Game of Thrones: GRRM, Fan Fiction, and the Pearls of Irritated Oysters

Since winter is over and interest is waning, I decided this will be my grand finale Game of Thrones piece for now. The other installments can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I still have a few pieces left I’d like to do — in fact, the ones I’m looking forward to the most! – but maybe we’ll hit those over the course of time instead. Never let it be said that I can’t take a hint, eventually, if enough people stand next to me and scream it in my ear.

“Irritated fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.”

Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fan Fiction is Taking Over the World

What is the appeal of writing, anyway? Why do people do it? Why is it that I wake up in the morning perky as hell, just itching to put my fingers to the keyboard, while others roll over and hit snooze instead?

Once upon a time, Will Truman and I got to talking about this subject, musing upon why it is that any of us are here on Ordinary Times.com to begin with. Obviously, it isn’t money, it’s love, love of setting down words onto blank pages that drives us. The truth is, I love writing more than I love just about anything, and some days even motherhood pales in comparison.

That’s why I write. Love.

My friend, horror writer David Dubrow, says that a lot of us out here in Internetsville are writing for dopamine. He’s right about that. He also says that the preponderance of people writing from love and not money is screwing it up for the writers who want to write for a living. He intimated, because he’s too nice a guy to say it outright, that if I want to make money at writing, and I do, someday, I admit it, that I shouldn’t give away the milk for free. He’s right, I know that he’s right, yet I find the prospect of a world in which I wasn’t laying down words and shoving them in front of people’s eyes to be a pretty empty one.

Over the course of this project I’ve talked a lot about David Benioff and DB Weiss, who wrote the Game of Thrones TV program, and then epically failed to stick the ending. In my opinion, Benioff and Weiss stole a fantastic opportunity away from other, much more capable writers who could have done a far better job with the property. D + D wrested far better opportunities away from other writers than I have with my bargain-priced scribbles, that’s for sure.

But in my closing salvo here I think it’s time I talk about the man himself – GRRM. And I want to write about him against that backdrop of love and economics because they both matter to what I am about to say.

George RR Martin may write too much, he may write too slowly, he may write the wrong things. But in my eyes, he has done but one unforgivable thing, and that unforgivable thing is dissing fan fiction.

That’s probably not what you thought I was going to say. I mean, fanfic, that’s for weirdos and freakazoids, right? Or as Birth, Movies, Death writer Devin Faraci puts it, “…people who write about Harry Potter putting his wand in Draco Malfoy’s butthole”.

As someone who largely eschews sex scenes in my own work, I don’t pretend to understand that inclination either, and even find it downright icky where underaged actors are involved. But you know what, I don’t understand a LOT of things people do, and likewise I’m sure. My mother-in-law collects dolls, and I don’t get that at all. People watch Lifetime Movies and go on cruises and join fantasy football leagues, and those things hold zero appeal for me. Yet I can understand – because I have empathy for my fellow passengers on this planet hurtling through the universe – that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to understand. If you are a wand-in-butthole fan, follow your bliss.

Thus I find it unfortunate in the extreme that GRRM takes the low hanging, if incredibly common, fruit of sexually explicit fanfic and holds that against the very CONCEPT of fan fiction itself. I mean, dude, srsly, that ain’t even logical. That’s like holding the existence of porn against the inclusion of photos in magazines. “Nu-uh, you can’t do this thing because some other people did it perversely!!” Fun fact, it is possible to both dislike porn and be ok with Good Housekeeping magazine. It’s even possible to dislike some types of porn and like others – you know, the classy stuff shot by Europeans that they show in arthouses.

Hating an entire category of stuff because you feel some people involved with it crossed boundaries, they shouldn’t have crossed is kinda how zealots think, isn’t it?

X-Rated fan fic aside, according to George, fan fic is bad for other reasons as well. In the past, GRRM has referenced Diana Gabaldon’s infamous fanfic rant, which was scrubbed from the Internet but preserved by a few quick-thinking individuals, so I’ll use that as my rebuttal guideline here. Please note, Gabaldon deleted this post, and may no longer hold these sets of opinions herself, but because GRRM has referenced her viewpoint as aligning with his own on multiple occasions, it’s still worthy of consideration.

The three main objections to fanfic appear to center around claims that fan fiction is stealing, that it’s gross, and that it’s lazy. (While there are subheadings within those categories, they seem like different ways to say the same three things over again).

Is fanfic STEALING?

Is writing fan fiction, as Diana Gabaldon claimed, like breaking into someone’s house and growing marijuana in the backyard?

I don’t think it is. As it so happens, I happen to work on a fertility website upon which I created some eBooks and some posts that are behind a paywall. These things are regularly stolen from me, repackaged, and sold by others, so my opinion is not at all uninformed. Unlike GRRM who sold out spectacularly enough so that there are dire wolves slapped onto everything under the sun, I don’t make that much money off my writing, but I make enough to buy myself teal eye makeup and secondhand books.

Yet I literally, truly, honestly, don’t give two figs that people steal and repackage this information. I don’t care because I want as many people to have the babies they are hoping for and I think I have a good way for them to do that. Occasionally I get annoyed when people misrepresent my information ~in ways that are harmful~ and claim it’s the same thing. But then again, we’re talking about actual human bodies who can be actually harmed by such misinformation and not the exploits of chicks who ride on dragons, so the stakes are a bit higher.

I find it bizarre that people who are multimillionaires are so jealous of their “intellectual property hurr de durr” aka circles of Druidic stones and ice zombies, that they’re shaking their fists at the sky over Tinkerbell7452, who is fourteen and lonesome and brimming over with creative potential, who sees characters she likes and wants to see have some adventure that is meaningful to her personally, who makes no money off of it and only gets a little dopamine rush when her circle of friends reads it. I find that bizarre, and greedy as hell. The way I see it, it’s a big ol’ world and there’s room in it for all of us, and maybe if you already have a ginormous piece of the pie, it’s ok to let another person take a nibble of it, especially when that nibble is born from love.

In support of the fanfic = stealing concept, GRRM trots out some sort of cautionary tale regarding HP Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs and claims that Lovecraft died in poverty because of fanfic, which is the biggest stretch since Reed Richards wanted the TV remote. Lovecraft preferred writing to having a job (who doesn’t?), which is generally a lot more predictive of people who die in poverty than fanfic of their work existing. And by the way, I checked my records, and it turns out that Edgar Allen Poe died in poverty too, and fanfic hadn’t even been INVENTED yet! Check and mate!

It’s so depressing to see otherwise insightful people bend their brains into pretzels to defend stupid ideas. Moving on…

Is fanfic GROSS?

The answer to this is (as you may have already surmised given The Potter-Malfoy Wand Incident) yes. There is a vast sea of absolutely horrifying fanfic, containing things that shock even me, the irrepressible and outrageous atomic. So much gross sexual fanfic is available on the Internet that the good stuff is like bits of flotsam and jetsam bobbing along upon it. But you know, something that occurs to me as I sit here a-typing this morning is that surely it’s better to get one’s jollies off of fake people than real ones, and a worldview that tolerates pornography in which actual people are actually exploited while swooning over sexually explicit fanfic doesn’t make a real whole lot of sense to me.

Are ya coming out against porn any time soon, GRRM/Gabaldon? Didn’t think so. Because porn affects people who aren’t you.

I can fully, fully understand not wanting to read explicit fanfic involving your characters (let alone for the legal concerns, which are ample, but boring, so I won’t get into them here). I too would find that enormously upsetting, because as any writer knows, you become quite attached to your characters, and in many ways each of them is truly a part of you, reflecting some part of your psyche or another. But to criticize the VERY IDEA of fanfic as a whole because you don’t like reading things “like that” is akin to demanding the whole world be sanitized for your protection. You may as well ask women to wear burqas to protect men’s eyes from their hotness.

If you want to live in a world in which some of us make up things in our heads, and share them with other people so they can pretend right alongside us in exchange for money, you have to accept the possibility that other people will also make up things in their heads, and you may not like those things. Freedom, she’s a bitch.

Honestly, it’s a pretty bonkers notion for a person who lives by imagining scenarios – and in both GRRM and Gabaldon’s case, some pretty explicit and disturbing scenarios – to look down their nose at anyone else doing the same thing, especially given that writers INVITE people into their imaginations to share in the big game of pretend. So.

Is fanfic LAZY?

This is where I really, really start to get irate with highly successful writers who have assigned themselves to the Anti-Fan Fictioners Brigade, and so I shall activate my Powers of Rant. You’ve been warned.

The utter arrogance and entitlement of a person who ADMITS that they themselves wrote things that could be deemed “fanfic” in their youth but it was different when they did it because Reasons, and went on to write a show called “Beauty and the Beast” (which, last time I checked, was totally a Thing Beforehand) telling anyone who does the same thing that they are “lazy” is just about mind-boggling to me.

No, writing fan fiction does not make one a bad or a lazy writer. The vast majority of jobs a working writer takes involve riffing on other people’s work, whether it’s writing scripts for ongoing series, writing adaptations – they give out both Oscars and Emmys for adapting already-existing books for the screen, doctoring scripts, continuing multi-writer series like comics/graphic novels, and editing. That’s right, even just editing requires the ability to deeply understand another writer’s work, to figure out its essence, to distill and rearrange that essence as needed (EVERY writer should be so lucky as to have an editor who actually understands their work!)

Fan fiction hones all those skills exquisitely. The ability to look into a work of fiction, to comprehend what is there, what needs to be there but isn’t, and what shouldn’t be there but is, is a mandatory skillset for a writer to possess. To produce new content taking it all into consideration is a fantastic ability for a would-be writer to have – and indeed, if you expect to write for a living, a totally necessary one.

To put it another way, most people aren’t Beethoven, but there are a hell of a lot of musicians that make their living playing Beethoven. No one, but no one, tells them “what you REALLY should do is go home and write your own symphony, champ.” Because everyone is aware that most musicians are not gonna write a symphony and even if they did it would never be a Beethoven symphony. Just like most people working as “writers” are not going to be the ones writing a multi-volume series with a cast of thousands like GRRM. This doesn’t mean that the guy playing the oboe in the Boston Pops is a talentless douche because he did not come up with the DUN DUN DUN DUHHHHNNN. He’s still a musician at the very top of his game and all those hours he spent at home as a teenager playing along with “Smoke on the Water” on his oboe undoubtedly helped him improve his skills.

To be a working writer, just like being a working musician, you shouldn’t prepare for being a prima donna, because as of yet no one has found fame and fortune being a star oboist. But a whole lot of people have made a living that way.

When I took creative writing in high school at the pinnacle of the hippie dippie “celebrate creativity” movement, there was a line in my textbook that went something like this: “If your hero has a sword of strawberry Jello, then you’re really onto something!” My teacher kindly explained that was bullshit. It was bullshit then and it’s even more bullshit now that the competition for jobs in writing is increasingly cutthroat. Because creativity rarely happens outside of some relatively narrow parameters, and thus learning to create inside a set of parameters is of critical import.

Truth, there are a hell of a lot more people working as writers doing this sort of professional “fan fiction” than writing original series. What GRRM, Gabaldon, and their fanfic hating ilk are saying is basically the equivalent of saying “well, if you can’t be Babe Ruth, you shouldn’t even bother, now go back and practice till you become Babe Ruth”, even though they know darn well the world doesn’t need but a few Babe Ruths (or is it Babes Ruth?) The world does need a lot of outfielders and coaches and managers and sports therapists and batboys and concessionaires and groundskeepers and even dudes that clean the urinals at the ballpark. The game needs all of those people, Babe Ruth cannot exist without each and every one of them, and telling people that the key to success is to swing the bat till you suddenly become Babe Ruth is as big a pile of crap as a sword of strawberry Jell-o or dreaming of a star making oboe solo and the cover of a Rolling Stone.

Most ballplayers are not Babe Ruth. And most writers – even most successful writers – never get the chance to create their own series, or even to write a single solitary book. This is ok and does not mean everyone who isn’t Babe Ruth is a big fat failure even if Babe Ruth secretly thinks that they are.

Gabaldon particularly pisses me off in this regard because she a) wrote for Disney writing comic scripts and should know this, b) she based her main character on a companion in Doctor Who and c) most importantly, she basically cribbed her entire setup from a book called The Flight of the Heron written in 1925.

Supposedly the latter is unevil and unlazy of Diana because it’s “in the public domain” while anyone doing that to HER work is evil and lazy because it was written more recently. Arbitrary distinction much? Again, if you have to turn your brain into a pretzel to defend your position, your position is indefensible.

But wait, Martin also particularly pisses me off in this regard because not only did he admittedly write fan fic as a youth and made his name writing scripts, but his whole schtick in Game of Thrones is deconstructing other people’s fantasy/fairy tale tropes. Like, for instance, if you take some characters created by Gaston Leroux/Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and change their names from the Phantom of the Opera/Beast and Christine Daae/Beauty to the Hound and Sansa Stark, but keep the dynamics otherwise the same, you’re basically doing that same exact thing you attribute to others as “laziness”.

And I don’t say this because I think either Martin or Gabaldon are wrong to have spring boarded off of other authors. I am merely pointing out how messy this starts to get. All writers use inspirations from other writers. All writers build on the backs of those that came before. If it’s ok for you, famous multimillionaires, then it has to be ok for others, including Tinkerbell7452! Being able to take a character another person has created, or elements of that character, and tell another story with those attributes is part and parcel of becoming a writer.

Everything you write makes you better, and writers absolutely learn skills from fanfic – including some you don’t learn from writing your own story, where you have complete creative control over everything. Plus writing your own unique world takes way longer and is far more daunting to a noob, who is still learning the fundamentals of sentence structure and character voice and writing believable dialogue. Are you seriously, seriously suggesting a novice writer should crap out a family tree for a whole nation from the jump? Talk about setting up a person to fail!

It’s a real advantage to learning anything to start off not having to worry about the hardest part, so you can concentrate on the basics. Writing fanfic is like training wheels on a bike, or more accurately because training wheels don’t actually work, giving a child a small bike on a flat surface rather than just plunking them on a ten-speed and pushing them down a big hill.

I find it elitist in the extreme for writers who have had the type of success that 99.99% of writers who have ever lived can only dream of to turn up their nose at a bunch of people who just super enjoy writing and want to start somewhere with it that feels safe and familiar. Why can’t a fledgling writer pedal around a little in an empty parking lot before they have to ride cross town in hilly, crowded San Francisco?

It’s so ridiculously elitist, especially all the while pretending it is for these new writers’ own good. I’d go so far as to call it borderline immoral, telling a bunch of people who are never gonna be Babe Ruth, even if they all WERE capable of it, which they aren’t, to keep swinging away. Because the world just doesn’t NEED that many Babe Ruths, and some of us could have had a career in the minors if only we’d honed the proper skills.

As for Diane Gabaldon’s suggestion that people “just write your fan fic but change the guy’s name from Jamie Fraser to Joe Karastopolous”, would someone just hand Reed Richards the remote already? Because that stretch is HUUUGGE!!

Here’s why – people who have the luxury of sitting around all day writing (and for all my bitching about not having enough time, I am fortunate to mostly count myself among them) have no business telling writers who write for love and have to work or go to school or raise a family too, that they “shouldn’t take shortcuts.” I’ll tell you what, writing a fanfic and then just changing a name is a massive flipping shortcut, Diana, and what’s more, it’s pretty much impossible.

Some readers may recall that I wrote a Supernatural fanfic, because I had tired of watching the show and wanted a conclusion to it that I was satisfied with. My son and I had a good idea for the ending, an idea via which I could accomplish my longtime dream of writing a highly powered female character who was not a Mary Sue to prove it could be done. Once I had it in my head, it just wouldn’t leave me alone till I wrote it. As I was writing it, I started to realize I was onto something. So, onto something I was, that I decided to change it to my own story because it was coming out so well I thought it might be marketable.

And you know what? It sucked. It sucked like Fifty Shades of Grey (which was also a fan fic in which the names were changed to protect the innocent…AND THE GUILTY) sucked. It sucked because it was obvs still a Supernatural fan fic, still had the same interpersonal dynamics, and the work involved in completely changing it over to become something else would have taken me so bloody long it wasn’t worth it for something that in all likelihood still would have sucked. All the gut-wrenching nuance of the piece built up by a tv show that had lasted ten long years would have been lost, and I love me some gut-wrenching nuance.

I learned something that day. Building a world and a set of characters with intricate backstories and intense interpersonal angst takes time, massive amounts of time. It also takes a level of skill that a new writer may not yet have acquired – skill that could be acquired writing fanfic, where someone else has already done the heavy lifting of worldbuilding and character development for you. Diana Gabaldon and GRRM have simply got to know how hard it is, and how lacking anything would be if you just wrote a fanfic and slapped a different name on it.

It’s dismissive, even downright insulting of Gabaldon to tell anyone to do that, particularly under the guise of claiming to want people to become better writers. That is not the act of a kindhearted person who wants to encourage other writers to be better, it’s the act of a spoiled brat who wants people to stop playing with her toys. Which brings me to my final point.

WHY do these people HATE fanfic REALLY?

Remember how I started off this story with an anecdote about the economics of writing? Well, it’s that. Both Diana Gabaldon and George RR Martin came of age in a place and time in which they were basically spoiled for choice. Baby Boomer authors, with a world of opportunity laying at their feet, opportunity that does not exist for writers in 2021. Those who want to write in the here and now have to contend not only with the old guard who refuse to die, not only with the corporatization of the publishing industry, not only with the books being churned out by “Robert Ludlum” from beyond the freakin grave, but also the myriad Chrissy Teigens of the world who get book deals because their relatives are famous, and the massive numbers of people who publish free or very low cost books online – including people like me, writing for teal eyeshadow and dopamine hits.

Forget a needle in a haystack, gang, writing in 2021 is like finding a needle in a needlestack – both tedious and poky.

It’s hard as hell for a writer to find their readers and it’s harder still to get a shot at being picked up by a legit publisher. Publishers would rather take a chance on a known quantity like Chrissy Teigen than give a talented nobody a chance. It’s just the way the economics work, sadly.

George RR Martin and Diana Gabaldon probably think…as people tend to do…that they’re where they are today because they’re better than other writers and they worked harder. But speaking as someone who’s seen a lot of pretty darn good writing come out of authors whose day job is being an immigration lawyer, an astrophysicist, or a mom, they’re incorrect. They’re where they are because they had some talent, but a larger amount of time and luck. There are many people in this big ol’ world who can spin a yarn and string some words together, and some of them, if only they had the goddamn time without having to stop in the middle to scrub toilets and write WWII newsletters, who could actually succeed at it, but will never get the chance.

The fatal conceit underlying GRRM hating fan fiction is this: he thinks professional writers are by definition better than amateurs. Sure, some professionals are better than some amateurs. But surely logic dictates that some amateurs, in this world of 8 billion people, that some folks out here in Everydayland where we have other jobs and other obligations that kept us from becoming full time writers, are better than some professionals, because some (by which I mean many) professional writers are hacks, you know it and I know it. You’re living under a damn rock if you think the average successful professional writer is knocking it out of the ballpark like Babe Ruth these days, and yet the powers-that-be refused to call any of us up from the minors, not even to replace the entirely-dead Robert Ludlum.

I don’t think either GRRM or Diana Gabaldon is living under a rock. I think they know damn well it’s hard out here for writers, and maybe it’s as simple an explanation as they don’t want anyone out here doing what they do, only better. (Especially for George who seems to have hit something of a dry spell.) I imagine it’s hard not to see a great fan fiction as a critique, since it’s basically someone finding something lacking in your work that they wish was there. It just makes sense that people making bank from their books might prefer to never take the chance on encountering the talented nobody who can put them to shame.

Because somebody’s going to break through into the industry in a big way one of these days by writing a kick-ass fanfic (No, Fifty Shades of Grey does not count, because it sucked…though you gotta admit it was lucrative – selling more than the Game of Thrones books do). When the conventional avenues to success are closed for repairs, people will find another way, and the tighter the conventional avenues are pinched shut, the higher the likelihood someone will smash through in some other way.

Fanfic Road is wide open and it’s eight lanes across. It’s not a question of if, but when. There’s an army of excellent pro-am writers dumping sacks of dopamine into our mental cars like its nitrous oxide, and we’re headed your way, Georgie Boy. Hate to tell you, you got no Wall to protect you.

Given that reality, I can hardly blame professional writers for wanting to run down fan fictioners, because every one of them is potential competition in an already stiff market. No wonder the big names are out directing traffic back to the approved routes.

The brain bug – it’s afraid!

You know a couple guys who are professional writers? David Benioff and DB Weiss, and we all know how that story ends – badly. They may have gotten paid a lot more than I do, but clearly, they did not know how to utilize and build upon a fictional world created by another person. Once they outstripped the material Good Writer George cranked out for them, they didn’t have the skillz to complete the deal. D + D clearly did not know how to extrapolate a plot to its logical conclusion, how to incorporate a greater theme, how to continue developing a character believably and give them a satisfying end to their arc.

David Benioff and DB Weiss had no idea how to absorb a fictional universe created by another person and make it their own, and then write unique stories within that universe. They did not know how to do that despite that ability being in the job description of both showrunner and screenwriter. They did not know how to manage someone else’s world, how to play in someone else’s sandbox, how to treat another person’s toys with respect, dare I say love. The very idea of loving someone else’s creation is as foreign an idea to Benioff and Weiss as not cramming tits into every possible scene tits can be crammed into.

It’s too bad they never learned those things somewhere. IDK, like by writing fan fiction, maybe.

There’s this old saying in which William Buckley claims he’d rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. And as I look back on Game of Thrones, I realize – George RR Martin is wrong about fan fiction, and the television adaptation of his own life’s work proves it.

Because I would have sooner turned over the TV show to 20 Game of Thrones fan fictioners than David Benioff and DB Weiss.