Whose Line is it Anyways

    I was wandering the internet yesterday, when an article about fanfiction caught my eye. It was about the recent success some fanfiction writers have found porting thier stories over to the mainstream.  The biggest examples that come to mind right now are that 50 Shades of Grey book that started out as Twilight fan fiction and the Mortal Instruments series which apparently was written by the author of the "Draco Trilogy" one of the seminal works of the "Draco in Leather Pants" school of writing.

     The article linked to another which demonstrated in detail how the author of that series had  plagiarized a number of other works from other books to television shows or movies, on occasion lifting entire pages of text intact for her story. There was a big scuffle/flame war on fanfiction.net and other Harry Potter fansites with some people shocked and apalled by plagiarism and others who claimed that all fanfiction was a form of plagiarism, so why single this writer out? This got me thinking about how fanfiction works and what differences there might be between a reference, or an homage or call out or just plain theft.

    There is nuance here, one that anybody who aspires to be a writer should be able to percieve. There is a difference between playing in someone elses sandbox, and building some new towers onto the sandcastle they built and calling it yours. I guess what it comes down to whether you really want to be a writer, or you just like the positive attention you can get from the fan community. A real writer wants to be the one who came up with the perfect turn of phrase, the well timed joke or witty double entendre.  There's  real satisfaction in crafting the perfect line yourself. The words fall into place, and you actually realise you just wrote something powerful that will have an impact on the reader. You'll never get that from a line you lifted from another writer.

There is some wiggle room however, for legitimately using references or quotes to other works.  Take the criminally underappreciated scifi show Farscape for instance. You have a genre savvy astronaut hero John Crichton who grew up on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and all the same pop culture sources we have.  It makes sense then when he's strapped into an alien torture device that he makes reference to the famous Monty Python "Comfy Chair" sketch in a moment of bravado before his mind is laid open.  If you used the same reference in your Lord of the Rings fanfiction when Frodo is getting tortured, your reader has to ask "Do they get the BBC in Hobbiton? Would Draco Malfoy, the pureblooded despiser of all things muggle really sneak out every Tuesday to faithfully catch every episode of Buffy so he can amuse his friends with witty Whedonisms?

This is beginning to run a bit long, so I'll end here. Next time I'll be looking at breaking down a scene to it's essence, and using that instead of lifting the scene entire and dropping your characters name in.