You will never do your best work in someone else's universe, because you're bound by their rules. Furthermore, most universes that people use for fan fiction are dreadfully dumb - one thinks of Star Trek and Star Wars - and most seventh-graders can come up with better ones.
As for using characters created by another author: That's where you're going to find yourself sued by any author who understands where the financial future of his work lies. In order to protect copyright and potential filmmaking rights, you have to AGGRESSIVELY protect your own authorship of characters, precisely because it is the characters that film companies need to license and protect when your work is filmed. Anybody writing fiction using my characters without my specifically having licensed it to them will be sued, not because I'm mean and selfish, but because this is the INHERITANCE OF MY CHILDREN, and to write fiction using my characters is morally identical to moving into my house without invitation and throwing out my family.
I care very much about new writers, which is why I strongly urge them never, never, never to waste their time writing stories set in other writers' universes without specific invitation, and even then they'd do more for their careers by spending their time inventing their own worlds and creating their own characters. Piggy-backing on someone else's financial success isn't how you create a career, and the "experience" you gain is worthless, since you steal precisely those story elements that you must invent for yourself in order to learn how to create workable original fiction.
Posted by Omega M. (Member # 7924) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ramdac99:
"The Tails of Capitol"
That would be the story how of Abner Doon's pet, Fievel Twickowitz, stowed away in his master's ship and found a new life among the diggers of Old Earth.
Posted by Ramdac99 (Member # 7264) on :
o.k. so for those of us who want more Capitol and OSC never wrtiing more on the topic...... we're just screwed?
Posted by Ramdac99 (Member # 7264) on :
i guess that's what you get when you "own the series" :/
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
I do think OSC would be rather hard to pastiche anyway.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
I absolutely respect Card's right to forbid people to write stories involving his characters or set in his worlds; they're his creations and it's his call, period. Furthermore, I agree with him about the value of writing stories involving your own characters, set in universes of your own imagining.
I'm curious, though. He says
quote:In order to protect copyright and potential filmmaking rights, you have to AGGRESSIVELY protect your own authorship of characters, precisely because it is the characters that film companies need to license and protect when your work is filmed.
If this is the case, how is it that J.K. Rowling, whose work has spawned vast amounts of fanfiction, has had no legal trouble when she has licensed her characters to film companies?
[ February 16, 2006, 06:34 PM: Message edited by: Noemon ]
Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
The question has been asked before; the response was something along the lines of (paraphrasing from memory) "Rowling does what her lawyer tells her, and I do what my lawyer tells me."
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
Oh, you know, now that you mention it I think I vaguely recall him saying something to that effect.
Posted by vonk (Member # 9027) on :
Heh. I just finished reading "The Originist" and it's afterward. Maybe if you put enough into it and work hard enough at it, you can be one of the people that breaks Cards rules, just as he is.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
quote:That would be the story how of Abner Doon's pet, Fievel Twickowitz, stowed away in his master's ship and found a new life among the diggers of Old Earth.