And now for something completely different:

Greg Braxton, in the LA Times, gives the 10-step formula to the hit TV police procedural:

3. The back-at-headquarters scene

The differences between the investigators must be quickly demonstrated — for instance, the veteran detective with the wife, kids and picket fence working with the rookie who launches into impressions of Popeye the Sailor Man when he makes a breakthrough. The captain must also give his or her team 24 hours to solve the case — in other words, 45 minutes in TV time minus commercials.

4. The eating scene

Early in the investigation, detectives must have some kind of food — preferably a hot dog from a park vendor or something else suitably nonnutritious (save those soy lattes for HBO!) that can be consumed on the run while discussing the case. But not all routine daily functions should be depicted. If a detective says, “Excuse me, I have to hit the head,” he should not be referring to using the restroom.

Lee Goldberg helps out with a few additional points:

1 ) the hero’s obligatory dead wife (an updating of what was “the obligatory estranged wife”).

2) the hero’s or co-star’s struggle with an addiction (gambling, alcoholism, etc.)

3) one lead character eats healthy, the other loves junk food.

4) the irascible boss.

Lee Goldberg has been posting about which authors are officially coming out and saying, Don’t write fan fiction based on my work, punk! So, because I am that sort of person, I went over to Fanfiction.net to see which of those writers had fanfiction posted there.

Well, this was a pointless angle, because I don’t know what Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb’s stuff would be listed under. (Under Robin Hobb? Under the name of her universe or main character? Dunno.)

My winner for the unusual category for fanfiction? Bible.

Now, I’m assuming from the titles and summaries of the stories posted there that it’s probably closer to what’s listed in bookstores as “Christian fiction,” or Left Behind type of stuff. But I gotta say, when I saw it simply listed as “Bible” I cracked up, because I started imagining all these stories about minor prophets written in King Jamesian English, or maybe the true story of what happened to Daniel, or something like that. I’m a bad person; I’m cool with that.

Lee Goldberg is the center of all things fanfic at the moment. He’s virulently anti-fanfic; several posters to his blog on this entry and this entry and this entry and a few others besides (these are just the posts in the past week) give a few impassioned discussions on both sides of the fanfic debate.

Tamara Siler Jones (no permalinks! and she’s moving her blog! augh!) has a nice summary of my feelings on the matter:

No matter how good the reflection, it won’t be real because there are multitudes of aspects to the characters and the world that no one knows but The Author. In my own work, my themes and structures and details are distinctive and no one writes like I do. My authorial voice is mine alone. To try to publish without knowing the layers or having my voice cheapens the experience. It mars the carefully constructed three-dimensional reality and, frankly, it can’t compare.

(Yeah, I know. “You got anything people want to do fanfic about?” Oh, shush.)

The primary argument against fanfic is that it’s stealing. A creator came up with these characters and this world and the fanfic writer is just stealing it all to create something that may not only be a terrible use of the characters and the world

I know most of the fanfic I’ve seen has a disclaimer as to the effect that such-and-such belongs to the Copyright holder, and the fanfic author is just borrowing it for a little while. I have no idea about how well that disclaimer would hold up in a court of law. Apparently this page discusses the legalities of fanfic, but I find it an ugly page to read and haven’t made it through it all the way. Ahem. Moving on.

A secondary argument against fanfic that not a few people bring up is that it’s godawful. And I gotta say: yeah. The vast majority of is terrible writing. I’ve seen a few people argue that fanfic is a way of learning to write; I would respond, “There are better ways.” Stretching the imagination on your own stuff will teach you far more about how to write than writing about someone else’s world. Because all you can come up with is a reflection of what the original creator came up with, or worse, come up with something completely antithetical to what the creator intended (e.g. Harry Potter does Hogwarts).

I understand the impulse to write and read fanfic—you want to live in this wonderful world as much as you can, and twenty-four hours a year or one book every two years or whatever just isn’t cutting it for you. There are several novel series that I am forever hoping will just happen to have a new installment at the bookstore every time I check. But fanfic is like a steak dinner made out of meringue—might look the real thing, but it’s not really going to fill you up.

That said, some of the anti-fanfic arguments made in the threads at Lee Goldberg’s blog annoy me.

The big one for me is, if using someone else’s characters is absolutely wrong, then what about work such as Wide Sargasso Sea (the story of the mad wife of Rochester from Jane Eyre), or The Seven-Percent Solution (Sherlock Holmes via Nicholas Meyer), or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Tom Stoppard)? It is simply because they’re well-written? I don’t know if Meyer had to get the Doyle estate’s permission to write The Seven-Percent Solution (is Holmes still under copyright? I don’t think so). Is it just because the authors whose characters are used here are dead that it’s a different case? Or is it just because they were written by “real writers” that it’s okay to do?

Nobody’s given a satisfactory answer to that one.

There are also several discussions of what a “real” writer is, and since I’ve suffered several discussions along that line at Wordplay, I won’t get into that other than to say, “Augh!” and “Noooooo!”

Later: It’s 4:30am here in the House of the Rising Fun. I’ve been awake since one of the kids woke me up, around 4. Urg. Anyhow. As I was lying awake, I started thinking about this issue some more.

All of the works cited above are based on much older texts. I can’t judge their popularity at the time they were originally printed, but obviously they’ve come down to us through the ages, whereas so many of their contemporaries have not. Bram Stoker’s creations: still with us; Marie Corelli’s: not so much. Since they’ve lasted so long, they have achieved “mythic resonance.” (I am sure I am not the first person to call it that, and I’m also sure there’s a better term. But you know: 4 am.) Most people who know Hamlet are going to remember the characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even if they don’t remember which one’s which.

However, this mythic resonance only comes after years of, well, surviving. And while Sherlock Holmes might have inspired fanfic at the time the stories were first appearing, the fact that he and his world (Moriarty, Baker Street, etc.) have survived so long and entered the lexicon means that there’s something more there than just current popularity. After a hundred years or whatever, a writer is not going to be swept up in the excitement and passion of a fan’s love for the material; you have time to consider it, to have new takes on it, to use the characters to explore different facets of the world they live in without adding something new to the characters that violates their spirit: Sherlock Holmes abusing cocaine in The Seven Percent Solution, check; Holmes and Watson slash fiction, not so much.

You can’t help but have a perspective and interpretation of works published a century or so ago. A lot’s happened. We’ve found out various things that were happening at the time that many people living in that age weren’t aware of. In seventy or a hundred years time, someone may be able to use Mulder and Scully for an evaluation of both the society that gave rise to them and perhaps a commentary on whatever’s going on in their current society. When the X-Files was first on, though, there’s no perspective or commentary possible, because you’re living at the same time. Chris Carter’s vision is the only interpretation possible at the moment. What you get is fan fiction that just has a lot of boinking.

One of the integral factors in being able to use mythic characters and stories is they’re available to use. Meaning, they’ve passed out of copyright. Work needs to pass out of copyright so that others can build upon it. Either a story and character are going to survive the ravages of time, and therefore be interesting mythic material for a storyteller to work with, or it will have disappeared and no one gives a damn.

Commence the firing squad on length of copyright, I guess. My take on it: Disney’s need for absolute and total hold over all elements of its creation since the start of the company is going to destroy modern copyright. And that’s a bad thing.