I’ve never really understood fan fiction. That’s when people who aren’t the creators of a work – book, movie, TV series – write stories in that world using those characters. Occasionally it’s done with the permission of the original creator (such as Eric Flint’s 1632 series), but mostly it’s done in the literary equivalent of under the table.

I get the idea of wanting your favorite characters to have continuing adventures and to have such an attachment to a created world that you want to play around in it. I think if I found out people were writing fan fiction about Antrey or Aton or any of the other character’s I’ve created I’d be flattered. But it takes a lot of work to write good, interesting stories (and don’t get me wrong – some fan fiction is really good), so why not take the time and effort and direct into original characters and locations? It seems like a wasted opportunity to me.

Still, if it makes people happy to do it and they’re not making money off the work of others, have at it. As I said, I can understand wanting to continue the adventures of favorite characters and my understanding is that’s largely what most fan fiction is about.

Then I learned about deathfic.

Deathfic is fan fiction based around the death, sometimes gruesome and involved, of a character. I initially thought it involved dispatching bad guys who maybe escaped the ultimate punishment in the original work. It wouldn’t be too hard to imagine a gruesomely appropriate death for The Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale, for example. But, no, it’s something quite different:

deathfic, the kind of fan fiction in which a beloved character dies, typically in a way that is as painful for the reader as possible. ‘Sometimes I’m just in the mood to hole up and read the saddest thing I can find on the internet,’ Rachel says.

* * *

A baseline assumption of love is that a person you adore is not someone you would like to watch die. Presumably, you would also not like to be the sole architect of that person’s death. But to deathfic writers, the genre isn’t about having some kind of sick control over the life of someone else. It’s about a different kind of control entirely.

So, I guess that’s a thing? Again, seems like an odd thing to do to characters you care about, but whatever rocks your boat, I suppose. And I get, as the article points out, that sometimes writing fiction (even fan fiction) can be a way of working through issues happening in real life, including the deaths of loved ones.

Where things get a little creepy is when the people being killed off aren’t fictional characters at all:

There is deathfic for almost every fictional character and real-life celebrity you can imagine. You can find stories in which Rihanna dies and is reborn as a modern Messiah, and hundreds in which members of the K-pop supergroup BTS haunt one another as beautiful ghosts. These can be “crack” stories, in which writers are openly striving to make the strangest fictional reality they can imagine. BuzzFeed, for instance, has documented the rise of Justin Bieber deathfic, which includes freak accidents and maimings of all kinds.

That’s just fucked up. I mean the any celebrity “reborn as a modern Messiah” angle has some possibilities, but writing death scenes for famous people is just macabre as shit. Not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do it, but if that’s your thing, maybe you want to get some help?

An old chestnut of writing advice is to “kill your darlings.” It doesn’t necessarily mean characters – it applies to any part of your writing not being so precious that it’s off limits from being cut – but it works that way, too. Killing someone else’s darlings, well, that may be a bridge too far. In the end, though, they’re only real on paper, so I guess there’s no harm.

Recently someone on a sci-fi/fantasy writers’ group I’m in asked the following question:

It’s an interesting question, but one I didn’t feel comfortable answering right away since neither one of those choices really seemed right.

“Allies” is pretty heavy in terms of commitment. Maybe that’s because my first thought when talking about allies is in a military sense. NATO members are allies not necessarily because they like or agree with each other, but because there’s a deep obligation to defend each other if another is attacked. That’s hard core and I’m not sure I’m down to shed blood (metaphorical, even) for other authors I barely know. In addition, allies have overarching interests that allow them to overlook other, even fundamental, disagreements. Think of the US and UK allying with the Soviet Union during World War II. Again, I’m not sure I want to think of my relationship to other authors that way.

But “Competitors” doesn’t really work either, at least most of the time. I’m a firm believer in authors supporting other authors and when someone I know in real life has success – a new book gets a great launch, superb reviews – or someone in an online forum shares that kind of success I join in on the celebration. Their success has little to say about my own sales, reviews, or lacks thereof. It’s not a matter of fighting over the same readership pie. Now there are times when I am in direct competition with  other writers – competitions, anthologies with limited spaces, etc. – but you know that going in and can prepare for it.

Thinking about these two concepts led me to another term that I think fits my perspective the best – colleagues. I settled on that after sitting in a courtroom watching a hearing where a pair of defense attorneys worked at cross purposes.

I’m an Assistant Federal Public Defender, one of about a half dozen in our office. Outside of our office there are a couple of dozen private lawyers on what’s called the CJA Panel who also take appointed cases – ones our office can’t due to conflicts of interest or just lack of resources. For the most part we’re on the same side as the panel attorneys – we share legal theories, help work through issues, that kind of thing. But sometimes, we’re not on the same side – we’re in what you might call competition.

In this particular case one of my AFPD colleagues was representing someone charged with violating his supervised release (sort of like probation after you get out of prison). The particular issue came down to whether the court believed our client’s story about how he came to possess some drugs. This story could be backed up by his girlfriend, but only if she admitted to conduct which might put her in legal jeopardy. So, the court appointed a CJA Panel member to represent her interests in the hearing. It would have been better for our client had she testified, but her interests aren’t the same as ours and, on her lawyer’s advice, she invoked the Fifth Amendment.

Everything worked out in the end and we were back on the same “team” as that panel attorney the next day. But for that brief time, we were competitors.

So I think that’s the word I think best describes my relationship with fellow writers – colleague. It recognizes that sometimes you are in competition, but it’s not very often, while taking into account that we share a lot of interests in common without going so far as to bring into being an iron-clad allyship. In general, I’m happy when my colleagues do well and want to help them do it, but there may be exceptions.

After all, just because you write books and I write books doesn’t mean I’m going to help you move or anything.