The Rediscovery of Fan [Writer]

[kevin_standlee]

John Scalzi has been thinking about the Fan Writer Hugo Award on his blog. Other people have been discussing it. pnh has made some excellent points, and other people have, in my opinion, completely missed the point of what the Award is intended to reward.

I found it especially amusing to read "I would actually hate to see a published writer of commercial SF/F fiction win a Hugo for fan writing." Followed shortly by Patrick pointing out "...this has happened over two dozen times. Nor were all of those Hugos to Dave Langford."

Some of them sure seem to think there is a bright-line definition between "pro" and "fan" and that one can't possibly be both at the same time. This isn't true. It's sort of sad that there are so many people (both pros and fans) who think it is.

Edit, 22:10: Changed subject line when I realized what I'd overlooked in the title.

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

See, I'd consider Berry's, or Gibson's or your essay as "writing about fandom" because it's writing about fans and SF/F pros (I don't care if it's autobiographical). It's writing about the field.

We're also discussing fanwriting in terms of defining fanwriter. I would argue that a writer who never writes about the field isn't a fanwriter. I would also argue that fanwriters may and often do write about topics outside the field, and doing so is by no means stops any of them from being a fanwriter.

But I'm going to go back to something kevin_standlee and I have been talking about offline. The Hugo rules are there to help voters understand what they're voting for. That's important. But they're also there to help administrators qualify nominations and ballots, rather than to make them disqualify nominations and ballots. That's of utmost importance. While the current rule makes it easy for the administrator to qualify nominees, it doesn't help the voters understand what they're voting for.

I think there's room to improve the rule so it better satisfies both needs, and I'm not at all wedded to the specific wording that I threw together in an off-the-cuff LJ comment...

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Oh, well, if you consider memoirs to be inside the pale, then we have much less to disagree about.

(The linked essay wasn't mine, however, it was by Teresa.)

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

"God and I" is one of my all-time favorites. In fact, I re-read it last night.