Authorial Responsibilities (WAS: Nimbus question)

[ssk7882 <skelkins@attbi.com>]

Carole (a belated happy birthday, Carole!) proposed a very 
interesting question as a possible Nimbus panel topic.  David 
attempted to summarize/phrase it as:

> How about: Do authors have a responsibility to their readers, or 
> only their art? Do fanfic authors have a responsibility to the 
> integrity of the world that they are borrowing? Explain.

I think these are great questions for a panel discussion!  For
that matter, I think they are great questions for an OTC 
discussion. ;-)

I believe that authors, just like everyone else, have a primary 
responsibility to their own sense of what is *right,* and that 
this applies equally to their aesthetic decisions as it does to 
all of the other decisions that they make in life.

Does the author have a "responsibility" to the reader?  Well, 
precisely who *is* "the reader" in this sentence?  Is "the 
reader" a member of the work's intended or anticipated audience?  
Is "the reader" a member of the author's previously-established 
fan base?  Does "the reader" refer to any random person who might
happen upon the work and read it?  Or is "the reader" meant as a 
representative of the *entire* set of potential readers: in other 
words, is "the reader" Everyman?

I absolutely do not believe that authors have a responsibility 
to write for the broadest possible audience.  When people make 
the conscious attempt to use this strategem, we have a rather 
unpleasant name for that.  We call it "pandering," and it actually
hardly ever works.  Most popular authors truly aren't pandering; 
for the most part, they come by their popularity honestly.  I 
don't think that we would have very much at all in the way of 
enjoyable fiction if authors regularly operated under the assumption 
that their goal should be to strive to reach the widest of all 
conceivable audiences.

As for the author's responsibility to *her* readers -- that 
is, to the people who have already been established as her 
audience -- again, I don't believe that it exists.  I don't
see any reason why authors should feel the need to chain
themselves to a single style or approach or subject matter 
for their entire lives merely because many people happen
to enjoy it.  Surely authors ought to feel free to experiment 
with as many different styles and approaches as they wish, even 
if all of them may not prove popular with the same (or any!)
audiences?

When it comes right down to it, I actually think it rather 
cheeky for readers to try to dictate the content or direction 
of an author's work -- particularly when the work in question 
is an amateur work of fiction for which the author is not even 
getting *paid.*

To be brutally crass here, if you are *commissioning* a work 
of writing, then I believe you can make a case for your "right" 
to dictate its content or style.  Publishers do get to dictate.  
That is because they are the ones holding the purse strings.  
Professional writers understand this, and people who write for 
a living learn how to go about writing to spec.  When they do this, 
though, they generally do expect to get *paid.*  Few people relish 
the idea of writing to someone else's specifications unless there's
going to be a check in the mail.

To my mind, readers who are receiving the works that they consume 
for *free* really don't have much case for claiming that they
ought to get to dictate the content or style of those works.  What 
those readers can do to express their distaste for a writer's work 
is to vote with their feet: if you don't like it, don't read it.  
The consequence for adopting a style which alienates readers is a 
reduced audience.  The extent to which the author cares about this, 
however, is largely dependent on what the author hoped to achieve by 
writing the piece in the first place.  Not everyone is dominated by 
the desire for popularity, and since people don't make any money off 
of fanfiction anyway, one of the major incentives to cater to popular 
tastes is absent.  The amateur writer is liberated from the pressures 
of the marketplace -- which for many people is actually amateurism's 
greatest appeal.
 
Then there is the question of social responsibility, which I
believe may have been one of the things that Carole was trying 
to get at here:  

> But just because we have the right to write whatever pair that 
> challenges us, should we? 

Do authors have a responsibility to endeavor not to write works 
that promulgate values they themselves would not personally 
endorse? 

I do feel that ethical individuals probably ought at least try 
not to promulgate values in their writing that they do not 
themselves endorse.  However, there is a very big difference 
between what the author is actually "promulgating" and what 
any given reader might interpret the text to be promulgating.  

I do not, for example, believe that it makes much sense to ascribe 
the attitudes of fictional characters to their authors, or to assume 
that just because an action takes place in a story, therefore the 
author must be condoning it as practice, or to denounce a piece of 
humorous sickfic because of the possibility that some mentally 
deranged reader might actually take it seriously and consequently 
go out and commit horrific acts.  Honestly, the responsibility of 
the author only goes so far -- and it should always be kept in 
mind, I think, that aesthetic values are *also* values.  From
the point of view of someone who loves the art of fiction, a 
writer who sacrifices too many literary considerations on the 
altar of inoffensiveness *is* guilty of promulgating poor values. 

I also think that when it comes to fanfiction, the entire question 
of social responsibility is considerably less pressing than it
is for many other types of expression.  After all, fanfiction is 
hardly the mass media, is it?  It isn't anything like television, 
or billboards, or the music playing over the loudspeakers in the 
only supermarket in town.  It is not in any sense *inescapable.*  
It does not pervade our culture, and no one is exposed to it against 
their will.

As for David's second question:

> Do fanfic authors have a responsibility to the integrity of the 
> world that they are borrowing? Explain.

I don't believe that they do, unless they *themselves* believe
that retaining the canonical integrity of the world is a
necessary feature of the fic's intrinsic value.  Then I'd say
that they owe it to themselves to uphold their own aesthetic
values.  Do they owe it to the reader, though?  Or to JKR?

Not in my opinion, no.  

When it comes right down to it, as Gwen pointed out, a work
of fanfiction is *never* going to reflect an interpretation 
of the fictive world identical to that of the canonical 
author.  How could it?  Different authors are different 
people; different people think in different ways.  For me,
in fact, that's the very appeal of fanfiction.  When I read
fanfic, I really don't *want* it to be just like reading JKR.  
I want it to be something else.  Something different.

But of course, different people have very different preferences
here.  Some people do turn to fanfiction in the hopes of finding 
something as close to JKR's works as they can get.  That's fine.  
It's just not what I myself happen to be looking for in it. 

Carole expressed some concern for the feelings of the original
author:

> I know how I'd feel if someone else writes about my original 
> character. I'd be worried that they wouldn't get them right. 

I argue this point frequently with a RL friend who is extremely 
strident in his opposition to the entire idea of "creators' 
rights."  He feels that authors ought to have *no* rights over
the worlds or the characters that they have created.  

I just can't agree with that myself, and I always find myself 
wondering, whenever we have this argument (which is often), just 
to what extent our respective positions in the debate might be 
informed by the fact that I write fiction, while he does not.  

Personally, I think that the best place to draw the line is 
probably, yes, *money.*  Making a profit.  That seems to me 
an appropriate line.  It's a bit frustrating for the fans, 
because it means that a work that might otherwise find a market 
and prove quite popular -- a compilation of fanfic stories, for 
example -- cannot be legally published without the sanction of 
the original author.  It's also a bit frustrating for an original 
author who just plain hates the idea of her characters and settings 
being played with by others.  So both parties are inconvenienced: 
the fanfic authors financially and in terms of widespread publicity
(although the internet is changing that), and the author on the 
emotional level.  Both parties also, however, have options open to 
them to get around the inconvenience.  The fanfic author can "file 
off the serial numbers" and seek publication.  The canon author can 
simply avoid the fanfic and try hard to pretend that it doesn't 
exist.  ;-)  I think it's a reasonably fair solution to the dilemma.

But of course, that's a rather legalistic way of looking at
it, I suppose.  Here, Carole seems to be taking a more personal,
or emotional, approach: 

> How much more so would JKR be appalled by some of the writings? 
> How much more would she be delighted by some of our astute 
> detection of her characters more subtle definitions?

Well, authors vary a great deal on this issue.  Some published 
authors think that fanfic based on their works is the coolest thing 
since sliced bread.  Others throw hissy fits about it.  Many fall 
somewhere between those two extremes.  From her interview statements 
on the subject, I rather get the impression that JKR's a "fall 
between" sort of author. 

A number of years ago, I wrote a serialized, "just for fun" bit 
of fiction that proved popular enough that a few people started
writing spin-offs of it.  I suppose that it was a kind of "fanfic," 
although since my original material was not published, the issues 
were somewhat different.

I had a blast reading it, myself.  But yeah, it did sometimes bug me 
a little when people had my characters behaving OOC, especially when 
they only did so in *little* ways -- in other words, it bothered me 
a lot more somehow when people actually *were* getting them more or 
less "right."  I usually enjoyed reading the totally "non-canonical" 
fics a lot more than the ones written by people who seemed to be 
trying to write the characters and the world very much as they 
thought that I would.  

But really, who cares what I think?  At the time, I just kept my big
yap shut about it.  In fact, I scrupulously avoided ever giving my 
opinion on any of that fiction, because I felt that it would be a bit
unfair for me to do so.  I wanted people to feel free to write 
whatever they liked without stressing too much about my personal
opinion.

So I guess that's pretty much how I feel about the extent to which 
people should worry about what JKR might think about fanfic as well.  
I don't think that they should worry about it at all.  Callous?  Yes, 
perhaps, a little.  But there you go.


Carole:

> And how does some of the more bizarre and strange pairings make the 
> fandom look in the eyes of the rest of the public? If the more 
> bizarre pairings get the public eye, does that tarnish the whole
> adult fandom as decadent?

Oh, dear.  Well, I'm afraid that I think that adult fandoms of this 
sort are probably always doomed to be viewed as decadent -- or at the 
very least as weird and "geeky" -- in the eyes of the rest of the 
public, and honestly, I don't think that the precise nature of the 
fanfic that such fandoms produce is likely to have much effect on that
phenomenon.  It's hard for me to worry too much about it, though, as 
nearly everything about my life is considered strange and 
disreputable by the majority of the population anyway.  I'm so 
accustomed to that that I've stopped even noticing.

If it's any consolation, though, I'd say that the HP fandom still 
holds a significantly higher social rank than many others, largely by 
virtue of being based on a massively popular work of relatively 
mainstream fiction (yes, it's fantasy, but it's also classified as 
children's fantasy, which is socially acceptable in a way that adult 
fantasy is not), rather than on something more fringe-ish or trapped 
in one of the less reputable ghetto genres.  I think that these 
factors probably have more influence over the fandom's rep than the 
shipping practices do.



Elkins