austinkleon:

Love what he says about fan fiction:

[Fan fiction] challenges just about everything we thought we knew about art and creativity…I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, but manipulating them and breaking their rules.”Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.

But, if you’re going to steal, you have to skewer:

…the danger isn’t going too far, it’s not going far enough. If you’re going to borrow from [C.S.] Lewis, you have to travesty him, openly poke fun at him, say something about him. Anything less and readers will see your allusions as merely plagiarism.

And if you’re going to lift a structure, lift it from another genre. On borrowing the narrative structure from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited:

I figured I could get away with a lot…because the theft would be untraceable—because I was taking it across genre lines.

(Thx, @gerrycanavan)