A Storied Conversation: Derivative Works in the Literary Canon

Transcript

The truth is that all literary works are in dialogue with one another. Conversations evolve through the unique perspectives of various authors. But sometimes, a story is written as an even more direct response to one that came before.

How do derivative works fit into the broader literary conversation, and how might an author incorporate them into their own writing practice?

I'm Mary Brydon-Kehoe, writer and owner of Elixir Editorial. Divine the secrets of the written word together with me in The Laboratory.

I’m joined today by Nowreen Haque who is actually one of my very best friends.

Nowreen has been reading fan fiction since 2004, and thinks they know a thing or two about fan culture and its online history.

They have also penned articles for the podcast, WHAT THE FORCE?, focusing on reviews and fan fiction round-ups, from 2020 to 2021, and worked as a content programmer for Fan Expo. These days they focus on work in art and history education, but they still avidly read fan fiction daily.

Mary: First things first, Nowreen, I'd like to thank you for joining me today.

Nowreen: Glad to be here today.

M: So what does derivative literature actually refer to?

N: So for me, derivative literature is really about things pulling from an existing idea or group of ideas that are universally acknowledged as one.

So for example, we don't think of it as such, but some of the offshoot stories in Greek mythology that we don't see as canon—technically derivative, very culturally specific, like say, there's one mountain range that might have a very specific story about Jupiter, but not everywhere where Jupiter is honored and has temples would that story be there. And that's technically derivative. That's one way of looking at it.

But the way that we would look at it in a pop culture lens would be something more of: same world, same people, same themes in some cases, but being used in a different way, either continuing a story, setting up a story, or just being an offshoot of a story.

M: So you'd say it's different from maybe something like a re-imagining or an adaptation of a work?

N:  No, that would include that as well. Because, for example, the Shakespeare versions of all the Star Wars movies is derivative from Star Wars, but it's also an adaptation. It's taking it, changing it in such a way, highlighting the original work and themes in it, retelling it obviously, but it's still derivative.

Another one would be Les Misérables—I'm butchering that so badly—the musical, but that's derivative work of the Victor Hugo novel. And I'm thinking of all the Pride and Prejudice post-novel novels that are actually published and try to take the story and reimagine it from a different perspective.

M: One that I was thinking of was Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. I've mentioned it before, I think  in blog posts, but Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea is actually a prequel to Jane Eyre. It's a post-colonial critique of the handling of Mr. Rochester's first wife as a character and kind of digging into that trope of the “mad woman in the attic.”

N: I mean, like the word “derivative” is so rude.

M: It does sound condescending to me.

N: Because like saying something's derivative—it's like, oh, it's not like the same thing—but unfortunately, that's the term we've got for a lot of these adaptations, reimagining, restructuring of themes, stories, monoliths that exist.

M:  And things like fan fiction fall into that, obviously, yeah. Big portion of that.

N: And it's really interesting, the line between like a fan work and like a remix culture. So like remix culture is just taking something and readapting it and remixing it—which “remix” itself is already like a very—within like pop culture anthropology—is already kind of like a heavy term, so like, I won't use it too much.

But like something that is like a remix culture is, for example, do you remember the posters of Obama during his first run that was “Hope?” By adjusting it, you're making a critique on it. So one of the ones with the original artist—people were remixing that so much that there was a lot of fair use talk. And then so they ended up being like, instead of “Hope,” it said “Fair” and it was a picture of the artist.

M: Oh, interesting.

N: And so that's kind of remix culture because I wouldn't call that a “fan work.”

M: No, no, it's a little bit different, yeah.

N: So remix is kind of taking it, critiquing it, changing it in such a way that we re-examine the original item—which fan work can do—it's just more the purpose of the change is to critique. Whereas in fan work, one of the purposes is to critique, but it's not always going to be critique.

M: Yeah. Sometimes it's more of a celebration maybe.

N: Yes. Or just kind of like a thought experiment or a narrative.

M: Recontextualizing maybe.

N: Oh, another thing I guess you could term into remix culture, but it's also is the grey line of fan work is alternative universes. So if we're thinking like someone's using the exact same character names, the exact same relationships, but they've taken the characters and put them in a coffee shop.

M: Yes.

N: Right? So that's technically—

M: Or they all go to high school together.

N: Or they all go to—yeah, exactly. Things like that. And that is more in line with remix culture where they're taking it and they're changing it, and something about it is fundamentally different and almost a critique on it, but it's still fan work, but it leans so heavily into the remix.

M: There's a book called The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, and it's a reexamination of Vlad Țepeș that kind of blends history with that of Bram Stoker's actual character, Count Dracula. And I think that that ends up being a little bit more of a meta commentary on history and storytelling. It blends genres. The two characters are kind of mixed together a little bit and it's not necessarily a gothic horror the way that the original Dracula novel was, but it kind of remixes those concepts kind of like what you're talking about maybe a little bit.

N: It's still something that people argue about constantly just because it also has different names and remix culture is just the one that comes off the top of my head and I feel like gets the point across the most. But it's very different in terms of the type of derivative literature I think we're going to talk about today.

M: Maybe the big grey elephant in the room, if you want to say—that's—Fifty Shades of Grey is a pretty big one that I think maybe a lot of people would think of when they consider derivative work or fan work and things like that that turn into its own concept after a time. Like it's got its own following now.

N: And I think it's really interesting to see the growth of that.

So there are like pillars, watershed moments in fan fiction that I can think of. And for a really, really long time for me, it was My Immortal, the Harry Potter fan fiction, which you're nodding and you're like, “Oh, I know what you're talking about.” For me, that was a watershed of like both a critique, like, was it a critique? Was it someone in earnest? Like we never know. We don't know. And there's been so much effort in trying to like parse it and like try to find the history of it. And for a really long time, that was what fan fiction culture—like the first thing that would pop into people's mind, right?

And now that has been replaced by published work such as Fifty Shades of Grey. And it's really heartening to see a lot of people who were writing as a hobby or outlet for creativity be encouraged by their community and publish publish, and make it their own and change it enough that like, you know, it becoming a fan work or a remix culture—like the core of what the story was, was there, but the ties to everything that was derivative to it. I would still count it as derivative fiction, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just something that was born out of something else.

M: It became something else after a time.

N: We don't want to say that like any fantasy that followed after Tolkien is derivative Tolkien. It's more like it's the influence, it's the community, the shared love of a genre or a story that like makes it something new.

But like yeah, Fifty Shades of Grey.

M: That is the big one. It does count.

N: Yeah. And the thing is, it's really cool because it really did bring the conversation of derivative fiction to the front. And people were like, “Oh, it's bad BDSM.” And it's like, yeah, have you read fan fiction? Everything under the sun—you'll find it. You'll find great depictions of certain things, you'll find terrible depictions of certain things, you’ll find fade to black of certain things. Like… you'll find everything. And so it's like when they're like, oh, it's bad BDSM. I'm like, “Yes.”

M: That can be characteristic of some types of fan fiction, especially if somebody is sort of first starting out, I think too, that tends to be what we think of. So that begs the question—and I mean, if you don't know, Fifty Shades of Grey was actually a fan fiction work that was based on Twilight and the author, E.L. James had recontextualized it in terms of a BDSM relationship. And in order to promote it as an original work, it was turned into something completely different. The characters’ names and things like that were changed, but we'll get into that in a little bit.

First, I want to draw us back to: how do derivative works actually respond to the works that they are inspired by? What kind of range do you see there?

N: I'm specifically right now going to pull from the Harry Potter and the Star Wars fandoms because they have the largest collection… Eh, and, you know, some of the Naruto. If we're thinking about juggernauts in terms of fandoms with writing—because there's other juggernauts in terms of fan works, like fan art or fan music. Harry Potter is a big one, Naruto was a big one for the animes and then Star Wars is a big one for the sci-fi movie nerds. And so when I think of why people make a derivative work that they do in terms of fan fiction, I think of—there's a lacking sometimes. Sometimes there is a want for more or a knowledge of more and the frustration of not getting it.

Because like in the terms of Harry Potter, a lot of the characters would get sidelined. There wasn't as much diversity. A lot of the rules were fast and loose in terms of what was happening. Because it was from Harry's point of view, there wasn't a lot of effort put into—obviously because of the format—into the inner worlds of like Ron, Hermione, Neville, all of these other characters and people almost use it as an exercise. “Okay, what was Neville's first year at Hogwarts like? What did he go through?” We only see these glimpses of him as a side character, but he's also facing tons of prejudice or remarks from teachers who know about the prophecy that would have been him or Harry, and they look at Harry and they're like, “Oh, you did it.” And then they look at Neville and they're like, “Who is this blumbering idiot with no parents and a grandmother who's kind of weird?”

A lot of it's a lacking, right? Or it's a want to understand a character better from maybe understanding how you yourself would react in a situation like that. People look at the work and they're like, I want more.

And then—the Star Wars fandom—there's so much lore that would still make it richer. And sometimes some of the works that I had read had completely disregarded the fact that Legends was Legends and was like, “We're still using all the rules and we're still using a lot of like—I might reference a ship name here for a different ship, or I might reference a planet or we might go to a planet that existed in the outer canon.” And it's kind of like just making the world fuller and seeing that not represented in the continuation of the media.

And I think it's not really out of frustration, but a want for more. And a lot of the time I would talk with people online and we would kind of be like, “Okay, why didn't they do this? Why didn't they do this? What's the overarching story with this character? Why are they doing these things to them? What's the point?

Like when The Last Jedi came out, there was a lot of discussions about Rose Tico within my group about like, “What is the theme of having her here? How do we wrap it in one movie?” Because when you introduce a character halfway, you kind of want them to be an example point for the characters that already existed previously, and want them to have a full arc. And so a lot of questions were about: What is she representing? Is she representing the continuation of love and community in the face of war on top of the story that war is, you know—only the people who profit from war are the ones who want war kind of things. And so some people wrote a lot on Rose Tico because of those discussions.

M: I just want to pull it back for a second, because I think there was something about canon and Star Wars Legends is a really good example of that, I think, where the canon sort of becomes its own beast after a time. Of course, when Disney took over the Star Wars franchise, they said that all of the Legends stuff wasn't really canon anymore. If people were really attached to that stuff, they'd want it to live on a little bit longer. And I think that's that space that derivative work really does a good job responding to is when the canon is there as sort of a guiding principle for people, but then you have something like fan fiction to kind of close that gap a little bit where it's outside of the canon—it's extra-canon, if you like, based on what the creators are saying or whoever happens to hold the copyright—but that conversation is still happening regardless.

Once you put a work out there, there's no institution guarding it necessarily from people having their own thoughts and opinions on it and then writing about it. It's a sign of success, I think, too, that if you've written something and someone makes derivative work of it—I would see that as a compliment.

N: And I think Legends is very interesting because people—even when I was seeing online discussions between each of the sequel trilogy—people were still hoping that things from Legends were going to appear. When it comes to fan fiction, you can be picky and choosy. And even the stuff that continues on can also be picky and choosy with it because it can pull up the things that enhance the universe but don't tell the universe's story, I think is the really important part when you're talking about non-canon versus headcanon, which is a completely different thing.

Fan fiction is so present in the time that it's written. Because if we're thinking about Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, it's been so long between books that fan fiction that would have been canon compliant, when the next book comes out, it will not be. Because they have to continue the story or they might have something happen to a character or someone might die. And very quickly, once the first author comes forward and is like, “Here's the rest of the story,” everything else becomes non-canon compliant, which are the two major terms.

So when you're looking at fic [fan fiction], one of the tags will be like “canon” or “canon compliant” or “not canon compliant,” which is my favorite because then people can just go off and whatever is canon is just happenstance—that's whatever—but I feel like being canon compliant puts you in such a narrow view.

M: Really ties you to the concepts that originated there.

N: And then at any point you could just suddenly become redundant because a lot of the time fan fiction is serialized. So if I take some of the Marvel TV shows that's come out—what's the one that was Loki? Was it just called Loki?

M: I think so.

N: Yeah. So people were like writing fic as it was airing because it was still episode per week, I think. And so then they'll be like, “I just saw the episode and I don't care for it, so I'm going to continue.” And you just have to be like, “Yeah, I respect that. This is your story. I'm not writing it. I'm here to watch you write it.”

One of my favorite things is stuff that's happened in the past. So one of my favorite views of derivative fiction and fan fiction is Dragon Age. Not a really, really big fandom, but lots and lots of choices. And all of the games have books that are tied in that reflect the past and sometimes it's really hard if you've never read all of those books to suddenly be canon compliant. Or like any of the Elder Scroll—

M: Oh. Huge world.

N: Yeah. And the thing is there's so many of these quote unquote “Dragon Breaks,” where like, “Hey, we've done a Dragon Break. This is a different universe now.” And like, you've seen me play Elder Scrolls Online. It is technically a completely different universe—

M: Oh, from the main—?

N: From the main game.

M: Oh my gosh.

N: And it's kind of like, even within something that is officially quote unquote “canon,” there's still this divide.

M: Yeah. The IP might have its own different sort of paths—divergent paths that are happening.

N: Video games, I think, is a perfect example because every player's play is canon, but every player is going to make different decisions.

M: Mm-hmm. It's a good point.

N: Fan fiction, I feel like is part of the individual story, but overall in terms of like derivative literature, it's ground zero. Everybody starts somewhere.

M: We're looking at derivative fiction—a very particular lens, like fan works and things like that—but there’s also responses that authors have had to other works. Tolkien comes up to mind because he was writing a lot of the time in response to Shakespeare or in response to Arthurian legend and kind of writing his own version of it.

N: Like Gawain and the Green Knight.

M: Yeah, exactly. He was able to kind of incorporate ideas or riff on ideas.

N: I mean, Beren and Lúthien is fan fiction for him and his wife

M: Yes! Self—self-insert fan fiction.

N: It’s self-insert fan fiction into his own universe like…

M: Yeah, yeah.

N: It’s self—it is self-insert fan fiction.

Fan fiction as an exercise—one of the best ones I ever read was a dissection of fan fiction tropes in Tolkien fan fiction. It's called Home with the Fairies by I_Mushi. And I was so moved by the first couple of chapters, I remember messaging them and we ended up exchanging emails and we became pen pals because the author lived in East Asia at the time. And we would be talking about the dissection of tropes in fan fiction.

So Home with the Fairies was a dissection of isekai, essentially. But isekai in the western lens and how it had appeared in a lot of Star Trek and Tolkien fan fiction as “girl randomly thrown into the universe.”

M: Quickly, I don't know if you want to define what isekai is for anybody who hasn't heard?

N: Isekai—I'm using a Japanese term in a Western lens—but it is essentially when somebody is transported through any means—usually by Truck-kun—from one universe—

M: Getting hit by a truck.

N: Yes, Truck-kun. That's his name. Truck-kun.

M: That's a canonical name.

N: You get thrown from one world, usually the modern world, into the world of the IP that you are talking about. So I'm thinking even Guy Gavriel Kay—I didn't know if you knew, is also a graduate of the Celtic Studies program at U of T—and so the book opens actually with all of them going to a Celtic Studies Union conference, but they get transported into this vaguely Celtic society in the past. And that's essentially what isekai is. You know, how we have incorporated the term umami—now we have isekai.

M: Yeah, yeah, isekai is its own thing, yeah.

N: One of my favorite Tolkien fanfics was—I_Mushi—she wrote this dissection where it's like, “Okay, well, what happens if somebody is randomly transported into Lord of the Rings?” It's not going to be as picturesque as a lot of these things. So the main character, Maddie—she gets transported, she had just stepped out to get like some quick groceries and she's in a field. And it's eventually her trying to figure out life, and it isn't until, I want to say, the end of the first arc does she finally realize that she is in Lord of the Rings. And it does actually talk about the class structures and some of the issues a woman who's very foreign would have.

And in seeing that it's like how fan fiction kind of doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists within its community and also what the community is doing and responses to the community and also playing with tropes and doing new things.

And I think we look at tropes and we're like—think of CinemaSins and I think that's over—you know—tropes aren't bad! Tropes are good!

M: Stories are built on tropes, they are the foundation. It's how you do them, how you execute them that can make the difference. And also what the cultural zeitgeist happens to be. If one trope happens to be used more than another, or if certain ones are associated maybe more with fan fiction or—

N: Omegaverse.

M: Yeah, or—

N: Vampires.

M: Oh, vampires, definitely. I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, in romance, you have to stay at a hotel and there's one bed.

N: I mean, and I love that. And I think also bringing up romance is really good because it is a—I don't know how to describe fan fiction other than a form of writing that is inundated with romance.

M: Yes.

N: And that's because there's not a lot of romance that you can buy that's varied and what people are willing to publish for romance might not be exactly the complicated stories that people want to read. 

M: And I think we can't go there without talking about the origins of fan fiction and slash fiction—relationship fiction.

N: Slash fiction is huge because, again, mostly led by women in this case—an area where it's not being served. It's not something published. It's not something that people want to talk about.

M: There's a representation that's lacking too. Because slash fiction originated in telling queer stories where there was lacking queer representation, but there was subtext—with Kirk and Spock.

N: If we're thinking about queer subtext, you know—Sherlock.

M:  Mm-hmm.

N: Sherlock.

M: Big one, big one.

N: Even a long time ago, back when Arthur Conan Doyle was very much like, “Ah, yes, I've written Sherlock, but he's not my favourite. I have other stories. If I shall pass and people will remember only Sherlock, I have failed as a writer,” and oh my God, Arthur, I hope you're rolling in your grave. Just oh, oh…

I think it's interesting too when we think of the older works, like if we're thinking about Star Trek and Tolkien because a lot of writers—

M: I love that those are both “older works”—like that they're in the same group.

N: I'm talking about pre-internet, but I've been talking about fan fiction from that age onward, but if we're talking about fan fiction before that, a lot of the really big name authors who support fan fiction were writers of Tolkien and Star Trek and Star Wars. But if we're thinking about how fan fiction has led to eventual careers—

M: Mm-hmm. Which was a question that I had.

N: I immediately think of Tamora Pierce. She wrote Protector of the Small and Songs of the Lioness. She started writing—as a child—Tolkien and then Star Trek and then Star Wars fan fiction. And that was a lot of what she did because sometimes you just need to write.

M: Yes.

N: If you already love something and you're already really into something, then you might as well just write about that.

M: Well, you have all the ideas at your disposal because I think that when people come across things like writer's block—or maybe an idea block more than writer's block—you can write, but you just need a starting point, you need something to get you going and get you into the practice of writing. Because I think the most prolific fan fiction writers tend to go on to create their own material.

N: Yeah, a lot of them like Naomi Novik—the Temeraire series speaks for itself. It's such a beautiful product of the ideas and that playing with tropes because it's an alternate universe historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars, but in a version of Earth that always had dragons—and dragons are their own unique culture and their own political entity. And you would love it—oh my gosh. And I feel that it's such a unique story and I don't think we would have gotten such a beautiful story had Naomi Novik not been able to play with tropes, play with mixing things, just going out there in the fan fiction setting.

M: Because you are taking creative license and mixing ideas together that you wouldn't necessarily see in—in—

N: Non-conventional…

M: Yeah, it is nonconventional.

N: But I think a great example of how fan fiction can benefit writing and just honing your craft and exploring new ideas is if we look at Ali Hazelwood. Fantastic New York Times bestselling author. She wrote so much Reylo Star Wars fan fiction and we all loved it. We were all like, “Ali, this is fantastic stuff.”

M: I think that the community is a big aspect of it as well. It brings people together. You have that sort of built-in almost community with fandom where you can talk about the same concepts, you can talk about things that you like and that connect you all. And as a writer, you can—I don't want to say “take advantage of that” necessarily, but certainly it helps to have those credentials and have that trust and have a readership.

N: It's fantastic to just make genuine friends who either love to write with you or love to see you write and ask you questions. Like one of the closest friends I have that I made through fan fiction, we're still friends today and when I had moved over a thousand kilometers away to the other side of the country, she picked me up from the airport. And so fan fiction is not just incredibly powerful for your craft, but also for your community, your sense of self and just connection with people. If you feel moved by someone's work, people are usually open to dialogue about it.

Fan fiction is so powerful in community, especially for people who aren't often seen. I'm nonbinary and most of the other nonbinary people I've met, I've met only through fan fiction. And it's been very empowering for me on a personal level to be like, yeah, I kind of figure out who I am while you're figuring out who you are. We're figuring out our lives, our careers, things we like.

M: Partly through fiction.

N: Yes.

M: And then partly through talking about that fiction and connecting with each other over it.

We mentioned this a little ways back. How do you protect your work or prevent maybe a derivative work that you might consider more of a “ripoff”?

N: If you're published and even if you're not published, your work is protected. You've talked about this before in a blog post about copyright, but even work that you haven't published, as long as you can prove that your work is older than the work that seems to be a ripoff, that work is protected because it's still down.

In terms of derivative works: fair use. Archive of Our Own was found, I think, in 2004 because of certain legal things that were happening with fan fiction. And they were like, “Well, we need a place where we can legally say everyone uploading has agreed that all of their work is fair use.”

M: Okay, yeah. You're not claiming any monetary funds.

N: Before that, a lot of the times when you would go on fan fiction websites, someone would have a disclaimer saying that they don't own what's being written, the subject matter or the IP that's being written about is belonging to this person and I make no profit. Archive of Our Own kind of took those steps and was like, “Hey, we have a volunteer board. We have people who are paid.” They make sure that if a work really is not falling into fair use, we take it. Song fics are gone. There's certain types of fan fiction that no longer exist now because of copyright. Like the lyrics are owned by somebody else, so you can't use that.

M: And this is part of what I've written about before is that music—song lyrics are so short as a complete work that you can use certain elements, you can reference certain works up to a certain point. If it goes over a certain percentage, a certain amount of that work, then you get into trouble with it. And that's why—

N: The six second rule.

M: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's why as editors, we always recommend if you're going to reference a song, reference the title and the artist, but not the lyrics themselves usually.

N: Yeah. And so I think a lot of forms of older fan fictions like song fics are gone now because of that.

But then you'll get authors who are very on top of things being like, “I don't want fan fiction of my work.” And Anne Rice—of, you know, Interview with a Vampire—used to be a very vocal person about this, but she's actually recently changed her mind. In an interview—and I'm very much paraphrasing—she said something along the lines of, “Twenty years ago when I was asked, I was very against it because I didn't want people using my characters and using my settings and changing who they were. Like I didn’t want it influencing me.” And that—that is also—

M: And that, that is also tricky legal territory sometimes.

N: But she then found that it was very easy for her to just not engage with people writing about her work in a fan fiction setting. And so she's now like, “Yeah, go ahead. It's no harm to me.” A lot of people have changed their mind based on that.

But it is very difficult as a writer who might have worked out there to try to avoid it. Especially when you are in a community and you are trying to connect with people and people are like, “Hey, I've written something. And it's like, “Legally, I cannot read that. I cannot see that.”

M: I mean, an author in the modern day—a lot of the advice out there is to market yourself and to create your community around you as you're working. And even as you're writing something that you're talking about it with your audience and they want to be collaborative with you… It comes from a really nice place, but it also can pose that problem.

There is that legal definition and there is that math, I think, that goes into it a little bit.

One that I've referenced even recently is that Harlan Ellison wrote a story—a short story that I believe he or his estate sued James Cameron for the intellectual property for Terminator.

N: Oh!

M: Yeah. Ellison had written a story that looked close enough in plot and close enough in the core concepts that he was able to successfully sue for his name being added to Terminator, which gave him royalties and things like that. So they had to acknowledge it after the fact, after the movie had initially come out.

N: I also think of Kimba the Lion and The Lion King. Kimba the Lion was a early nineties animated feature from Japan about a white lion. A lot of the shots and a lot of the story points are extremely like The Lion King, but there's also differences. And it's one of those things where it's kind of like, yeah, that's a ripoff. I wouldn't call it a derivative work.

In my head, derivative always comes from a positive place. So I always think of fan music. I think of fan games. I think of remix culture and I think of fan fiction. I think of a place of like…

M: Like more earnest.

N: I think—yeah—I think of a place of more earnest, more communicative, more like interacting with the original, acknowledging the original and being there.

M: On the other side, if you're looking at creating something that is a derivative work, you have to, first of all, acknowledge where it comes from. Or the alternative is if it's different enough, like you mentioned Ali Hazelwood and her concepts are an alternate universe—

N: They’re all AUs, so it’s so easy.

M: Yeah, so it's very easy for the author to modify a few things. Even in memoir if you don't have permission to talk about someone, or if it might be trending into sort of defamation areas, what you do to avoid that is—and people think of changing names as one big thing—but beyond that, you have to be so careful as to potentially change genders, change physical descriptions of characters and things like that. You have to really make them unrecognizable to the original.

N: One of my favorite things about Ali Hazelwood's The Love Hypothesis is that she made the main male protagonist named Adam. Which I thought was such a fun, like wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and I think is very telling of the time we live in now and the attitudes we have towards fan fiction where Disney isn't like throwing every suit at Ali at this moment being like, “We know what you did!”

M: Well it's different enough, right? And it lends itself well because as you say, it's alternate universe. The characters are the same. They come from that place. That's the relationship that she wanted to explore as an author. But at the end of the day, the ideas and the situation that she's put them in is her own making.

N: Exactly. If you're an author and you have fan fiction that you're thinking of turning into an originally published work, don't do it if you don't know your work well. You need to be able to know your work, how to change it in such a way that everything everybody loves about it stays the same, but it's not so tied down into the IP.

A lot of the time someone might write fan fiction for a serialized thing or for a character like Batman or something and then maybe later in their career they end up writing for Batman.

M: Yeah, that happens.

N: Right? It happens. And so it's kind of like sometimes it's just training wheels for some of these bigger pieces.

I think comics are a fantastic description of derivative works because you have these legendary ideas of a character like Superman, we have Batman, we have Robin. But then under that, we have so many different universes, so many different versions, so many different times and places and things that happened to them. It's very much like fan fiction where it's like we have the idea of Batman and here's all the millions of different stories that happened to him.

M: Here's Batman in feudal Japan. Here's Batman in Victorian period.

N: Comics are great because they're all technically canon, but they're all different stories. It's an interesting way to think about derivative works and that comics are all derivative, but still all stand on their own in canon.

As an author, don't be discouraged if you're finding yourself drawn to derivative work as a practice or as a hobby and you're sitting there being like, “I'm not working on my own things!” No, it has its own place. Derivative works are really important. They're jumping off points or they might actually just be things that you have for yourself, you collect for yourself, you share with your community and, in turn, that community will support you with your original work! 

 M: The title that we have here is, you know, “A Storied Conversation,” but it is a conversation,  and it hearkens back to a lot of things that I learned about in university and taking classes on this kind of thing. All literature is in conversation with each other. One could argue, if one was so inclined, that all literature is derivative work of each other.

You look at the market today, you look at the trends and the things that have happened throughout history, throughout literature. We're talking about similar concepts throughout time and then also at particular times, like the first stories that we were telling were epics…

N: Yeah, Epic of Gilgamesh, and we think about like the flood story. Hey, are we going to call the flood stories derivative? Everybody's got one.

M: Because, as authors, we're drawing on just sort of the human experience, we're going to come up with very similar concepts.

N: It's something like there's only seven stories.

M: The archetypes and the same characters that show up and the Hero's Journey, the cycles that we go through—you know, we know what we like.

N: Yeah. And like, not to say that those are the only kinds of stories, cause like everybody in narrative anthropology and narrative critique are going to find something unique and new. When we think about stories—what are the purposes of stories?

M: We're connecting with each other really at the end of the day.

N: A lot of my work is connecting ideas and cultures from different places and different times together for young people, old people and new people. And so we're always telling the same stories and derivative work is just stories.

M: It's us telling stories to each other and exploring those same concepts, but giving it our own spin, I guess.

N: I'm just going to say it's a great time to be in fan fiction. To be reading and experiencing and writing it. Compared to like 10 years ago, it's a much more open environment. Publishers especially are more willing to talk about your derivative works and the communities around them, along with how it tells them what kind of writer you are, what kind of themes you explore, and how you're not afraid to try new things and to try things with other people's stuff—that you're flexible, you're not solely responding to an internal story. You're part of a story that's outside of you.

M: It's a good place to start.

Thank you for coming on here and talking about this. It's been fun.

N: It has been fun.

With that, I want to thank you for listening to today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. If you have any questions on the topic discussed, or if you'd like to suggest a future topic, please don't hesitate to reach out. Contact me through elixereditorial.com or find me on Instagram, Blue Sky, and LinkedIn @elixireditorial.

Intro and outro modified from Danse Macabre by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com and licensed under Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 License.

See you next time in The Laboratory.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.