I can't agree enough with this essay. I enjoy writing but don't know if I ever want to put in enough effort to do it professionally. So yeah, amateur writing is a good way to put it, and I liked your analogy with amateur theater. Fanfic is kind of like sitting around in your basement and putting on scenes from a play. Yeah, you didn't pay the royalties, but you're not making money either.
The other reason it gets me when writers get all proprietary of their charcters is that literary fanfic is a legitimate genre that makes money as long as the characters are out of copyright--witness the (in my opinion excrable) Pride and Prejudice spin offs, the novels with Shakespeare characters, the novels that retell fairytales or legends.
As soon a writer creates a character and has readers, the character exists in the minds of the readers as well as in the mind of the writer, and the writer has no control after she is done writing over how I view and manipulate the characters in my mind. If a writer is very very skilled and lucky, her characters will out-live her in the minds and pens of others. I think writers should be flattered and thrilled beyond measure if that happens. I know I would be.
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The other reason it gets me when writers get all proprietary of their charcters is that literary fanfic is a legitimate genre that makes money as long as the characters are out of copyright--witness the (in my opinion excrable) Pride and Prejudice spin offs, the novels with Shakespeare characters, the novels that retell fairytales or legends.
As soon a writer creates a character and has readers, the character exists in the minds of the readers as well as in the mind of the writer, and the writer has no control after she is done writing over how I view and manipulate the characters in my mind. If a writer is very very skilled and lucky, her characters will out-live her in the minds and pens of others. I think writers should be flattered and thrilled beyond measure if that happens. I know I would be.