Why it’s sometimes good for writers to build on each other’s work

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon writing out my idea for how fanfic and other writers could theoretically use digital technology to bypass copyright roadblocks. What inspired me was the recent story about an unauthorized sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye” that Salinger managed to quash in the U.S. before his death.

Now today The Guardian has published a piece by David Barnett that asks what I think is the obvious question: is it always a terrible thing to have another writer build on an existing work? As Barnett points out, not every unauthorized sequel is a money-grab by an unscrupulous hack. When the creator of a character or series dies, for example, the only real way to create more of that world is for someone else to take the reins.

As an example, he describes his reaction to a new book about a spy named Nicholai Hel, who appeared in the novel “Shibumi” by Trevanian, who died in 2005. Now a different writer, Don Winslow, has written a sequel. Barnett writes,

“[At first] I read it not wanting to like it…. But as I read on, I realised I loved it. The spirit of the original was there, the characters were bang on, the novels flowed almost seamlessly into each other. And, by the end, I found that I no longer considered that I was reading a Don Winslow follow-up to a Trevanian novel. I was reading a Nicholai Hel novel.”

“Catcher in the Rye sequel might just be a good idea” [The Guardian via Publishers Weekly]

(Photo: Dave Dugdale)