literature

Literary Merit for Fanfiction Writers

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Published: Jan 14, 2014

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Literature Text

So last winter, something amazing happened to me. Well, a lot of amazing things happened to me. I met iammemyself here on dA, and read her stories. They inspired me to start writing again, and I wrote one in particular for her birthday that was really, really good. So good, in fact, that it was selected for a Daily Deviation. Now, at the time, a fanfiction group I didn't know about had a policy of adding fanfiction DDs to their featured folder. They added my piece, and I, intruiged by their premise, joined up. I started doing LiteraryFanFiction's weekly challenges, their Flash Fan Fiction Fridays, writing some of my best work for these weekly exercises. And in the fall, I was invited to pitch in as an administrator. I'm still learning the ropes for approving and denying work there, but my grammar nazi tendencies are not all I have to contribute. I love writing about writing, and I felt like doing that today.

I find a lot of confusion about what literary fanfiction is. I feel like some people stay away from the group because they think literary means stuffy, and I think others don't realize that literary is supposed to suggest quality. I want to have something to refer people to when I talk to them about the group's mission. So I'm going to attempt to define the term "literary" and related terms in the context of fanfiction. I think these definitions stand independently of the group, though I will, in places, explain what that means for or within the group.

The Word "Literary"

So let us begin with definitions of "Literary." I'll start with two fairly reputable ones. Here's the Miriam-Webster online dictionary's entry on it. They gave it three definitions:

1
a : of, relating to, or having the characteristics of humane learning or literature
b : bookish 2
c : of or relating to books
2
a : well-read
b : of or relating to authors or scholars or to their professions

OK, so to put that in less intimidating language, Miriam-Webster says that "literary" means that something came out of books, relates to books, or has the characteristics of books. Oh, but not just any books: It has to be what people consider literature. It also refers to authors and their jobs. It's basically an umbrella term for things pertaining to a special kind of writing. We'll come back to that idea.

Let's try the Oxford Dictionary:

1 [attributive] concerning the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form:the great literary works of the nineteenth century
concerned with literature as a profession:the newspaper’s literary editor
2(of language) associated with literary works or other formal writing; having a marked style intended to create a particular emotional effect:the script was too literary

This is much, much more useful to us. Basically, this definition of literary, which is much closer to how most people use it and to how LFF uses it, is that literary means it has a connection of some kind with writing we consider literature, especially works that have a focus on their structure, style, and emotional effect.

Structure? Style? What?

Structure is the way your story is laid out. The word this definition uses is form, which actually means the whole of what you're writing. Basically, quality of form means "good writing." It means every word, every sentence, every paragraph, ever page do what they're supposed to do. And one thing that they're supposed to do is make the reader feel something.

Now I'm sure some of you are here going, "OK, that means my story is literary because it has lots of emotions!" I feel awful for saying this, but that may not be true. It may have a great deal of emotional value for you, and the characters may feel a lot of emotions, but that doesn't mean they'll get through to the audience. Bridging that gap between you and the reader takes practice, no matter how "talented" you are or how cool your idea is. You can't just throw something down on paper and expect it to work. That's where "form" and "style" come in.

Now there's one more piece of the word "literary" that these definitions are missing, and this is about three parts connotation (or implied meaning), and two parts buzzword. Literary work is expected to have a deeper meaning. This isn't technically part of the definition, not exactly, but it's a standard expectation. People will tell you that movie novelizations and pulp fiction aren't literary. Well, let me tell you, I've had movie novelizations make me cry harder than the movie, for movies that make me cry every time. I don't actually buy that they aren't literary, exactly, but I see why people say they aren't.

There are two main reasons a movie novelization, or something written just to sell toys, or "genre" fiction (science fiction, fantasy, westerns, etc.) might considered "not literary." One is that people will say there's no deeper, underlying message the author felt compelled to tell. The other, related idea is that the author only wrote it to fill a purpose other than sharing that message: to amuse, to sell a product, to make money. Can you see how these connotations, or associations, of literary conflict with the denotation, or dictionary definition?

It is possible to hit all of the possible points of literary merit in a piece of fanfiction. All you have to do is:

Write it in a very skillful way, with everything serving a purpose and making sense
Write it in a way that makes the reader react emotionally, both through what happens and through the smoothness and feeling in your words
Make sure your emotional reaction gets a point across to the reader
Write in a format that is similar in format and form to the books people read in school (aka prose/narrative format, usually first or third person, usually past tense, punctuated properly, follows "book" format rules)

But we're getting way ahead of ourselves.

So now that we have a few different ways of understanding "Literary," and a general idea of what makes a literary fanfic, let's look at two other, related terms to that core word: literary merit, literary fiction.

Literary Merit

Literary merit is a nightmare to present to you guys because good, reliable definitions of it are hard to find online without JSTOR access, JSTOR being an academic publication service. Most of the sources on this topic I found at university and college websites (.edu) were rants about whether particular works had literary merit, or attacking the concept in general. I have to admit, I'm not terribly fond of it either. At a complete loss, and with great shame in my teacher's heart, I present to you a definition from Wikipedia.

Literary merit is the quality shared by all works of fiction that are considered to have aesthetic value.^[1]
The concept of "literary merit" has been criticized as being necessarily subjective, since personal taste determines aesthetic value, and has been derided as a "relic of a scholarly elite".^[1] Despite these criticisms, many criteria have been suggested to determine literary merit including: standing the test of time, realistic characters, emotional complexity, originality, and concern with truth.^[2]

OK, this we can work with. And actually, Wikipedia has a gem here next to the definition. They go on to talk about the obscenity trial for a work of literature with some harsh language. I think it explains better by example. Have an excerpt from The People of the State of California vs. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, courtesy of George Mason University:

All of the defense experts agreed that "Howl" had literary merit, that it represented a sincere effort by the author to present a social picture, and that the language used was relevant to the theme.

That's where that pesky "theme" or "message" stuff comes from! Actually, everything I know about what art is, I learned from studying obscenity trials. You see, in the U.S., where I live, we have two very conflicting sets of laws. We have the First Amendment, which is meant to protect free expression, and we have various obscenity laws, which are meant to stop people from saying things that are filthy, dirty, perverse, vulgar, etc. Basically, to stop swearing and porn.

So what if you have a story that has sex or swearing in it, that also has expression in it? How do you decide if it's obscene or "protected" expression? Enter the <a wytiwyg="1" href=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_t…">Miller test. Pasting from Wikipedia after checking their references for accuracy, because I hate what other sites do to my formatting:

Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.^[3]

Or in layman's terms, a work is obscene if these three things are true: most people would think the work is meant to make people feel sex-related feelings, it actually shows sexual contact to a degree that could disturb people, and it doesn't have one of any four things that could save it. Literary and artistic merit are pretty much the same, and we've defined them pretty well. Political value ties into that thematic stuff again, and scientific value is because, well, understanding reproduction might help save lives and pain, right?

Now, at this point it looks like I'm defining something with itself, and maybe I am, but really I wanted to look into the examples. Have you ever seen a movie that had some sex in it, but you were more interested in what the characters' emotions were doing, or what they learned in the end? I bet you have.

So basically, literary merit usually comes down to one, being so well-done it makes you feel something, and two, saying something important.

Literary Fiction

So uh... if not all fiction has literary merit, then literary fiction must have literary merit right?

Haha, yeah, like it could be that simple.

Once again, finding a definition is impossible, and once again, I am forced to resort to Wikipedia. Sorry guys. There ARE solid definitions out there, but I don't have the books that Wikipedia is citing and my favorite literary glossary avoided all these terms. It's quickly becoming less of a favorite.

Anyway, Wikipedia on Literary Fiction:

Literary fiction is a term principally used for certain fictional works that are claimed to hold literary merit.
Despite the fact that all genres have works that are well written, those works are generally not considered literary fiction. To be considered literary, a work usually must be "critically acclaimed" and "serious".^[1] In practice, works of literary fiction often are "complex, literate, multilayered novels that wrestle with universal dilemmas".^[2]

If we hold you guys to that standard, we'd have no group. Critically acclaimed? What makes a fanfic critic? Would it be just a group of DD winning-pieces? Forget that. Having characteristics from "literary fiction" are usually plus points for acceptance over at LiteraryFanFiction, but many of them are not required. Your story doesn't have to be serious. It doesn't have to be slow-paced. It generally should have some hints of what's going on in characters' heads, and we do ask it be well-written to a certain degree, but we focus more on "literary merit" than "literary fiction" as a genre.

The Four Pillars of Literary Merit in Fanfiction

Remember how I laid out four fool-proof ways to have literary merit in your stories? Let's look at them closer.

#1. Write it in a very skillful way, with everything serving a purpose and making sense.

Now, I get it. We are not all professionals. Some things in fiction take skill. We don't expect everyone to be experts (and if you catch me doing it, because I'm terrible about it, please gently remind me not to). However, for most part, we expect the writing of work we accept to follow the rules you would have been taught in school, both on a small scale and a large scale. We expect you to put the kind of work into a story that you'd be expected to put into school work. I put more work into my stories than most people do on their school work, and I expect you to try as hard as I do, more or less.

I'm going to break that "skill" down into two component pieces.

#1A. Your spelling and grammar need to be clearly understandable and contribute to the story.

Ok, ok, Typos happen. I get it. Missing a "was" and writing "is" instead happens. I get it. You didn't know a comma went there. Fine. We all make mistakes.

But if your mistakes are so frequent that they're distracting, that's not really literary, is it? That's not up to the standard a book would be held to.

If your mistakes actually make the work make less sense, that's not literary skill level. Funny as it is "how is babby formed" isn't literary.

Commas can change meaning. Let's eat, grandma, vs. let's eat grandma, anybody?

So spelling, grammar, and sentence structure actually play a role in getting your point across, and if they get in the way, that's a point away from your literary merit.

#1B. The plot and structure of your story need to fit "literary" rules and contribute to the meaning and feeling behind it.

This is why "crack" fic is not literary most of the time. This is why "vignettes" with no plot are not as literary as people act like they are. You need to have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. It needs to have a protagonist, a conflict with something they struggle against, and a tone, or a feeling it tries to capture. This is stuff you would have been taught in elementary and middle school if you are in the U.S.

And where possible, the way you do these things should feel like a novel or a short story you'd read in school. They should be to a literary standard. If you break the formula or break the rules, there needs to be a VERY good reason. You need to be able to explain why, probably in more words than you spent on the whole piece. You are not Stephen King. Yet.

#2. Write it in a way that makes the reader react emotionally, both through what happens and through the smoothness and feeling in your words.

Have you ever heard the phrase, "You lose every battle you never fight?"

It's a trite little cliche, isn't it? It sounds like something you'd see on a teacher's wall. It's not all that moving.

OK, now take Lady MacBeth hounding her husband from Shakespeare's Macbeth, courtesy of Bartleby.com:

Macb. If we should fail?
Lady M. We fail!
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
and we'll not fail

That's probably not as moving to you as it is to me. Shakespeare can be hard for people to understand. Here, let's try a passage from my yet-unpublished NaNoWriMo fanfic, Start From There, which was more or less directly lifted from that scene.

She looked down. "What if we fail?"

"Then we fail!" He took a deep breath. "If you keep asking that, we will! Are we moving on or are we simpering here? Where is that courage from before?"

OK, that has a little more punch than "You lose every battle you don't fight," doesn't it? I can tell you about the techniques I used. I repeated the word "fail" for the same reason Shakespeare did: for rhythm and emphasis. I made sure my list of two things was parallel, or structured the same way. (#1: are we moving on, #2 are we simpering here") I had the male character fire off several exclamations in a row to create a sense of urgency. I used the way my words were put together to create a feeling, alongside what the words actually said.

Your stories should do that too, to the best of your ability. Young writers do struggle with this, but the only way to improve is to practice and get feedback. I'm generally pretty happy to give that feedback if you don't put me on a timeline.

One area that really catches people up here is that their mistakes occasionally make things hard to read, even if they make sense. You have to read the same sentence twice or three times, or maybe you put a [fill in the blank] section in, didn't you, [y/n]? Anything that makes your reader pay attention to anything other than the picture you're trying to paint makes it hard to build that feeling. Try to create "immersion." Try to make your reader not think about the fact that they're reading so they can focus on feeling.

#3. Make sure your emotional reaction gets a point across to the reader.

Amg that reader insert story was sooo good I totally felt like I was there with N and he loved me and oh my goodness!

Ahem. Technically? That reaction would fit some definitions of literary merit. But the most common ones need you have to more there than just feels. So you have to say something.

I've spent two paragraphs picking on reader inserts, so now I'm going to make my point referencing one. Not long ago there was a reader-insert story that made a DD. It was set in a post-apocalyptic story, and you, the reader, are a survivor. You're captured by another group of survivors, who are afraid your presence will bring trouble. You are tortured, and during the torture you and one of the group start to fall for each other. Now, if you weren't you, if you were the author's self-insert or some other character you don't really know, it'd be easier to tune out the torture. But because you are you, because you are attached to yourself, the violence and the hitting and the throbbing pain in your head are just a little bit more real. You are a human being and you don't deserve this, but you know this is common where zombies roam.

Congratulations. You've just been more or less forced to look the stark realities and basic inhumanity of a popular TV show in the face in a way that most writers could not do with a character that you happened not to like. Maybe you will think about what would be happening to the people on "the wrong side" of a conflict next time you have to vote on someone who wants to go to war. Maybe you will think about that next time you want to punch someone in the face.

Some of the most powerful themes are timeless. We keep talking about them because we keep forgetting about them in our real lives. If I can read your story and take away something for my life, that's literary merit. You can do that with your fanfiction. You can do that with fanfiction. Maybe, when you have a lot of skill built up, you can even do it with things people said could never have literary merit. You will never do it unless you try, and keep trying.

#4. Write in a format that is similar in format and form to the books people read in school.

Did you know that if you do the kind of analysis I've been doing this whole article to a movie, it's not literary criticism. It's... wait for it... film criticism! Film, TV, and theater are so different from literature that the rules and the skills are different. Reading a script by itself doesn't really suck you in the way watching a movie or reading a book or poem would. That's why I replaced my Shakespeare quote earlier (scripted play) with an excerpt from my fanfic (prose narrative).

Literary formatting and objective standards help your reader get into your story. It's also not fair to judge scripts by the same standards as literature, no more than it'd be fair to judge Spanish by English grammar rules. Whether you write scripts, prose, or poetry, know the rules for each and know the groups that accept them.

Literary prose standards usually mean first or third person narration, usually past tense, usually punctuated more or less correctly and usually formatted like a book. You can break most of these if you have a very good reason, but it's very much sink-or-swim. If you try to break the rules for whatever reason and it doesn't do what you meant, you don't get a free pass, you know? There are second person books, books written entirely or partly in present tense, and books that don't follow grammar rules perfectly. These authors all knew what they were doing and had an editor who agreed as much.

In the coming weeks, when I find time from my other projects, I'm going to talk a little bit about literary expectations that are easy to lay out. In the meantime, take a book that's similar to what you're writing about and look inside. If you didn't lay out your story the way it appears in those books, then either you need to fix it, or you need to be looking at script resources to improve your work that way.

So there it is: a one-person discussion of literary merit, literary fiction, and literary fanfiction. Did I miss anything? Any thoughts to share?

TL;DR: Literary means like a book. Literary fanfiction is fanfiction that's like a book. Could a publisher get away with putting out something like your story as it is? No? Then let me show you how to edit it.

A lengthy discussion of the notions of "literary merit" and "literary fiction," and an attempt to apply literary merit in all its diverse and conflicting definitions to fanfictoin. While some points in the guide are geared toward explaining LiteraryFanFiction's standards, the suggestions given go a long way toward creating generally good fanfiction in any genre.

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KaizenKitty

Apr 14, 2014

No shit
yes, Fanfiction can have literary merit.

Ugh

it always annoys me when people talk down on fanfiction -- I'm sure such people have only skimmed once over "My Immortal" and decided that all fanfics are like that.