Just thinking...
Jan. 19th, 2005 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rabidsamfanThe bunny is not cooperating tonight, so I've tackled some thoughts that have been bubbling for a while, but got kicked into higher gear over the past few days because of some things I've encountered wandering around LJ.
I see fanfic as being something that has shown up again and again throughout history. When Perrault took the stories he'd probably heard since childhood and rewrote them and gussied them up for the French court he was writing fanfic. The Grimms and Asbjornsen and Moe were more honest collectors, but even they mucked with the material. When the many translators of the Swiss Family Robinson added pirate attacks and other adventures and even wrote sequels they were writing fanfic. Lancelot is a Gary Stu, you know. He's got all the characteristics of one, and can't you just see some French balladeer deciding to spice up the stories he'd picked up when he visited England with a little local interest? (After spending hours and hours as a teenager pretending to be a knight, of course!) And of course all those pastiches and scholarly articles on Sherlock Holmes are fannish.
Not having spent a lot of time in academia since I got my degree, I have grand theories and no incentive to verify or disprove them, so I may as well expound up on my grand theory of "the life of the mind". You see, people have big brains – big enough to recognize thousands of plants and know what they're good for, big enough to categorize animals and weather and what all – and as people got more and more efficient at having food and shelter enough, those big brains kept on looking around for something to do besides sleep. Hence the invention of language and from there the invention of hobbies. And most hobbies revolve around one of three kinds of activity. Playing with the toys, playing with the people and playing with the words. And it's the last two which color fanfic.
Playing with the toys is manual/physical craftsmanship – the fine art of chipping flint until you've made an axe that is more than just sharp, but also a pleasure to hold and to see. Storytelling and gamesmanship enter into it too, quite often, but that kind of craftsmanship retains a stronger hold to the "practical" origins of hobbies than the other two. Music is, if you think about it, a kind of physical craftsmanship.
Playing with the words includes finding new words, and categories, and ways of combining them. And as language evolved to the point where there were adjectives and adverbs yet another kind of wordplay was coming into use. Once people began to tell other people how to get to the place where the berry bushes are language has included narrative. And ever since a small sticky three year old looked up at its mother and solemnly insisted that a bear came and ate the fruit that had been gathered to save for daddy there have been Stories and storytellers, and ever since daddy came back from the hunt with plenty of meat and a good mood there have been storylisteners willing to egg the tellers into adding details to the narrative. Someone quickly discovered that it was easier to remember a story than a list of instructions and soon parents turned stories into ways to teach children (and each other) things about the world, but still, there must have always been stories that didn't quite jibe with the "real" world.
Playing with people, cooperatively or competitively, gives us Games. Games are different from other activities because they are organized around arbitrary rules. The first games probably were played by children in imitation of their elders, and the "rules" of the game were imitations of the "rules" of daily life. The first games came from the tasks of life – like throwing rocks at animals. Somewhere, some time, someone was practicing their aim and another kid came up alongside and the competition began. And ever since some small child said "I'll be the Mommy and you'll be the Daddy" there have been games which include a narrative as part of the game – imaginative play, if you will.
All three kinds of hobbies constitute the elements of the life of the mind, and since we have big brains that like to be busy, most of us have a pretty active life.
What has all that to do with fanfic? Well, you see none of the three areas are "pure" -- they all overlap, and I think that fanfiction, like imaginitive play, lies in the country between story and game, with just a touch of that urge to decorate or improve an object which ostensibly is already complete. Because it is story it needs an audience, and because it is game, the audience is also part of the storytelling -- in fact, the line between storyteller and audience becomes blurred, because the people who were audience are the ones who desire to embellish or enhance the original text.
Silly yes, but seeing the connection between fanfiction and imaginitive play explains part of the reason why so many writers begin with Mary Sue. Very small children become Superman or Batman or a Power Ranger as they play, but when we grow a little older we recognize our limitations and become willing to settle on meeting the people in our imaginations. (And of course, having recognized our limitations, we take our avatars and add a few shiny details to make them acceptable to those extraordinary characters. Rather like putting on makeup before going to stand in an autograph line even though your lipstick spends most of its life deserted in the bottom of a drawer.) It's a rare person who begins to tell stories about established characters without inserting themselves into the story.
Roleplay gaming approaches the same territory from a different direction, and somewhere between the two is what I call "storytalking" where two or more people take on the roles of some of the characters in the story as it gets discussed into existence. (Whether or not it is ever written down.)
Rather a disorganized set of thoughts, but I'm cold...
I see fanfic as being something that has shown up again and again throughout history. When Perrault took the stories he'd probably heard since childhood and rewrote them and gussied them up for the French court he was writing fanfic. The Grimms and Asbjornsen and Moe were more honest collectors, but even they mucked with the material. When the many translators of the Swiss Family Robinson added pirate attacks and other adventures and even wrote sequels they were writing fanfic. Lancelot is a Gary Stu, you know. He's got all the characteristics of one, and can't you just see some French balladeer deciding to spice up the stories he'd picked up when he visited England with a little local interest? (After spending hours and hours as a teenager pretending to be a knight, of course!) And of course all those pastiches and scholarly articles on Sherlock Holmes are fannish.
Not having spent a lot of time in academia since I got my degree, I have grand theories and no incentive to verify or disprove them, so I may as well expound up on my grand theory of "the life of the mind". You see, people have big brains – big enough to recognize thousands of plants and know what they're good for, big enough to categorize animals and weather and what all – and as people got more and more efficient at having food and shelter enough, those big brains kept on looking around for something to do besides sleep. Hence the invention of language and from there the invention of hobbies. And most hobbies revolve around one of three kinds of activity. Playing with the toys, playing with the people and playing with the words. And it's the last two which color fanfic.
Playing with the toys is manual/physical craftsmanship – the fine art of chipping flint until you've made an axe that is more than just sharp, but also a pleasure to hold and to see. Storytelling and gamesmanship enter into it too, quite often, but that kind of craftsmanship retains a stronger hold to the "practical" origins of hobbies than the other two. Music is, if you think about it, a kind of physical craftsmanship.
Playing with the words includes finding new words, and categories, and ways of combining them. And as language evolved to the point where there were adjectives and adverbs yet another kind of wordplay was coming into use. Once people began to tell other people how to get to the place where the berry bushes are language has included narrative. And ever since a small sticky three year old looked up at its mother and solemnly insisted that a bear came and ate the fruit that had been gathered to save for daddy there have been Stories and storytellers, and ever since daddy came back from the hunt with plenty of meat and a good mood there have been storylisteners willing to egg the tellers into adding details to the narrative. Someone quickly discovered that it was easier to remember a story than a list of instructions and soon parents turned stories into ways to teach children (and each other) things about the world, but still, there must have always been stories that didn't quite jibe with the "real" world.
Playing with people, cooperatively or competitively, gives us Games. Games are different from other activities because they are organized around arbitrary rules. The first games probably were played by children in imitation of their elders, and the "rules" of the game were imitations of the "rules" of daily life. The first games came from the tasks of life – like throwing rocks at animals. Somewhere, some time, someone was practicing their aim and another kid came up alongside and the competition began. And ever since some small child said "I'll be the Mommy and you'll be the Daddy" there have been games which include a narrative as part of the game – imaginative play, if you will.
All three kinds of hobbies constitute the elements of the life of the mind, and since we have big brains that like to be busy, most of us have a pretty active life.
What has all that to do with fanfic? Well, you see none of the three areas are "pure" -- they all overlap, and I think that fanfiction, like imaginitive play, lies in the country between story and game, with just a touch of that urge to decorate or improve an object which ostensibly is already complete. Because it is story it needs an audience, and because it is game, the audience is also part of the storytelling -- in fact, the line between storyteller and audience becomes blurred, because the people who were audience are the ones who desire to embellish or enhance the original text.
Silly yes, but seeing the connection between fanfiction and imaginitive play explains part of the reason why so many writers begin with Mary Sue. Very small children become Superman or Batman or a Power Ranger as they play, but when we grow a little older we recognize our limitations and become willing to settle on meeting the people in our imaginations. (And of course, having recognized our limitations, we take our avatars and add a few shiny details to make them acceptable to those extraordinary characters. Rather like putting on makeup before going to stand in an autograph line even though your lipstick spends most of its life deserted in the bottom of a drawer.) It's a rare person who begins to tell stories about established characters without inserting themselves into the story.
Roleplay gaming approaches the same territory from a different direction, and somewhere between the two is what I call "storytalking" where two or more people take on the roles of some of the characters in the story as it gets discussed into existence. (Whether or not it is ever written down.)
Rather a disorganized set of thoughts, but I'm cold...
