I’ve had several discussions with fans over the past fiew days, for no reason in particular, but they all seemed to end up in the same place, and that is, whether or not fanfiction is superior to profiction.

Profiction are those works that get published by a recognized publishing house. Books like Gone with the Wind, The Prophet, Huckleberry Finn, all my favorites. Published, bound, and sitting on my shelf within easy reach. Fanfiction is any work done by a fan for the pleasure of it, and there’s no profit involved. Fanfiction might be bound and sitting on my shelf, but it never saw the inside of a recognized publishing house and would probably run screaming in the streets if it did.

So the debate is, which is better? Could we say that fanfiction is morally superior simply because it is true art and the base influence of monetary compenstation never comes up? Or is profiction better because it’s recognized, official, and gets kudos and props because you have the cachet of money, stamping it as good? Am I really just fooling myself thinking that some fanfiction is the best thing I’ve ever read better, and when I look to a higher level of ability and style, I need look no further? Bookstores are full of books, you know. Someone is making money here, and the books, well, they have to be good, right? Otherwise, they’d never get published. Well, sometimes they are good and sometimes they are not.

I couldn’t figure it out. So I started asking around, any chance I got. Any convention, any fannish conversation, any time, anywhere. I got a lot of feedback, and the pendulum swung between profic being better and fanfic. Here is a list of the final arguments that settled it, for me, once and for all.

One of the first arguments for profiction being as good as fanfiction was this: Profiction is organized by the ever-helpful alphabetical method. You get titles, you get authors, and usually books are organized by subject, mystery, horror, sci-fi, romance, etc. You are left to wander, at this point, and wonder, as you read the little blurbs for each book, whether the book is going to be good, be what your reading tastebuds want, whether it’s going to be worth your time.

Fanfiction, on the other hand, is organized by fandom, author, subject matter, and then typically each story is subcategorized to such a degree that you can narrow down your search as easily as a biologist can use a taxonomy to identify the exact family, genus, and species of a particular fly. So not only can you say that you want a story about Starsky and Hutch, you can specify your request to such a detail that what you get when you finish your search is exactly what you want. How could you not be satisfied with that?

So the conclusion to this little disucssion (which lasted several hours) was that actually profiction and fanfiction are equally good, and have the same percentages of good and bad writing. But that fanficition seems to be superior because you are able to narrow your request down to the very details that are going to hit all, not some, all of your buttons.

This satisfied me for a time. I felt it was a very good argument, and really, it’s true. If you want a story about orphans who are rescued, and you go into a bookstore, those stories are out there. But good luck finding it by using keywords or anything. Because book stores don’t organize stories like that. Libraries don’t either, unless I’ve been doing it wrong all these years. Try using “orphans are rescued” in a search in fanfic, and you will get, voila, exactly what you are looking for.

I still wasn’t satisfied, however. I’ve been reading fanfic forever, and I always come back to the same spot. My amazement at how good this stuff is. Oh sure, there are some clunkers out there, stories so badly structured or poorly plotted, or that have POVs that jump around like grasshoppers. But you know, I always give those writers credit because, really, they’re writing. They’re responding to the excitement that their favorite show engenders within them, and they are doing something with that. They aren’t merely stuffing more bon bons in, they are getting up, going to their computer, and trying to recreate the fun and the spark of their favorite characters. And I’ve never known a fanfic writer who, with some practice and time, doesn’t increase her skill.  

But the good stuff? Oh, the good stuff is good. Good in a way that hits all my buttons, makes me feel like every day is my birthday, and leaves me feeling either so good (because I want to have the effect on my readers that so and so did) or so bad (beacuse the story is so good, I want to throw in the towel), I know there’s nothing better than fanfiction. Stories that rock, characters who are true, ideas being written about that are important and meaningful, and…well, that sounds rather dull when I put it like that. Good fanfiction is top of the tree, and superior fanfiction blows me away. I sleep better after having read fanfiction. I sleep like a baby with good fanficion.

In my mind was growing the stubborn idea that fanfiction was better than profiction, hands down, regardless of how it was organized. I have never been so blown away as I am when reading fanfiction. I don’t want to mention the titles for stories, because I would be repeating my rec list, so go check any of those out, and see what you think. Then get any book from a bookstore and compare. Get back to me.

So here’s what I came up with, my final reasoning so I don’t have to try and justify this any more.

First, fanfiction is written for love. Maybe it’s written to impress or awe, but it’s mostly written for love, created out of passion and excitement, and all those good things that happen when you watch a great TV show that has excellent characters and lots of what you want going on. And instead of just absorbing, fans create. What a wonderful circuit this creates. Creativity out of creativity, and it just keeps going.

Second, fanfiction is done without filters. There’s nobody telling you you can’t, or you shouldn’t, or that nobody has ever done that before. There’s nobody in an office reviewing your work, and trying to determine if your story is going to reach the most readers.  You don’t have anyone telling you what to do. You write. You write first or second person, maybe you experiment with present tense over past, you write stream of consciousness, you write like Hemingway, you set it up like Dickens, you do whatever the heck it is you want to do. Because really, you’re doing it for yourself. You can be brave, bold, and have no boundaries whatsoever.

And third, is the interaction with your audience. By feedback and casual comment, you know what your readers are reading. They send locs, and comments, and call you up, and another circuit is created that doesn’t exist in profiction. How do you write to King and tell him how much you liked the Green Mile? Well, you send a letter to his agent (if you can figure out who that is), or the publisher, and good luck getting through. You don’t know if the letter even got there. Bam. Dead end. Fanfic, though. The response is immediate. If you get comments on a story, it worked. If you don’t, it didn’t. You try something else. You keep writing.

So, my conclusion is that fanfiction is better than profiction, period. I’m not saying that there aren’t good published books out there. I read Cold Mountain, okay? I have read The Secret Life of Bees, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Stones of Summer. I absorbed Catspaw. I know there’s good stuff to be found in a bookstore. I just think there’s more good stuff, with more quality, outside of it.