ang | (no subject)

One thing I find really funny in all the nonsense about fanfiction not being "real" writing, and not being "legitimate" is that when people (published authors or not) say that, they seem to assume that people who write fanfiction want to be published authors who get paid to write.

And yes, there are some fanwriters who are published writers of either fiction or non-ficton. And there are some fanwriters who are working on original projects that they may seek publication for.

But I would say the majority of fanfiction writers don't really think about publication that much. Maybe I'm just assuming that most people are like me here, but I know for my part, while I do have original projects I work on, and sometimes I fantasize about them getting published and being hugely popular, I am well aware that I like writing too much as a hobby to want to make it my job.

So I'm always kind of baffled when people make arguments about fanwriting that are mainly based around "you're never going to get published!" I'm always like "Yeah, okay. Your point?"

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Yeah, that's pretty much how it works for me. Trying to be a published author--hell, even being one--just doesn't sound like that much fun.

I'd rather have a regular job with a salary and benefits and fanfic as a hobby.

It just sounds so stressful.

Seriously. Okay, so (hypothetically) I wrote a Shakespeare fanfic and suddenly realize "wait, this isn't copyrighted, I could publish it." Okay, first I have to research a market. What if my story is 500 words long, or what if it's 200,000 words long and I don't *want* to split it up into two or three books? Where exactly do you publish Shakespeare fanfic these days-- themed anthologies, I guess? So I sit around waiting for someone to come up with the idea for an anthology of "Wingfic!Shakespeare stories" and hope the editor calls me? And meanwhile I'm writing lots and lots of stories and sending them out and waiting to get them back and sending them out again and rewriting them for a different market ("Wingfic is out this year! Steampunk is in!" "We can't use this as a novella, maybe if it were a novel?") and meanwhile... nobody is reading my stories! Pssh, seriously, what's the point of that?

Also, omg, I totally googled "novel length" while I was typing this comment because I have no idea what's officially too long to be a novel, and the third result in Google's auto-complete responses, when you type in "novel length", is "novel length Harry Potter fanfiction," ahahahahahaaa. :D

As someone who mostly writes stuff that there's not even really a market for in fandom, the "this is good, but there's no market for it" issue is a huge part of why the idea of publishing seems so stressful to me. What do you mean there's no market for stories about telepaths with questionable morals unless it's YA or paranormal romance? >:(