A question was asked: how afraid are you to read something a fan wrote and see that it has become part of your book?
Pratchett said things about the people no longer knowing the rules of the game, about the suggestion that ideas are worth money etc.
The talk continued in the direction of fan fiction, with Jordan talking about stacks of paper he sometimes received. Sitting there I felt certain the female Dragon debate I’d given him was doomed, but listening to this again now, I have better hopes.
People occasionally send me various compilations of FAQs and things of that sort they’ve done about the books, or analyses of the books, and I will occasionally read that if I have time, but fan fiction, or other fiction, or ‘I’ve read this book and would you please tell me what you think of it?’ or stories, it gets returned to them.
I do not read it, I’m sorry. It’s not because I think that anything is going to compete with my works, it’s not, but it’s because what Terry said, there are bozos out there.
I was accused in an anonymous letter to my publisher, of plagiarizing. That The Dragon Reborn was plagiarized. Now this infuriated me to such an extent that I’m going to incredible efforts to find out who’d written the damned letter. I knew it was a nutcase bozo somewhere, because I knew that every word was ripped out of the inside of my skull. And I’m going to find him, and push him into a corner, and beat him half to death with my walking stick [laughter], because he made me that mad, that he would make this accusation against me. And this was…in an anonymous letter, who is not making any effort, he’s not trying to make any money out of it, he just wants to cause trouble.
There are guys out there who I know who said ‘you know, I have this great idea’ and the great idea they want to share with you is worth about as much as ‘let’s write a book about pilots’ and the worst case is when they see something in the book and say, and they think that they can claim it was stolen from them. So I will not read fan fiction, I will not read anything that somebody sends to me. The only things I read are the books I buy.
He ends very definite about not reading anything, but he’s really only talking about fanfiction, and the first few remarks about reading analyses give me hope again.
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