Plagiarism and reviewing

[louiselux]

I see the plagiarism argument has resurfaced on the old flist.

There's this idea that people who write fanfic are not only breaking the law but are somehow wasting their talent/time/precious souls to boot. I delight in using someone else's characters and derive vast amounts of entertainment from it, as long as the author doesn't mind. If they did mind, then I think I'd stop. Which brings me to a point - would you stop writing fanfic if the author asked you to stop? What would you consider as 'stopping'? Stopping distributing or posting it, or stopping writing altogether?

Another hoary old chestnut that nonetheless bothers me, because you really can't get away from it, is the idea that by attacking someone's fic you're attacking them as a person. I don't believe this is true, but I can see why some people feel it. It's hard receiving criticism, as hard as it is to give pain-free criticism. I think the same general rule applies to this as to any social interaction - practise common decency in reviews and LoCs. Personally, I try and be honest, think about the language I use, and think about my own motives.

Comments

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

It does seem a self destructve thing to do on the part of an author. I think Anne Rice lost a lot of respect over the way she treated fanfic, *kof* and also over the way she started producing utter crap.

[slythwolf.livejournal.com]

Yes, I really can't imagine what she was thinking. I've always thought that if I ever got published, I would encourage fanfic - it's what introduced me to half my fandoms, after all, some of which I buy large amounts of merchandise and spend lots of money at the theaters *cough*Harry Potter*cough*.

I've never been able to get through any of Anne Rice's books; I tried Interview With the Vampire shortly after seeing the film (which I enjoyed), but I just couldn't get into it.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I think Interview with the Vampire is her best, at that. The Vampire Lestat was also rather good, but the others in the series (and there must be at least 4 more) quickly became very self indulgent.

One of the reasons seems to be that (I read this in an interview with her) she stopped allowing anyone to edit her work, as she thought her manuscripts were good enough as they stood. Wrong. It made them worse.

[slythwolf.livejournal.com]

How completely ridiculous. She is the fifteen-year-old fangirls on ff.net who write atrocious Mary Sues and claim they don't need no steenking beta.