{"id":4349,"date":"2014-09-27T17:57:26","date_gmt":"2014-09-27T17:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/09\/27\/if-i-had-the-power-i-would-ask-all-the-authors-in\/"},"modified":"2014-09-27T17:57:26","modified_gmt":"2014-09-27T17:57:26","slug":"if-i-had-the-power-i-would-ask-all-the-authors-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/09\/27\/if-i-had-the-power-i-would-ask-all-the-authors-in\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>If I had the power, I would ask all the authors in the world to do Yuletide or something like it every year. Sign up for a fic exchange and write some porn for a stranger; tailor your stories to an audience of one, let go of the long-form plots and the careful wide-spectrum appeal, embrace the joy of spending a hundred words on Carlos\u2019s perfect hair or Buffy\u2019s perfect shoes or Jo\u2019s perfect knives. Remember the joy of waiting for one person to open a story and see what it contains.<\/p>\n<p>Because fanfic is joy. Fanfic is fixing the things you see as broken, and patching the seams between what\u2019s written and what is not, and giving characters who got cheated out of their happy endings another chance. There was a time, not that long ago as we measure things, where all fiction was what we would now call \u201cfan fiction.\u201d Shakespeare didn\u2019t come up with most of his own plots. He wrote plays about the stories people already loved. We didn\u2019t get a thousand versions of \u201cSnow White\u201d accidentally: people changed that story to suit themselves, and no one said they weren\u2019t storytellers, or looked down on them for loving that core of red and black and white, of apples and glass and snow.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p>Seanan McGuire, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com\/574901.html\">Let\u2019s Talk About Fanfic<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>(hat tip to <a href=\"http:\/\/kassrachel.tumblr.com\/\">kassrachel<\/a> for the link!)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I had the power, I would ask all the authors in the world to do Yuletide or something like it every year. Sign up for a fic exchange and write some porn for a stranger; tailor your stories to an audience of one, let go of the long-form plots and the careful wide-spectrum appeal, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/09\/27\/if-i-had-the-power-i-would-ask-all-the-authors-in\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\"><\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[470,135],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4349"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}