So...

Mar. 13th, 2006 10:50 am
agilebrit: (Antubis)
[personal profile] agilebrit
The Town Drunk is accepting submissions. I have a fanfic I can rework to fit within their guidelines ("Black Market Beagles," for anyone who remembers that). I've been planning on reworking this story into an original work for some time, and now I actually have a reason to do so.

And the Hubby is busting my chops for thinking about doing this. He says it's "cheating." His reasoning is that I've used other people's work to create my fic--and therefore it's not okay to disguise this work as my OWN original by changing details to make the characters appear to be mine for money. Even if I'm changing major details like speech patterns and the gender of the characters, he seems to think that it's somehow not kosher, because the whole basis for the story was stolen from other sources.

Of course, my defense is that I'm going to change the characters around enough that (hopefully) no one will recognize them as coming out of Firefly (Hubby comment: Kind of like painting a car a different color and sticking a spoiler on the back so no one will recognize it as the one you stole!), and that the actual story itself is mine. I've heard of fanfic authors doing this very thing with some success.

What say ye, flist? Am I on the horns of an ethical dilemma, or is the Hubby blowing smoke?

Date: 2006-03-13 06:55 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] nodrogg.livejournal.com

Smoke is blowing. It's your plot, isn't it? All you did originally was plug pre-established characters into a story of your own devising. Now you're replacing those with characters also crafted by you. What now isn't your own?

Re: taking your husband's side

Date: 2006-03-13 07:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] agilebrit.livejournal.com
That's kind of what I thought, but the Hubby is rather rabid on intellectual property rights and sees this as some form of cheating. And perhaps it is a kind of crutch, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing. All writers riff from other stories and you can't avoid certain archetypes, especially in science fiction. The question is whether it's done WELL or not.

taking your husband's side

Date: 2006-03-13 07:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kathleendoris.livejournal.com
it seems sort of like plagarism. the first version of the story was using someone else's characters and someone else's universe and just changing the speech pattern and gender doesn't seem make it non-fan fiction. don't people make stories about orignial characters set in a pre-established universe all the time? so your story is your character, and your plot is your plot but you didn't put in the work to figure out how the rules of the universe, joss whedon did. so not calling it fan fiction is taking credit for all the work he did figuring out the details of the universe surronding the charactes he created.

also, the changes you make to the characters may be very sophisticated but they may also be superficial. the characters you write in version 2 may share the same motivations, profession and personality of characters created by joss whedon which make them somewhat unoriginal.

all of this said: if you do it, i doubt anyone will know (excpet everyone who reads you lj).

Re: taking your husband's side

Date: 2006-03-13 08:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] agilebrit.livejournal.com
So, does it depend on HOW MUCH I change the characters as to the line it crosses? If I stick the same basic plot into a 'verse of my own devising, with rules I figure out, with characters of my own... *shrug*

The difference between fanfic and original fic is that your readers have certain assumptions they make when they read fanfic. In original work, you have to start from scratch and explain EVERYTHING, including the characters' relationships with each other and their jobs. On Firefly, everyone knows that Mal's the captain, River is Simon's loopy little sister, Kaylee's the winsome mechanic, Jayne's the dimwitted muscle, and Zoe and Wash are married. I don't have that luxury in original work. So, this will have to be fleshed out quite a bit to make it so that a publisher will even glance at it.

Certain archetypes, I think, are unavoidable. If you've got space smugglers, you have a captain (who may or may not also be the pilot and the mechanic and the doctor, for that matter), and you have his/her partner, because that's just the formula. The other jobs on the ship can be carried out by other people or just those two. I need more characters than just the two, so I'll have other people carrying out some of the jobs. I certainly won't have as many characters as Joss used, because they're not necessary to the story.

I guess that, when all is said and done, whether or not it's cheating will have to be determined by the final product's similarity to the first work. If people look at it and say "Dude, she totally ripped off Mal Reynolds," then I haven't done my job. Of course, people accused Joss of ripping off Han Solo...

Re: taking your husband's side

Date: 2006-03-13 09:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kathleendoris.livejournal.com
if you "stick the same basic plot into a 'verse of my own devising, with rules I figure out, with characters of my own" then you have created an original work and have not plagarized. but just chaning the character's gender? come on.


you're right, of course, about how everyone kind of rips each other off.

Re: taking your husband's side

Date: 2006-03-13 09:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] agilebrit.livejournal.com
Oh, right, I wasn't going to JUST change their genders. I agree, that would be cheating. But changing personalities, merging jobs, or adding aliens (which I just realized I can do!)...that would make it my own, I think.

It's definitely going to take a lot more work than the original story!

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