Fanfiction

Booking Through Thursday's question for this week is:

What do you think of fanfiction? In general—do you think it’s a fun thing or a trespass on an author/producer’s world? And of course, obviously specific authors have very firm and very differing opinions about this, yet it’s getting more popular and more mainstream all the time. Do you ever read or write it yourself?

I've never actually thought much about it. I've read the odd Topless Robot Fanfiction Friday - a selection of the more horrifying examples of fanfiction out there (warning: do not read these unless you and your friends want to be simultaneously amused and traumatised) - but I've never really read any fanfiction with the expectation of actually enjoying it. That's not to say that there aren't people out there writing fanfiction that might be high quality prose, but I suppose the samples the glorious world of the internet brings to my doorstep are some of the worst.

I completely understand the impulse, when you've finished a book, TV series, or film and loved it, to allow the characters to continue to exist outside their original framework. Personally though, I prefer them to live on in my imagination only - anything else seems wrong, and however well done, departing from the author's original vision creates someone different, a slightly weird twin of the original. Even in published works like Death Comes to Pemberley, I can't shake off the feeling that the characters are being twisted out of their natural selves somehow.

In short, I think it's great to feel inspired to write by books/films/etc, but why not write something that comes from within yourself, rather than using someone else's ready-made characters?