Some of it is leaving stuff to the imagination. Also, some people can't comprehend the idea of a complete story. Not EVERYTHING needs to be continued, plotless, just to keep putting words on the page. I see a lot of that. The author finishes the initial idea for the story, but keep rambling on, pointlessly.
And yeah, that's pretty much the deal with fanfic, to some degree. However, it's not all finishing or continuing a story someone else wrote. More often, you take the characters, settings, or situations, and expand OR extrapolate. For example, what if the crew of the Enterprise lived in the current time, in New York City, and they were part of a crime investigation unit? Someone would write that story, where Pike runs the criminal investigations unit, Jim is their young hotshot detective, Spock is the forensics expert, Uhura does wire taps, Chekov is the office intern, Scotty handles equipment, and Bones is the paramedic who got stuck in the middle of a sting operation when he went in to treat Jim for a gunshot wound. That would be what they call an AU (alternate universe) fanfic.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2011-03-21 07:11 pm (UTC)And yeah, that's pretty much the deal with fanfic, to some degree. However, it's not all finishing or continuing a story someone else wrote. More often, you take the characters, settings, or situations, and expand OR extrapolate. For example, what if the crew of the Enterprise lived in the current time, in New York City, and they were part of a crime investigation unit? Someone would write that story, where Pike runs the criminal investigations unit, Jim is their young hotshot detective, Spock is the forensics expert, Uhura does wire taps, Chekov is the office intern, Scotty handles equipment, and Bones is the paramedic who got stuck in the middle of a sting operation when he went in to treat Jim for a gunshot wound. That would be what they call an AU (alternate universe) fanfic.
But yeah, no pay, no lawsuit.