Digitally Composed, Consumed, and Critiqued (Episode 21)
We live in a digital world, and that means writers need to develop their readership online. Luckily, the tools available to do that continue to improve.
Wattpad is one of those writerly tools, and fan fiction one of the ways writers find an audience. Today, Jason and Kevin talk about how to be digitally composed, consumed, and critiqued. We look at the phenomenon that is fan fiction. Remixing and revisiting popular works has existed for centuries: look at what Shakespeare did with his source material or today, what Disney does with old fairy tales. But fan fiction is very popular online, and even amazon gets into the whole fanfic game.
Show notes:
- “Tomorrow’s Best-Selling Novels Will Use This 19th-Century Trick” by Clive Thompson in Wired
- Wattpad.com — Excellent place to get your work out there
- Prodigy by Edward Mullen — An example of a Wattpad novel
- “Web Fiction, Serialized and Social” in The New York Times
- “Clive Thompson on the Importance of Fan Fiction” — An earlier article from Wired
- Jane Friedman on serialization in fiction
- Amazon’s attempts to sell fan fiction aren’t going well.
- George R. R. Martin on fan fiction (he doesn’t like it!)
- Hope Leman’s Critical Margins interview with Anne Jamison, author of Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World
- This book explains Don Quixote as fan fiction throug academic sounding terms like cantaminatio and ekphrasis
- Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson — Thompson’s book on dealing with technological change
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