A lot of authors have mixed feelings about fanfic. CS Lewis thought it was a brilliant idea:

I am delighted to hear that you liked the Narnian books. … why not write stories for yourself to fill up the gaps in Narnian history?

A number of others have spoken out strongly against it, including Anne Rice and Diana Gabaldon. Robin Hobb, in a now-deleted post, wrote that it was ‘insulting’. Plenty of authors fret about whether approving it, or knowing about it and not suing, threatens their copyright over their characters. Copyright is vital, of course, but there’s another and much more emotional issue going on here. Jo Walton wrote this (in 2007, so for all I know her views may have changed since. While I’m on the subject of Walton, you really ought to read her alt-hist Farthing trilogy which is amazing.)

If other people can take my characters and my universe and write their own things about them, wrong (and it’ll always be wrong, to me, because I know what wasn’t in the story and they can’t) while I’m alive and don’t want them to (dead is different, this is about the inside of my head and my creativity, which won’t be an issue when I’m dead), then I’m not safe to let my stories and my characters out there because they might be desecrated. The thought of it makes my throat close up. Just reading this here and thinking about it will probably stop me writing any more today.

You might find that a bit emotional / pretentious / precious, but writing is emotional. These are, in the end, imaginary people we made up, but if they aren’t deeply real to the writer they won’t work for the reader. And when you create something, you own it. My characters are mine. Mine. I know them, I write them, they live in my head. Stephen Day from the Charm of Magpies series is someone I know intimately, from taste in footwear to dental problems, from childhood griefs to how he’d react in the event of anything up to a zombie apocalypse. He’s mine.

But, and here’s where I differ from Walton: in my view, if you’ve read the books, Stephen Day is also yours.

A book isn’t inky slices of mashed tree, or a set of data marked up in xHTML workflow. A book is a story, and stories exist in telling. It may live when I write it, but it then goes dormant, unread, functionally nothing, until you read it. It starts as my story: the author’s. It becomes your story: the reader’s. And your Stephen Day isn’t quite mine, because you don’t know everything I know, and because what I know has been mediated by my questionable ability to choose the right words and the restrictions of plot/book length, and because your Stephen arises from your reactions to my words and your different life experiences that colour your interpretation.

The book you read is not the book I wrote. Sometimes the book you read may diverge imperceptibly from the book I wrote; sometimes the gap is so great that it tempts authors to write furious rebuttals to reviews and send their reputations crashing into the ground. But it is never, ever the same book, because the act of reading is a creative one. Your experience of Stephen, and his lover and his friends and his world, is created in your brain by your interaction with my story. And when an act of creation has happened, some people—writers, artists—need to get their creations out.

Readers are writers, and readers interact with writers, and we all interact with books. ‘Riff’ and ‘homage’ and ‘reference’ and ‘shared universe’ and ‘crossover’ and ‘inspired by’ are all words that swirl around in a lexical space that’s not very far at all from fanfiction. And you never know when playing with someone else’s ideas may give you a brilliant idea of your own.

I like to play in existing universes myself. My short ‘The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh’ isn’t Heyer fanfic because the characters are all mine, but it’s certainly a homage (with a lot more gay sex, that being a department in which Ms Heyer is sadly lacking). Think of England is set in the universe of Edwardian pulp novels, my new book The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal is in the Victorian occult mystery tradition, and both books reference famous characters from their respective genres because I actively want to be playing in that sandpit, and to let readers who care know what I’m doing and enjoy it on that level too.

Whose book is it? It’s my book that I wrote. It’s your book that you’re reading. It’s her book that she’s reviewing, or writing fanfiction about. And as long as we all respect each other’s rights–to write, to read, to discuss what we read, and to be acknowledged as the original creator and paid accordingly–I don’t see that as a problem.

Three rules regarding fanfic:

• Don’t ever sell fanfiction. Making a profit for yourself off someone else’s copyrighted work and characters is plagiarism and copyright infringement, which is theft. ‘Filing off the serial numbers’ until you can avoid a plagiarism lawsuit is a matter for the writer and the publisher’s conscience. (Hahaha ‘publisher’s conscience’. I slay myself sometimes.) If the story turned into its own thing as it was being written, and went on to develop with no resemblance to its fanfic genesis, that may be a different matter.
• Unless the author has explicitly stated she’s happy to receive fanfic, don’t send it to her or tell her you’re doing it.
• If you’re an author, and someone has fanficced you, don’t read it. Not just because that way lies potential social media meltdown, but because if the fanfic has a great idea for where to take the characters next, and you use it, that would be plagiarism of a derivative work of your own book, and just typing that gave me a headache.

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KJ Charles is an editor and writer. Her next book is The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, out 16 June from Samhain.

A story too secret, too terrifying—and too shockingly intimate—for Victorian eyes.

A note to the Editor

Dear Henry,

I have been Simon Feximal’s companion, assistant and chronicler for twenty years now, and during that time my Casebooks of Feximal the Ghost-Hunter have spread the reputation of this most accomplished of ghost-hunters far and wide.

You have asked me often for the tale of our first meeting, and how my association with Feximal came about. I have always declined, because it is a story too private to be truthfully recounted, and a memory too precious to be falsified. But none knows better than I that stories must be told.

So here is it, Henry, a full and accurate account of how I met Simon Feximal, which I shall leave with my solicitor to pass to you after my death.

I dare say it may not be quite what you expect.

Robert Caldwell
September 1914