Fan fiction, Slash fiction – What Next?

Fan fiction, sometimes spelt fanfiction, is the sort of stuff afficionados write about the characters in their favourite books. Not surprisingly, there is a huge volume of fan fiction written about the Harry Potter characters and the author, JK Rowling, is said not to mind – so long as the writers do not try to sell their work.

Fan fiction is rarely authorised and is technically illegal as the writer uses copyrighted characters and settings, and encroaches upon the intellectual property rights of the original author. Copyright law grants the holder the exclusive right to control how their work is used and identified.  Many authors, like JK Rowling, are aware of the fan fiction their work inspires but see it as largely harmless, maybe even of benefit to any young person trying their hand at it as it develops their imagination. Established authors will rarely, if ever, read any of it though; partly because they have better things to do with their free time, partly through fear of being accused of ‘stealing’ an idea from a fan for a future book.

One of the worst examples of Fan fic, I am told, is My Immortal, which is based on Harry Potter books, but shows scant regard for the actual characters and is riddled with typos and grammar mistakes. Many other works aren’t much better, and some developments in fan fiction are increasingly giving the genre a bad name.

Slash fiction is a sub group of fan fiction. It focuses on same sex romantic/sexual relationships between characters that was neither intended nor implied by the original author. It is so called because the slash (/) is used to indicate that the relationship is sexual (e.g. Noddy / Big Ears). Friendship is indicated by ‘&’ (Noddy & Big Ears). The sexual relationship is usually between 2 male characters (m/m). If it is between two females (f/f) it is called femslash or femme slash.

This is still pretty harmless, you may think. But some writers of fan fiction go further – Angst fic, or even Dark fic where the plot lines become increasingly violent and sexual – rape, incest, murder, torture, suicide ….

The journalist and women’s rights campaigner, Dr Helen Joyce, first wrote about fan fiction in The Economist in 2016 when her editor asked her to look into the potential impact of pornography on young people. She had not paid any attention to fan fiction before, and had never heard of slash fiction, but in her initial research she found a link between them and porn. She included in her article her concern about the impression this could be making on the many young female readers who like reading fan fiction.

Subsequently she was contacted by a number of parents who agreed with her, but also felt that slash fiction was creating, or compounding, their daughters’ feelings of gender dysphoria – initially starting with the girl identifying as one of the gay boys in a fan fictional relationship, rather than a female character from the original book.  However, in most of the slash fiction of that era (remember, this is less than 8 years ago) the relationships were not explicit, and the romance element virtually sexless. Ostensibly, many storylines seemed relatively tame – for some girls a temporary haven away from the anxious realities of first periods, developing breasts, and boyfriends in real life.

Helen Joyce has recently gone back to research the topic, and found, in keeping with modern angsts, a plethora of fan fiction characters were now in therapy of some form or another. She has been shocked, too, to find that the fan/slash genre has become much more pornified, violent and explicit than even a few years ago, with anal sex, choking, spitting and slapping seen as ‘normal,’ even on a first date (and a million miles away from the behaviour of the characters in the original books). These degrading porn storylines however do correlate with recent research done with young people about the impact of porn on their lives. It appears that many have had access to explicit and violent porn from a young age, and that girls understand this behaviour to be what they could expect from boys in real-life sexual relationships, or be seen as prudes. Certain strands of fan fiction, that to the uninitiated sounds like an innocent, adolescent,  vehicle for fandom in regard to a favourite author, seem to have become very dark indeed.

Links to my books and social media

My work, as far as I know, is a fan-fiction-free-zone. You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story is always free.

ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

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Am I Bad Enough to be Good?

Did you know that there are publishing houses that insert ‘morality clauses’ into their contracts, a phenomenon that has apparently been growing since the rise of the #MeToo movement? Some publishers, it seems, are worried that if a writer is found to have behaved badly, it will affect not just sales of that author’s books, but the whole publishing house.

One publisher reportedly warned an author against any acts that indicate ‘moral turpitude.’ That is, they must avoid upsetting the accepted standards and feelings of the community through their life-style, or they won’t get a contract.  This despite the desire to shock the reader into re-appraising agreed norms – think Updike, Kerouac, Winterson – being the main reason why some authors put pen to paper in the first place, and why many readers buy their books.

There are plenty of writers and poets, generally regarded as good – not to say great – who have been the staple of school and university reading lists because they have the ability to combine compelling original prose or poetry with original thinking. But how many of these would pass the ‘moral turpitude’ test if it had been applied when they were looking for a publisher? Here are just a few who probably wouldn’t:

Lord Byron – where do you start?

Charles Dickens – cruelly cheated on his wife (as did VS Naipaul on his – many, many times)

Patricia Highsmith – anti-Semite.

Virginia Woolf – anti-Semite (which included most of her husband’s family) and snob.

Philip Roth – sexist

Philip Larkin – racist and alcoholic

William Coleridge – drug addict.

George Eliot – defied the accepted norms of her time by living openly with a man she was not married to.

Even writers for children have not been immune to the conflict between writing engaging books that children loved and still love, whilst being quite unpleasant in person and to their families.

Roald Dahl – a sexually promiscuous misogynist, racist, bully, and liar (and that’s just his wife’s opinion).

Enid Blyton – who was so busy writing her children’s stories she had no time for, or understanding of, her own children’s needs.

What all these ‘bad’ writers have in common is the ability to touch the lives and minds of readers, and to encourage them to read more. How much, in these more sensitive times, should readers be deterred by knowledge of a writer’s questionable behaviour off the page? We will never know if publishers get in first with a rejection letter. What will we lose if we can only read works by those who are pure in thought and deed? Quite a lot, I imagine.

It is not just morality clauses. We now have sensitivity readers. These are employed to check, normally at the beta reading stage, if a writer is straying into areas which are not part of their ‘lived experience’ – other races, social classes, sexual orientations, gender identities etcetera – and suggest alternatives. A literal interpretation of ‘writing about what you know’ perhaps, but disregarding a good novelist’s ability to imagine new and exciting worlds for us – and do the necessary research. Kate Clanchy complained about sensitivity readers who went through her prize-winning memoir, Some Kids I taught and What They Taught Me, when it came up for re-publication – but offered contradictory advice on how to ‘improve’ her work. Fortunately she found a more sympathetic publisher.

Many authors argue that the process stiffles rather than fosters diversity. There are a lot of ladies of a certain class who take up writing when the children have grown up (guilty as charged!) Whilst we may not behave in ways that would contravene any morality clause, if the sensitivity issue is taken to its logical conclusion, the publishing world would end up with a mountain of books about middle-aged, middle class, mostly white, ladies writen by – middle aged, middle class, mostly white, lady novelists. Yawn!!!!!!!

Fortunately sense prevails for many publishers (or at least their accountants). hence we still have a certain white middle-aged female author who cut her teeth writing about a boy wizard before moving onto a one-legged ex soldier, with a poor diet and a knack for solving crime – neither of which characters reflect the author and women’s rights campaigner, JK Rowling’s, life experiences.

But back to morality clauses. Would my sales improve if I was a better person? Or am I simply not bad enough to be good? You can check this out by clicking on the links below.

Links to my books and social media

You can find all my books and short stories on Amazon books, At least one story always free. ALL BOOKS FREE ON KINDLE UNLIMITED

www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B00RVO1BHO

fb.me/margaretegrot.writer

@meegrot

(This post is an updated version of one that appeared in April 2018)