There is a fascinating article on Time's website about fanfic, including the history and whys and wherefores. It uses Harry Potter as a hook, but it is not exclusive to that fandom. I enjoyed reading it and thought some of you might as well.

How Harry Potter Became the Boy Who Lived Forever

Really great article. Thanks for sharing that with us.

Yep, a fascinating look at some of the pitfalls (legally speaking) of fanfic, as well as a look at the culture and the sheer diversity of fanfic.

I must say I'm glad that L&C has such a well-curated, well-edited Archive of fanfic. It's a tremendous blessing. The Kerth Awards are great too - when I first got into this fandom, the Kerth Award-winning stories were marked as such. Reading those got me hooked. Then I found the non-Kerth Award stories, many of which were just as good...

A balanced and accurate article. I am impressed. My only criticism is a minor one: The author seemed unduly fixated on the pornographic side of fanfic. (On the one hand, the author did indicate that not all fanfic is pornographic; OTOH, Mr. Grossman spent a disproportionate amount of the article talking about sex-related fanfic.) I guess that even in Time, sex sells.

Joy,
Lynn

Great article. Thank you

I agree - it was a really good article!

Thanks for posting

There's another, really rare aspect that this article didn't touch. In fact, it's so rare that I've only ever heard of it happening once.

There was a fan fiction writer, Melissa Good, who wrote a lot of Xena fan fiction. Robert Tapert, one of the executive producers of the show, contacted her and had her actually write 2 of the Season 6 episodes - Coming Home and Legacy. She was also to write a third episode that never came to be.

Wow, that's great acknowledgement from the producers. I didn't know that had happened.

The only thing I knew - and getting slightly out of topic - was that L&C producers were aware of the fandom and sometimes followed it and tried to (more or less) give the fans what they wanted.

I really, really respect when producers do that.

Thanks for the link. I passed it on to my daughter who wrote HP fanfic and now writes for the doctor. I appreciated the girl who said fanfic was her English teacher. My daughter never cared about spelling or punctuation until her stories kept getting rejected because of poor mechanics. Now she's a stickler.

Happy

Nice article!