Ah the glorious, bizarre, furtive underworld that is fanfiction. An opportunity for fans to write and read Scenes They'd Like To See, both probable and...less probable. But what do the writers of the original works feel about it?

This post was inspired by my recent love affair with the Realm of the Elderlings series by Robin Hobb. Browsing around, I discovered that Hobb is vehemently against fanfiction. You can read her explanation here, but the gist is that she feels it violates her creative copyright as a writer, even if no monetary gain is involved. A fair proportion of the RotE fanfic does seem to be of the 'the stupid author ended it wrong so here's my version' variety, and it's easy to see why she finds that to be an insulting use of her creative work. The venom of these fans is pretty astonishing, considering that if it wasn't for Hobb, they wouldn't have the books or the characters they love so much at all. Perhaps she was simply too good for her own good in that regard.

Hobb may be among the most actively opposed to fanfiction, but many other major writers have a lukewarm relationship with it, at best. JK Rowling for example has said that she's glad to have inspired people to write and be creative, but that she's a bit disturbed by some of the common themes in the fanfic, such as the Draco Malfoy obsession. Stephanie Meyer is okay with it, but finds the effort involved confusing, and thinks these people should just be writing their own books. George RR Martin is very against it, as he says views his characters as almost his children and hates to see others meddling in his creative work: " “My characters are my children … I don’t want people making off with them, thank you. Even people who say they love my children. I’m sure that’s true, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affection, but still… No one gets to abuse the people of Westeros but me.” Robert Jordan of Wheel of Time fame viewed it as a violation of copyright, plain and simple.

So, yeah. Confusion or mistrust from those authors, for the most part. And I have to say, I think this may partly be a generational thing. Most of those authors had never read or even heard of fanfic before their works inspired it. They never dreamed that people would be sharing original stories derived from their books, and they don't understand why it's assumed they would be okay with it. I am of a different generation. Being in my twenties, I read fanfiction of my favourite books as a teenager, and always believed that if I ever had very successful books, there would obviously be fanfiction about them. I would take it as the highest compliment that my stories and characters had affected others enough to want to write about them. They may be mine, but if I had wanted to keep them just to myself, I would have locked my manuscript in a drawer, or kept it in my head. Every reader is going to interpret things differently or imagine different scenarios. Within reason, every fan owns a piece of the story. Are you going to approve of all the fics? No, but who really cares? Fans easily draw a line in their heads between 'canon' and 'fic'. They don't hold weird or bad fanfictions against your work, and in fact fics often seem to serve to keep people interested in series in between installments. In a way, a good fic is someone doing promotion for you. Now, there are the grey areas, such as urban legends of successful writers who changed the characters' names in fics they wrote and got them published as books. But, if they wrote the thing and added their own ideas, how is it that different to regular fiction? I would be very against that practice, as a writer who works hard to create my characters and worlds, but I think it would be naive to assume that that sort of derivation of plots and characters began with online fanfiction.

So love it or hate it, I don't think fanfiction is going anywhere. Might as well embrace it.