Summer 2007 (3 page)

It’s easy. One of the most fun things about writing
fanfic, for me, was that it brought back the joy of writing, the ease and
fluidity that I used to have before I knew what I was doing. And that’s,
honestly, because somebody else has already done the heavy lifting for me.
Somebody has set up the backstory, laid out the characters, and placed their
issues and trauma in a harsh light. The warp and weft are there: you’re not
starting from scratch.

It’s
what we do
. From a very young age, we take
existing symbols and turn them into stories. Cops and robbers, cowboys and
Indians, Batman and Robin.

Four hundred years ago, professional writers were
ripping off Ovid, and so were schoolboys.

Is a lot of it bad? Well yeah, you betcha. A lot of
original fiction is just as bad. You should see my slush pile.

Heck, you should see what I was writing for original
fiction when I was eighteen. Trust me, there’s probably Sentinel/Enterprise
crackfic out there that looks like award-winning literature next to my juvenile
stuff.

The thing is, fanfiction is written for the writer, and
other fans. It’s not written for the market. It’s written to service a kink,
whatever that kink might be, and it’s totally unapologetic about that. On that
level, it’s some of the most honest writing around, and one can learn an
amazing amount about what fans want and how they read and view by studying it.

And frankly, it serves the property owners. It allows
the fans to stay interested and engaged with the property during hiatus or in
between books, to build community. It’s another avenue for discussion,
connection, and celebration. It can bring in new viewers or readers.

Simply put,
it increases demand.

I have sympathy for the writers who feel that something
of theirs is cheapened when they are ficced. I understand that possessiveness
of one’s own work, and it seems to me that a respectful fan (as opposed to a
crazy stalker) will in those cases attempt to respect the wishes of the author.

Certainly, in the hands of some fan writers, fanfic
becomes an arrogation–”Mine is better than theirs!”–and that can
certainly chafe. But that’s not a social faux pas limited to fanfiction. A
certain group of fans are possessive. They have always been, and they always
will be possessive, and nothing is going to change that.

It doesn’t matter. They don’t own the property: the
copyright holder does.

Fanfiction is by
definition
not canon.

That is, in fact, the point of it: there’s no profit to
the fan writer in being mistaken for canon. It is a response. I have never read
a piece of fanfiction that could be, or intended to be, mistaken for the canon
material. There are close pastiches–as found in material derivative of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes–but the more-or-less unsuccessful
attempt of a derivative writer to be mistaken for more of the original is
limited to the pro-fiction arena. (How long have V.C. Andrews and Carolyn Keene
been authoring through intermediaries, now?)

To misquote Anaïs Nin, my
book is not made of soap. It will not wear out.

Column:
Lansdale Unchained #1 by Joe R. Lansdale

JUST DO IT

Or

ENJOYING THE WRITTEN WORD WITHOUT BEING OWNED BY IT (but
always have a savings account and a piggy bank, or in my case, I have a bear
and a dinosaur and a Batman bank, and a few mutual funds.)

This is the first article of a column I’m calling
LANSDALE UNCHAINED. I intend to write about pop culture: writing and art and
comics and movies and anything related. Sometimes the relations may be tenuous,
but I’ll do the best I can.

Let me tell you a secret. Everyone enjoys recognition, a
little fame. Let me tell you another secret. If you like it too much it’ll eat
your guts out. In creative endeavors, like writing, it’s the curse, baby.

You start out writing because you enjoy reading and then
you write to please a certain in-crowd, usually other authors, or for some,
critics and reviewers, and then pretty soon you find an audience, and that my
friends is both good and deadly.

We all like to have an audience. You don’t have someone
reading you, then you don’t get to sell your nifty writing, and if you don’t
sell it, it doesn’t matter if you’ve written a lot or not at all, because a
creative endeavor for most people is sharing. No sharing. No writing. When it’s
in your desk drawer, it might give you a hard on when you go over it, or make
your nipples stiff (depending on gender), but it’s not satisfying if there are
no readers. Reading aloud to the dog doesn’t count.

There’s something inside the creative mind that thinks
it has something someone would want to read, see, or hear. It takes some ego to
believe that. Even the quietest, most withdrawn of authors, like to believe
they have some worth, if only in that one area. Writing.

But if you find an audience, you began to give your
audience what you think they want. Some people can do this very well. They can
become rich and famous. They can have so much money that when they fart they
blow out spare change, but good as this may be, it can ring a bit hollow if
your creativity is within one constant artery, because eventually, that artery
gets filled up with plaque of the non-artistic kind, and you’re just pumping it
out, but it’s not a clean pump, because all that plaque you know, it’ll make
you grab your chest from time to time, and eventually, it just might kill you,
creatively anyway. Now, just knocking it out, find that audience and giving
them exactly what they want at the expense of all else is not a bad thing if
your job is as a prostitute where a certain rhythm of movement, or at least a
willingness to take a fucking will get you by, but as an author, well, brethren
and sisteren, (yeah, I made that one up) ’tain’t so good.

Sometimes the publishers can be a problem. They may want
to restrain you. Sometimes that can’t be helped. If your publisher doesn’t want
you to say pussy or fuck or shit or prick or have pronouncements against the
powers that be, if you think religion sucks the big ole donkey dick but they
fear their readers like sucking the donkey dick, and they want your work to be
about kitties and puppies and to be non-offensive, and you aren’t that kind of
writer, well, you can be, to put it mildly, disappointed.

Doesn’t mean you can’t modify if you have to, but it
does mean there’s a difference in modification or adjustment, and bending over
and greasing up.

You write to please everyone else but yourself, you
might as well get a job at the grocery store sacking groceries. Because you do
everything but what you want to do, you aren’t happy. You aren’t writing for
love. You will find yourself reading less, because you no longer know how to
enjoy it. Or because you have developed your own formula for success, and it’s
frustrating to read others who don’t share your formula. Perhaps because it
sounds different and you think it should be only one way. You are a Baptist of
a writer, and they are a Methodist of a writer. You’re both working for the
same deity, but you have different angles of attack, and of course, like all
pious Christians, you think your sect knows the truth and theirs doesn’t. The
mind narrows, and so does your taste and your ability to absorb new things.

Face it. We’re all a little that way. But if we
recognize that we are, we don’t have to let that aspect of ourselves overwhelm
us like some sort of outer space parasite.

Bottom line is if you think you know how it’s done and
there’s only one way to do it, you are on your way to creative destruction and
will soon live in a creative world that lacks greenery and is nothing but dry,
white sands. It’s uncomfortable there. It sucks your soul empty and shits it
down a dark gopher hole.

I know. I’ve seen it. I have friends who have done quite
well financially through chasing what they thought was popular, only to be like
the dog chasing the car. When they catch it, it wasn’t exactly what they expected
or wanted.

Now I’m not knocking money and I won’t say I haven’t
written some things for a few bucks in my time, but it’s never been my driving
force. I have written the things I’ve wanted to write with as much passion as I
could bring to them, and for as large an advance as I could manage. I’m no
idiot or blind idealist. But I believe you have to do your work, not the work
you think you should do to satisfy some unknown audience. You can’t write for
others, because, who are the others? You can’t please everyone, so don’t try.
You can only write for yourself, and you can only be yourself. So if your ideas
are sharp and clean, put them down. If your ideas are a bit messy, unzipped
pants and exposed genitals, then you got to go that direction. Next time out,
you might find your muse is all dressed up with a coat and tie, sophisticated.
Time after that, the fickle witch may be wearing Bermuda shorts and a sports
bra, drinking cheap beer from the bottle and scratching her ass. Time beyond
that, nothing but a smile, her pubic hair shaved in the shape of a heart.
(Remember, muses are traditionally female, so I’ve gone with that image. You
want a boy muse, hell, you’re the creator, go for it. Let him flap his pecker
at you if you like.)

You have to follow that muse where it takes you. The
bright places, the dark places, the distant planets, the center of the earth,
or just over to the 7-11 where you think you saw the story of your dreams
behind the doughnut counter.

So you go at your work because it is your work, and it
grows out of your subconscious, not some overly conscious design to please. To
put it together in such a tedious way that it hits all of the tenets of “good
storytelling” will end up knocking you ass over heels, throwing you face down
in a puddle.

Here’s a secret. Listen up. Everyone wants the secret,
and I’m going to be pretentious and offer it to you. Good storytelling is just
good stories well told with conviction. You should want to know how grammar
works, but you don’t want it to work you. You should have some idea of
structure, but you shouldn’t be afraid to branch off the standard scaffolding.
Hell, if you want, tear it down. Understand how it works, then mess with it.

Okay. A confession: I don’t want to sound too high and
mighty after giving you this valuable secret (later I’ll reveal where you can
buy all your ideas), but I want you to know, I’ve written for money. I like
getting paid. I always want to know how much something pays and can I get more
than that. That’s just common sense, money jobs can be jobs for love, I still
think like that. I want to get paid for doing what I can do that not everyone
can do. Being paid for being in love, that’s pretty high cotton.

On the occasions I took the work for money, because
there was really no choice. I had to make a car payment, or stick something
back so I could write one I was dying to write but knew had about as much
chance to make big money as a crippled monkey selling pencils on the one street
corner in a dirt road town called Podunk, but I always put as much of myself in
them as I could. Sometimes there was less of me available, but I gave it what I
had. In a few cases, because I still went at it like I loved it, I came to love
it. And the results were a pleasant surprise. But there’s a difference in
working to eat, and just making more money. At some point, how much money do
you really need?

There were other times when money wasn’t a question at
all.

I was just in the mood to write and I let it go. I
wasn’t thinking: Wonder where I can sell this? I was just writing. Nothing
profound, but something moved in the back of my head and I sat down at the
machine and wrote. Whatever came out I let come out. I wanted to be surprised.
Sometimes the surprise wasn’t all that good and had to go back in the box, so
to speak, never to raise its ugly head again. Sometimes it wasn’t amazing, but
it was curious and I felt the world might like to see it, so I released it into
the wild.

Often, I was right to release it. Now and again, maybe
not so much.

These writings were not always brilliant, or my best
work, but they were me and they came out of me in rush of excitement, or at
least mild curiosity. I learned I was happier than the guy or gal who sat up
late at night trying to figure how to repeat what they had done before so that
they might repeat the success of before, and the one before that.

Again, I like success. Who doesn’t? The Bestseller list
is cool. You make big money when you hit it. That kind of success is good, but
I don’t want to be, and refuse to be its bitch. I get there, I want to get
there on my own terms.

And let me tell you the most wonderful surprise of all.
Sometimes these whims, these urges, turned into the best of my work, and they
sold really well. That was a neat surprise. There’s an old adage, and in my
case it’s been true. Do what you love, and the money will come.

Of course, when you the money comes, don’t be stupid.
Save some of it. We all like to eat. And the old adage, well, shit, it isn’t
always right. But mostly. So be smart with your money and never be so prideful
as to not do a project for money, but again, don’t base your career on that.
The difference in a hack and a professional is attitude. Remember, I never said
don’t write for money. I said don’t let money be the reason you write.