and it HURTS YOUR PRECIOUS FEELINGS and therefore it should just be stopped, outright.
First of all, you're living on planet Wrong. Second of all, writing fanfiction is not like rape. You know what's like rape? Rape. Stop trivializing a horrific experience so you can pretend to have some moral high ground just because you're a Grand Poobah New York Times Bestselling Author.
See that word pretend up there, Diana Gabaldon? your moral high ground really in fact does not exist because your big fancy published book series is a Mary-Sue romance fanfic involving a 20th-century time-traveling woman who meets and falls in love with someone who's pretty much Jamie from Doctor Who. Because it's only immoral and terrible crutch-writing when someone else does it, right? Right, miss New York Times Bestseller? News Flash: Just because you get paid for it doesn't make what you do GOOD. I wish I could sit you and James Patterson* and Nicholas Sparks and Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer down in chairs, tiny chairs like you're at a parent-teacher conference, and make sure you GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEADS.
See here's the thing: Copyright is a strange strange beast, and before it existed, literature was an interactive experience. people "wrote fanfic," if you will, of things that had been printed, like Don Quixote and Pantagruel and the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales and Orlando, good lord Orlando's got a lot of fanfiction out there. Before moveable type allowed for easy and cheap dissemination of printed material, people "wrote fanfic" in the oral tradition. Let's talk about Homer, and how these stories had been circulating for hundreds of years, being retold and adapted and changed in the telling before someone wrote them down. Let's talk about Virgil, writing Homer fanfiction for the arguably masturbatory purpose of making Augustus feel better about himself. Let's talk, now that we're really getting into it, about how the Bible's flood narrative is Gilgamesh fanfiction, and how the Gilgamesh flood narrative derived from another Akkadian one, and now we're talking about Ur-texts and we get to a point where no one really OWNS these things because they are part of a Shared Cultural Narrative.
The Shared Cultural Narrative still exists. It exists on the internet now, among other places, and no matter now many C&Ds you get your lawyers to issue, no matter how many tantrums you throw, it will not stop. Because people have been sharing stories ever since they could communicate with each other, sharing them and re-telling them and changing them. Story is not something static. Story is fluid, it is change, and it enriches our lives and our connections to the world and to each other. It's part of what makes us human.
So get off your high horse and stop crying that we're raping your family, for goodness' sake, because you can't separate yourself from this process. Just because you published it doesn't make it pristine untouchable Litteratoor, above and better than anything a lowly, perverted fanfic writer on the internet could write. Once you put your stories out there, they will take on a life of their own, and they will change. Hell, it happens every time someone adapts a book into a screenplay for a movie. The only difference between that and fanfiction is that in one instance, the changing of the story is being done to make money. In the other instance, it's being done not for profit, but to enrich people's lives with cultural connections.
Now think about that before you tell me what's moral and what's immoral.
As an extra-special bonus, I'm going to make a list (which will probably be ongoing) of things that can be safely considered fanfic which are better than the original text. Let's go:
Battlestar Galactica reboot
Most novel-length Pirates of the Caribbean fanfics
National Treasure, essentially a Da Vinci Code fanfic (and written by the guys who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean, among others!)
West Side Story (yeah that's right, Shakespeare, you can't touch that choreography)
I'm going to pause here and point out how Dan Brown's sequel, The Lost Symbol, is in itself a National Treasure ripoff. Let me mention how much it UTTERLY BLOWS.
In a perfect world, I'd like to see ownership of literature in the hands not of the people who wrote it first, but the people who wrote it BEST.
Or how about Literature just belongs to the PEOPLE. How about that?
*When I say James Patterson, I mean the ghostwriters, the "co-authors," whatever you want to call them, the people who don't get paid as much, though at this point I've started thinking that maybe they aren't slaves to a ridiculous tyrant named James Patterson, but that the real James Patterson is now long dead and these people are collectively writing in his name and churning out crap month after month after month. James Patterson, I'd like to see you live and in person to prove you're real. And then I'd like to kick you in the balls just for calling "The Murder of King Tut" nonfiction, you utter piece of shit.
Addendum: A couple other reasons Diana Gabaldon is on my list are as follows:
1) Her books are so damn long that audiobook versions of one book take up two separate volumes, and god help us if one of those cds gets lost and we have to re-order it from the publisher and people are stuck listening to volume one over and over and have to wait a few weeks to get volume two. it makes patrons angry.
2) I have to weed books that haven't circulated in some years, and inevitably this means I have to get rid of lesser known works, maybe someone's first novel, maybe it got some good reviews or it's about an interesting subject, but it doesn't circulate like the mass-producing Grand Poobah New York Times Bestselling Authors' tons of books do. So this means that I clear out original, inventive writing JUST SO WE HAVE ROOM ON THE SHELVES FOR MORE GODDAMN SELLOUTS. Today I was weeding in the Gs. How many good books have to die for your bigass Mary-Sue
And for the record if a book looks really good, or quirky, or interesting, or queer, etc, I make a point of checking them out to save them.
And that's all I've got for today. Sleep!
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