Fan-fic – Tyson Adams

Anne Rice, The Queen of Literary Monsters

This month’s It’s Lit! covers the woman who made vampires sexy.

I was a young and impressionable university student when I bought The Vampire Lestat. It was not the first reimagining of vampires as more human creatures I’d read, but it managed to feel more substantial than other efforts. As a result, I went out and gradually made my way through the first half-a-dozen Vampire Chronicles. They still sit proudly on my shelf next to my wife’s collection of Twilight books.

There were obviously a lot of people who felt the same way as myself. We enjoyed the tales of immortals walking through history. We even liked that pensive sadness all the characters dripped. It certainly made the indulgent detailed descriptions of ancient art mildly tolerable.

And I think that is why I parted way with the Vampire Chronicles and Rice’s works in general. There was a moment in reading one of her novels, either Blood and Gold or perhaps a Mayfair Witches books, when I remember commenting upon the poem at the beginning of a chapter. Here was yet another very arty poem by Rice’s husband to skip over, what a waste of good paper.

Now, I generally dislike non-novel additions to novels. Chapter titles are fine, but sub-headings, dates, locations, quotes, poems, and other indulgences are just stuff in the way of my book reading. They often feel like attempts to make the work more arty or important than it really is. In the case of dates and locations, common in thrillers, they feel like lazy writing. And Rice was the author who made me dislike these things.

Once you start pulling at the thread, things start to unravel. I started to realise just how indulgent and boring much of Rice’s novels were. These were books I thoroughly enjoyed, yet I’ve not felt compelled to reread them since making this observation (I’d read several of the Vampire Chronicles at least twice at that point). Maybe I’m being too hard on Rice, I mean, she did pretty much reshape genre fiction (as discussed in the video). Maybe I need to revisit The Body Snatcher or The Vampire Lestat (again, as they were my favourites I’ve read multiple times).

Or maybe I should pickup some Lestat fanfic. Rice would love that.

Forbes once called her “The Warren Buffett of vampires,” but American author, Anne Rice has established herself as the literary queen of monsters of ALL kinds over her four-and-a-half decade career. Besides her 15 novels of the world-famous Vampire Chronicles series, she’s also written 21 other books featuring all your favorite dark, supernatural, and undead beings: witches, ghosts, mummies, werewolves, aliens, demons, angels, Jesus.
But the works of Anne Rice aren’t just light, pulpy fun monster books–her vampires changed the landscape of genre fiction as we know it?
Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres, and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Blog Topic, Fun Articles, Reading, Video

The Case for Fan Fiction

It’s Lit! is back and they have picked an easy subject to discuss: how Fan-Fic is actually awesome.

I wouldn’t really say I got my start writing fan fiction. Sure, I wrote some stories loosely based upon MacGyver and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But I’d say they were more homages to… Okay, they were fan-fic. Who am I kidding?

That paragraph essentially sums up what I used to think of fan-fic. I appreciated it, recognised it as a legitimate creative outlet, that it could be great fun to write, and that authors should be proud to have people passionate enough about the work that they are being inspired to write their own stuff. But at the same time, I saw it as what beginners did. It was really just for the writers, not readers. That it wasn’t “legit” writing.

It wasn’t worthy!

When Anne Rice was issuing cease and desist letters to her biggest fans, I thought she was a fool. What sort of idiot honestly thinks these fans are somehow ruining her characters and books?

But underlying this argument was the idea that none of those fan-fic stories was any good. Rice’s characters were safe from harm because no hack would be taken seriously compared to the internationally bestselling author. Those stories weren’t even available in real books.*

Then I had somewhat of an epiphany. An author friend made the argument against fan-fic from the premise of copyright and how fan-fic was low quality. They made a sizeable amount of their income from tie-in novels, the books that are licensed to a movie or TV show IP, and written to satiate fans who can’t get enough of the adventures. So you could see their points as defending their meal ticket. But after they made that argument, a professor of writing, who was a published author and also wrote tie-ins, pointed out how they also wrote fan-fic and how this wasn’t about copyright. This was about fans expressing themselves.

It is easy to say that copyright is being breached, despite the clear acknowledgement by everyone involved that fan-fic isn’t canon and isn’t even “sold” to people. No one picks up a Chewie and Yoda slashfic and thinks, “Can’t wait to see this will be in the prequel trilogy movies.” It is also easy to say that the people writing it are all hacks. Except we not only know that isn’t true (e.g. the above writing professor and award-winning authors mentioned in the video). And if these fans are working hard at writing lots of fan-fic, they are bound to become good at it.

So now I stand back and say: Fan-fic is legit.

I mean, where else will I read a steamy sex scene with cries of linguistically impaired pleasure and Wookie growls?

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For years writers of fan fiction were shamed, the butt of jokes, and even subject to copyright litigation. However, in the past few years, with the fan fiction writers of today becoming the published mainstream authors of today the past time is a celebrated benchmark of one’s climb to publication.

In the season two premiere of It’s Lit, we explore what happened and how fan fiction writers were able to come out of the proverbial closet of shame.

Hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes, It’s Lit! is a show about our favorite books, genres and why we love to read. It’s Lit has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

* It was the 90s. If it wasn’t in print at your local bookstore, it didn’t exist. It certainly wasn’t going to overturn the canon.