fabrisse

The whole Diana Gabaldon versus Fanfiction thing is interesting to me.

I've used this line elsewhere, but really, what's Euripides' The Trojan Women? It's a really terrific Iliad fanfiction. He fills in the interstitials and shows the consequences for characters that are minor at best in the original work. For those of you who read or write fanfic, how many of those stories do the same thing?

Plus there's the professional fanfiction... Star Trek, Criminal Minds, The 4400, etc. all have professional writers creating further adventures in a universe someone else created. Marion Zimmer Bradley published a book of stories set in her Arthurian universe that included works by a young Mercedes Lackey, and now Lackey is allowing her publishers to put out books of Valdemar short stories by other writers.

And love or loathe Cassie Cla(i)re, her YA original novels are better than anything Stephenie Meyer ever wrote, and her style is recognizable to anyone who read "The Very Secret Diaries."

On my own front, I'd love to have more and better ideas for original works. I know fanfiction has made me a better writer. It has certainly opened me up to a wider range of subjects. I remember reading what may have been the first ever "Five things" story back in the earliest days of the Smallville fandom. Nearly a decade later, I've finally written a "five things" and it's a tough conceit to play with. Drabbles, which call upon a writer to work with lapidary precision, challenges, themes, style choices, all of these things make fanfiction vibrant and original.

My last point, and I think this is what Gabaldon and some of the other commenters may be viscerally reacting to, most fanfiction fandoms grow up around either television where side stories happen all the time or "imperfect" worlds. There's probably someone, somewhere, who's written War and Peace fanfiction (and yes, there's a thriving Jane Austen community), but in general, really magnificent "for the ages" prose is not going to have thriving fanfiction communities.

Damn, I miss