This began as a reply to Charles Yallowitz’s “Fairy Tale Rewriting Vs Fan Fiction”, but then it grew out of control and rather than dump it on his page I thought I’d post it here.

The question of rights-holders matters a lot to publisher’s lawyers, but I don’t think it’s as important to writers.

There are a lot of ways in which a writer can use another writer’s work as the basis of her or his work. What I would call Pure Fan Fiction is at one end of a continuum–where the characters, settings, and major events are all taken from a particular source.

There are degrees of purity in the fan fiction community, and a bewildering code of abbreviations to distinguish between different alternative worlds. There are fan fics in which characters who have died in the “official” world are still alive. There are fan fics in which a…