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been reworked in a billion bedtime stories, novels, D&D games, movies, fanfic stories, songs, and legends. 
 
Each person who retold Pygmalion did something both original -- no two tellings are just alike -- and derivative, for there are no new ideas under the sun. Ideas are easy. Execution is hard. That\'s why writers don\'t really get excited when they\'re approached by people with great ideas for novels. We\'ve all got more ideas than we can use -- what we lack is the cohesive whole. 
 
Much fanfic -- the stuff written for personal consumption or for a small social group -- isn\'t bad art. It\'s just not art. It\'s not written to make a contribution to the aesthetic development of humanity. It\'s created to satisfy the deeply human need to play with the stories that constitute our world. There\'s nothing trivial about telling stories with your friends -- even if the stories themselves are trivial. The act of telling stories to one another is practically sacred -- and it\'s unquestionably profound. What\'s more, lots of retellings are art: witness Pat Murphy\'s wonderful There and Back Again (Tolkien) and Geoff Ryman\'s brilliant World Fantasy Award-winning Was (L. Frank Baum). 
 
The question of respect is, perhaps, a little thornier. The dominant mode of criticism in fanfic circles is to compare a work to the canon -- \"Would Spock ever say that, in \'real\' life?\" What\'s more, fanfic writers will sometimes apply this test to works that are of the canon, as in \"Spock never would have said that, and Gene Roddenberry has no business telling me otherwise.\" 
 
This is a curious mix of respect and disrespect. Respect because it\'s hard to imagine a more respectful stance than the one that says that your work is the yardstick against which all other work is to be measured -- what could be more respectful than having your work made into the gold standard? On the other hand, this business of telling writers that they\'ve given their characters the wrong words and deeds can feel obnoxious or insulting. 
 
Writers sometimes speak of their characters running away from them, taking on a life of their own. They say that these characters -- drawn from real people in our lives and mixed up with our own imagination -- are autonomous pieces of themselves. It\'s a short leap from there to mystical nonsense about protecting our notional, fictional children from grubby fans who\'d set them to screwing each other or bowing and scraping before some thinly veiled version of the fanfic writer herself. 
 
There\'s something to the idea of the autonomous character. Big chunks of our wetware are devoted to simulating other people, trying to figure out if we are likely to fight or fondle them. It\'s unsurprising that when you ask your brain to model some other person, it rises to the task. But that\'s exactly what happens to a reader when you hand your book over to him: he simulates your characters in his head, trying to interpret that character\'s actions through his own lens. 
 
Writers can\'t ask readers not to interpret their work. You can\'t enjoy a novel that you haven\'t interpreted -- unless you model the author\'s characters in your head, you can\'t care about what they do and why they do it. And once readers model a character, it\'s only natural that readers will take pleasure in imagining what that character might do offstage, to noodle around with it. This isn\'t disrespect: it\'s active reading. 
 
Our field is incredibly privileged to have such an active fanfic writing practice. Let\'s stop treating them like thieves and start treating them like honored guests at a table that we laid just for them.  
 
$$$$ 
 
Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia 
 
(Self-published, 26 August 2001) 
 
0. ToC: 
 
  * 0. ToC 
     o 0.1 Version History  
  * 1. Introduction 
  * 2. The problems 
     o 2.1 People lie 
     o 2.2 People are lazy 
     o 2.3 People are
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