As a creator of a popular fictional universe, you get to decide on the rules, the technology levels, the politics and you use all that to hopefully craft an exciting story. It is certainly no easy task to put all these together, some writers can craft a story, but the word feels vague and uncertain, some create fantastically detailed worlds, but the stories themselves are sometimes left to suffer. When all the aspects come together, you usually have a hit and with a hit, you have a rabid fan base who pour over every little detail of that world you have built.

One such author no stranger to all this is creator of A Song of Ice and Fire, probably better known to most by the name of the first book and the TV show that spawned from these stories, Game of Thrones. Of course, I am talking about George R. R. Martin, and that story he began away back in the mid-’90s is still unfinished with two more books left to complete. Martin is a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to his stories and as such, he is a very slow writer, seen by the fact it has been eight years that fans have been waiting for the next book in the series, The Winds of Winter.

So what have fans been doing as they await the new book, well sometimes they are creating their own fanfiction. This, I’m sure you are aware, is when people create stories by themselves (unofficially) within the universe that someone else built. Martin is certainly not the first or the last creative to have his work taken on by fans in such a manner. This has been going for a long, long time and we can look to the likes of Tolkien, Star Wars, and many others, and always find some fanfiction with varying degrees of quality. So what does Martin think of fanfiction himself? The author spoke at a recent event to honor him in his hometown of Chicago, the full video of which, you can catch above, but here is what he said about fanfiction.

“I don’t think it’s a good way to train to be a professional writer when you’re borrowing everybody else’s world and characters. That’s like riding a bike with training wheels. And then when I took the training wheels off, I fell over a lot, but at some point you have to take the training wheels off here. You have to invent your own characters, you have to do your own world-building, you can’t just borrow from Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas or me or whoever. The other thing is there are all sorts of copyright issues when you’re using other people’s work…My understanding of the law is that if I knew about I would have to try to stop it, so just don’t tell me about it and do what you want there. It’s not for me, I don’t wanna read it and I would not encourage people to write it.”

Yep, he is not a fan, and to be fair, neither was Tolkien back when he was alive, and if you ask yourself honestly would you be happy to see fanfiction using the world you created? Whether it is unofficial and not made for any profits, doesn’t mean the author has to like it. At the same time, it becomes pretty tricky to prevent, anyone can write a short story and post it free of charge on a discussion forum for others to read, and very occasionally they may be pretty entertaining, but for the most part they are not.

I get what Martin is saying, about how it would be better to divert those creative energies into something they create themselves, but as said right at the start, that is no easy task. I’ve done some fanfiction myself, I did a rewrite of The Phantom Menace many years ago as a project to back up my opinions on the movie, and actually I recently decided it might be fun to do so again. This would only be shared by me to friends and colleagues, but there is always the chance that a copy ends up on the internet somewhere. Martin is definitely right that I would be better using the time to create something of my own, but occasionally you can’t help but have a passion project, and as long as it is just for you, it really does no harm. As soon as you try to monetize that work though, then you are getting into some seriously illegal territory, and I would imagine if I was to try and make money from my TPM rewrite, Disney would be on me with a cease and desist order before I could blink.

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As for Martin not wanting to read any of it, I totally feel him, if I was in his position I would not particularly want to read fanfiction either. Though it could, of course, be argued that Game of Thrones Season 5-8 was pure fanfiction, perhaps that’s why Martin stopped watching it around that time. Though, legally, he had already been paid for the rights to do so, so it is a little different to what he is referring to here, I think, perhaps it is a little backhanded comment about the way the show went in a different trajectory to his books?

Where do you stand on the whole fanfiction argument? Leave your thoughts below as always.

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SOURCE: George R.R. Martin at Carl Sandburg Literary Award

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