A good friend of mine—whose name I am not using here, because some bruises deserve to go unprodded, and she has a right to be hurt—said recently, “Every time I talk about writing fanfiction, I get hate mail.” She wasn’t exaggerating. I’ve seen, with my own eyes, what happens to authors, especially female authors, especially female authors of young adult fiction, when they mention their time in the fanfic world.
I got angry. On her behalf; at the world; at the unfairness of it all. What you are about to read came out of that anger. Much of this originally appeared on my Twitter, one concise chunk at a time. I’ve expanded it a little, cleaned it up, and clarified the places where it wasn’t exactly right the first time. The original thread is still on Twitter, if you feel the need to verify that I haven’t changed my tune (but if you hum a few bars, I bet you can harmonize).
Here, in this longer forum, I also want to add a few disclaimers.
FIRST: This is written from a very gender binary perspective: boys and girls and men and women. This is because I am writing it from my experiences as a member of the fanfic community, and my experiences with the way the world worked in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Genderqueer, agender, and genderfluid people have always existed, but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve been including them properly in the conversation. This means my data is virtually non-existent. I can only speak from where I stand.
SECOND: The fanfic community has serious, deep-rooted issues with the treatment of characters of color, often erasing them from their own properties and consequentially alienating many aspiring POC fanfic writers. This is similar to the way fanfic can erase canonical female characters, but even more insidious and widespread. Because again, I am speaking only from the position of my own experiences, I am not equipped to speak to this nasty aspect of the fanfic world.
THIRD: Boys, men, and masculine genderfluid people absolutely do write fanfic, and the experience of a queer or gender-nonconforming male stands a good chance of mirroring much of the experience of a female. I am not trying to erase you. I just, again, can only speak from where I stand.
FOURTH: Not all fanfic is porn. If something borrows setting (Star Trek, Star Wars, MCU) or characters (coffeeshop AUs, fairy tale AUs, mashups), it is fanfic. Sex is an aspect of many successful fanfic stories, but the word “fanfic” is sort of irrelevant in that sentence: sex is an aspect of many successful stories, period.
We all on board? Great.
Let’s go.
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In An Absent Dream
So far as anyone can tell based on excavation of my old papers—Mom kept everything—I started writing fiction around the age of six. In those early stories, I ran off to Ponyland to have adventures with the Ponies and hang out with Megan. Everyone loved me, naturally. I got to ride unicorns. I saved Flutter Valley a dozen times. I had no idea anyone would think I was doing anything wrong, and why should I? Most of the kids I knew were making up the same stories; I was precocious only in that I was already writing them down. The boy three houses over had a very close relationship with the Care Bears. His sister was the best mechanic the Transformers had ever known.
Was most of it self-insert wish-fulfillment? Well, yeah. FUCK, YEAH. We were kids. We were learning how to make up stories, and the best stories were the ones that had a place for us in their centers. We didn’t just want to hear about the adventure. We wanted to live it.
Jump forward a few years and most of the boys I knew stopped telling those stories, or at least stopped sharing them with the rest of us. They had discovered that the majority of media centered boys exactly like them, which meant they could move from self-insertion to projection without a hiccup. The boys who couldn’t manage that immediate act of projection understood that they would be showing weakness if they admitted it. They may not have stopped making up adventures for boys who looked like them, but if they did it, they did it in secret.
(Projection is an important step in learning how to make believe. If you can’t BE the main character, you can let them be your avatar, carrying your essence into the story. Here’s the thing, though: it takes time to learn to “ride” avatars that you can’t recognize. When all the avatars you have offered to you look like someone else, you can wind up shut outside the story, or fumbling to find those points of commonality that will let you step inside.)
Enter The Default, that strong-jawed, clear-eyed, straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, vaguely Christian (but not too Christian) male. Everyone who grows up on a diet of Western media learns, on some level, to accept The Default as their avatar, because we historically haven’t had much choice. Want to be the hero, instead of the love interest, the scrappy sidekick, or the villain? Embrace The Default. Learn to have empathy with The Default. He’s what you get.
Kids who look like The Default exist, of course. No one teaches them how to empathize with the rest of us, and that’s a problem too, one that short-changes them badly. But that’s a little bit outside the scope of today’s discussion.
Back to elementary school, where bit by bit, the number of girls who admitted to making up their own stories also dropped off. The rest of us, well. We learned that “I had an adventure…” made people laugh at you. We stopped writing about ourselves and started writing avatars, characters who could represent us in the stories without quite being us.
Only writing avatars also got us laughed at when people found out about it, got us accused of Mary Sue self-insert wish-fulfillment bullshit, as if half the stories on the shelves weren’t exactly that for those lucky few who matched The Default. We stopped making up original female characters. Many of us stopped making up characters at all.
If we used only existing characters as our avatars, we didn’t get laughed at as much. If we used only existing male characters—characters we had all been trained to view as The Default, capable of anything, not just of being The Sidekick or The Girl—well. Suddenly we could write ANYTHING WE WANTED. Suddenly we were GODS OF THE FICTIONAL WORLD, and we could finally start telling the stories the shows and books didn’t want to give us. Our stories were finally judged based on what they were, and not what people thought they knew about us, and them.
(I honestly think the reason so many fanfic writers are women/girls [or gay, or gender-noncomforting, or some combination of the above] is a mixture of social stigma [“ew, fanfic is a GIRLY thing, ew, it’s all PORN, and most of it is GAY PORN”] and seeking a way to empathize with The Default. I also think this contributes to the prevalence of male/male couples in fanfic even when written by authors who identify as straight: by being only The Default, we move away from the “ew icky girls” reactions. But that’s another conversation.)
So you have generations—literal, multiple generations—of largely female authors growing up steeped in fanfic. Making our own stories from high school on, if not before. Trying to find our way to a schema of story that actually fits us.
(You also have generations of queer authors, trans authors, and gender-nonconforming authors, all going on their own journeys. My sexuality definitely influenced my attraction to fanfic, because finally, I wasn’t being judged for it.)
This means that you have, again, generations of female authors who have gone through the most rigorous writing school in existence, going pro and starting to publish. Yes: the most rigorous. FIGHT ME. Fanfic taught me pacing. Taught me dialog. Taught me scene, and structure, and what to do when a deadline attacks. Fanfic taught me to take critique, to be edited, to collaborate, to write to spec. FANFIC MADE ME.
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Middlegame
An MFA takes three years. My path from fanfic newbie to published author took me more than a decade. It’s not a structured school. There aren’t classes or finals; you don’t get a degree. How fast you learn is tied to how fast you listen, and you can stop whenever you find the place that makes you happy. “Going pro” is not the brass ring for every fanfic author, nor should it be; fanfic is a genre unto itself in some ways, and there are people who thrive within its conventions and constraints who would be miserable doing anything else.
But.
A not inconsiderable number of us started writing fanfic because we wanted to live the stories that we loved, and then discovered that we loved telling stories. We wanted to do it always and forever and maybe…maybe we wanted to tell OUR OWN STORIES. Maybe we wanted to CHANGE THE DEFAULT. Can you imagine? The audacity! Graduates of a school that doesn’t cost money, with a “student body” made of mostly women, CHANGING THE DEFAULT.
Because here’s where I’m going to pivot a little, and tell you a filthy, filthy secret: lots of men write fanfic too. It’s just that sometimes they can get away with calling it “homage,” or “public domain,” or “licensed work,” and get on with their bad selves. Maybe more importantly, the world calls it all those things.
Fuzzy Nation? Fanfic. Wicked? Fanfic. Every X-Men comic written since Claremont stopped? Fanfic. Your beloved Hamilton? Real-person fanfic. Songfic, even.
When men write fanfic, there is a tendency for the media to report on it as “transformative” and “transgressive” and “a new take on a classic story.” When women do it, the same media goes “hee hee hee she wrote about dicks.” Am I blaming the men who tell the stories? Fuck, no. Anybody gets to tell any story they want to. But when the conversation is always framed as “HE makes LITERATURE, SHE writes TRASH,” that is the schema people seize upon. That is the narrative we live.
The Default, now, is that a man who writes fanfic is uplifting and transforming, showing us the pearl within the oyster, whereas all the woman wants to show us is the “pearl” in the “oyster,” in the Victorian sense. AND THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE VICTORIAN SENSE. But this is just an updated version of the “men write literature, women write romance” conversation that’s been going on since I was a wee small Seanan sneaking my stepdad’s Playboys. And this is a problem. Women who admit they wrote (or still write) fanfic get shit upon, over and over again, because we keep saying, and allowing the media to say, that fanfic is trash, and that by extension, we who write it are garbage people.
It gets used as a “gotcha.” I have experienced it directly, the interviewer who drops their voice, leans in conspiratorially close, and asks if the rumors that I used to write…those stories…are true. They always look so damn shocked when I respond with a cheerful, “Oh, yeah, my agent initially contacted me because she really enjoyed my Buffy the Vampire Slayer Faith/Buffy porn!” And usually, that’s where they change the subject, because I won’t be properly ashamed. I am supposed to be ashamed of my past. I am supposed to repudiate the school where I learned to hold an audience; I am supposed to bury the bodies of all the girls who made me. I refuse.
Fanfic is a natural human interaction with story. Children do it before they know its name. People who swear they would never do such a thing actually do it all the time, retelling fairy tales and Shakespearean dramas and family anecdotes in new lights and new settings. FANFIC WILL NEVER DIE. We need to acknowledge that fact: we need to accept that fanfic is never going away, and that it would suck a sack of wasps through a funnel if it did, because we need it. We need to center old stories in new ways, to update The Default, and yeah, to see some vampire peen.
So if you know someone who wrinkles their nose at fanfic, or who would tell a former fanfic author that their original fiction is somehow worth less because of their roots, or who is just generally an impacted asshole with legs, remember:
They are wrong. Fanfic is beautiful. Writing fanfic teaches you important storytelling skills. I have a funnel and access to wasps. Thank you for coming to today’s episode of Seanan Gets Mad About Things, and join us next time for No It’s Not All Porn And There Wouldn’t Be A Problem If It Was.
Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and several other works, both standalone and in trilogies. She lives in a creaky old farmhouse in Northern California, and was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear fives times on the same Hugo ballot. The Wayward Children novella series —Every Heart a Doorway, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Beneath the Sugar Sky and the upcoming In An Absent Dream—is available from Tor.com Publishing
Is it good to take someone else’s story and change it in substantial ways?. If I wrote a character, I wouldn’t want someone else going back and altering what I wrote for their own story. I made that character a certain way for a reason, and whether I did a good or a bad job, they’re still my creation and shouldn’t be adjusted by someone else.
@1 – but why is this a bad thing? Are you harming the author in any way by doing this? To modify someone else’s creation…why…that’s what humans do. We take in experiences and stories and we swirl them around inside our own imagination and we breathe out something new and different and hopefully beautiful. Is this a bad thing? We’re inherently creative and I don’t see how it is wrong to use our creative powers thus. Are you depriving the author of something by writing fanfic? I think not.
Would I necessarily agree with what someone else wrote about my own created characters and stories? Perhaps not, but would I deny them the privilege of participating in the creative process? Never.
I absolutely never saw a problem with fanfic like this and I read a lot of it.
My guess is it is an author thing. As an author making your living from selling books you have a strong incentive to be against free reading material on the Internet. Fanfiction doesn’t help with promoting less read material, so the existence of fanfiction is really only a negative for an author who wants to make a living.
As a consumer I absolutely love fanfiction. It’s a playground for weird ideas and concepts which you’d not see in published books, naturally because many are not viable for (whole) books. I’d even say that literary new development will come to fanfiction first at this point (like e.g. LitRPG).
@1 The original canon still exists. No one is making your original creation disappear. Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton exists simultaneously with Hamilton the Musical and both exist with The Hamilton Mixtape (wherein Lin-Manuel Miranda recruited people to fanfic his historial real person song-fic.)
Fanfic adds dimension and it explores different paths. It doesn’t destroy or invalidate an original work.
John Rogers (Leverage, Librarians, Global Frequency, etc) even goes so far as to say that “fanfic is the sign of a healthy show.” And Neil Gaiman has said on multiple occasions that he won a Hugo for his Sherlock/Cthulhu crossover fanfic.
@1 There’s always going to be a version of your character that’s in a person’s head which is different from the character on the page. Does it make that much of a difference if the other version is written down, too?
@3 Fanfic doesn’t necessarily hurt published authors. The reader is always going to finish a book before the next one is written and there’s already more entertainment choices out there to keep any potential reader busy 24/7/365. Adding a few thousand hours of potential reading material doesn’t make much of a difference.
On the other hand, I don’t know how gay romance writers compete with fanfic.
@1 If you feel that way, then keep the characters to yourself. As soon as you share them with someone, even if all they are doing is listening to you read the story or all they are doing is read the story, they’ve already started deviating from your vision. Talk to any published author and they’ll tell you the words they use most often with fans are something along the lines of “no, what I meant was…”, because sharing a story is a transformative act in and of itself. Every one you ever shared a story with has a different version of that story in their head.
And they are going to go and talk about those stories and characters with their friends, who will change it again and again and again, in every interaction. Storytelling is a collaborative artform, much as Disney might hate it (any word on how Disney changing the law for Steamboat WIllie this time, btw, only six years to go now, time is pressing on), and it will always be a collaborative artform. If you want your stories and characters fixed only in the way you conceived them, then you better keep them in your own head.
@3 and @5 John Scalzi once called fanfic the methadone that fans use when he isn’t cranking out the heroin of the original property fast enough.
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/04/11/reader-request-week-2005-creative-commons-and-fanfic/
It is basically free advertising and a way of keeping the momentum and interest going between books that helps drive sales. I’d agree with that. One of my favourite fandoms is Ranma 1/2, which I occasionally still write the odd bit of fanfic for. You know which channel aired the cartoon in the UK? Trick question, none of them. Yet I have far too many DVDs of the show on my shelves. I have the full run of the manga too. I have them because I encountered it through fanfic and fanactivity. And because fanfic and fan interest was so prevalent it became worth someone’s while to license the show and manga for release in the UK. Fanfic made Rumiko Takahashi (and the publisher, and everyone else with a hand in the pot) a lot of money. Authors shouldn’t, in general, fear fanfic costing them money.
I write fanfic for the sole reason of having a Default I could identify with. Yes romance is often at the centre of those fics but again, where else was I and others like me to find an alternative in mainstream media? Times are changing but not enough to allow for proper representation. Kids are always going to want to see themselves in a story, and the lucky ones get to go on to make a living doing that. For the rest of us we have the sites we do, and fandoms we love to see or write stories we can relate with.
@5 – As a former romance writer – pretty well actually! Some people like original fiction, some people like both. (Though it is not without its own Major Issues, but that’s another thread.)
Everything you’re saying is true. The moment a story is written or told, the audience places their own interpretation on it, and it’s never the same as the author’s. I don’t think fanfiction harms authors financially, and it’s not a bad thing.
If I was an author, though, it would still irritate me to have people having my characters act in ways different from the ways I wrote them to act. I don’t think it’s a rational thing, but I would feel territorial about my own creations, even though I often look at other people’s writing and create my own mental headcanon for how things could be better. I can see how it would be difficult to have someone else playing with the story you put so much time and effort into building.
“Fuzzy Nation? Fanfic. Wicked? Fanfic. Every X-Men comic written since Claremont stopped? Fanfic. Your beloved Hamilton? Real-person fanfic. Songfic, even.”
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyone?
Isn’t “Shakespearean drama” just Holinshed fanfic anyway? :P
I honestly think that a lot of straight women wrote Male/Male because man on man sex is hot to many heterosexual women.
Thank you for this. Fanfiction taught me everything I know about story structure and developing characters.
The fact that everyone goes into it knowing the same canon means you have a community where people actively care to engage you with your work, even before you know what you’re doing. You all can grow together as writers. It can be a stepping stone to creating your own original works, especially since you already know how to engage in feedback, or it can just be something for fun.
Without “fanfiction”, there would be no contemporary works involving Sherlock Holmes or Dracula, and we wouldn’t have the enormous amount of media to pick from if these properties were being guarded by an estate. Transformative works can have real impact, and you’ve probably read more of them than you think! Biopics that fictionalize true events in an interesting way, historical novels that invent conversations Anne Boleyn had… The instinct to take something known and rework it to your own creation is a common one, and not inherently non-literary.
Dear dptullos,
Yeah, I mean, we would never idolize an author who did that. I mean /Shakespeare/ would nev… oh, you mean he took almost all his plots from earlier works? Ummm.
Well, James Joyce would never… you say Ulysses was in dialogue with the Odyssey? hmmm.
Look, your original work still exists. No one has made it not exist, but people get to re-tell it, interact with it, and react to it. The history of literature is, frequently, the history of fanfic that we don’t call that.
Let it go. Unless you want someone else to come in and find every place where you are actually retelling an old story and make you stop, just let it go.
The joy of stories is in their variations. And I’m betting that your stories aren’t nearly as entirely original as you seem to think they are. We’re all working with themes and memes and schemas and tropes. That’s how stories work.
And, again, their ‘adjustment’ does not actually touch your work. Your work still exists just as you wrote it.
What you said times infinity.
I’ve been working on The Great Swords and Sorcery Novel for most of the last thirty years (yes, that dates me). Then about six years ago, I stumbled into the *oddest* fanfiction that a middle-aged male could possibly write. Yep, MLP. A year later, I had a half-dozen stories up, and a staggering amount of reality slapped in my face about my poor writing skills. Another year of hard-fought study and improvement later, I had progressed to the point where my editors no longer fled screaming from my every run-on sentence and bizarre sentence construction. So I wrote on the most improbable topic that I could find: MLP romance stories. Oddly enough (and even odder for people who know me as a complete introvert), I was fairly successful, and my skills grew to the point where I’m in the top 100 writers on the site. Yeah, it shocked me too.
Since then, I’ve written over a million words of fanfic, from a Bolo crossover to a story about a young character who plans on drifting down the river on a raft until he finds his destiny (sound familiar), and even my critics say I’m getting better.
I’m *still* not quite to the point where I’m ready to quit my job and write for a living (because I don’t want to live under a bridge, most probably), but soon. Very soon.
Or maybe I’ll just keep writing fanfic. It’s been a blast so far and shows no sign of stopping.
“Going pro” is not the brass ring for every fanfic author, nor should it be; fanfic is a genre unto itself in some ways, and there are people who thrive within its conventions and constraints who would be miserable doing anything else.
THANK YOU, THANK YOU,THANK YOU for this. Early in my fanfic career someone commented that I was so good, I should think about going pro. When I responded that doing that wasn’t for me, they were utterly shocked. I’ve been writing fanfic on and off for about ten years now and I still feel like that’s the best place for me. Known in certain circles, but not too well known to make my head big. *G*
@6
I’m just looking for an explanation why someone would be angry with authors writing fanfiction.
If you have an established fanbase, fanfiction obviously doesn’t hurt you and even promotes your work. But people will write fanfiction for orignal work that a lot of people have read, or where there is already a lot of fanfiction (like Ranma 1/2).
But how do you use fanfiction to promote your original works where there isn’t already a fanbase? I guess you can write cross-over fanfiction like Andrew Seiple did, so OP could write a October Daye/Harry Potter cross-over fanfiction. But then you are giving your work away for free and it’s also kind of more icky then writing normal fanfiction or crossing over already popular works.
There is more to life and community spirit than money. I think that might be harder to get across these days, when there are no more large community hubs that everyone comes to, but it is still true nonetheless. I do miss the mailing lists, the juggernaut forums, and the webrings. They did make it easier to see worth in more than just financial terms, as well as to provide community focuses for discussing meta issues as well as just fanfic.
I can see how authors would be angry about fanfic writers who charge for their work (take commissions, solicit tips, etcetera) because the characters are the authors’ intellectual property and if anyone is making money off them it should be the authors themselves (and those with whom they’ve made financial arrangements). I don’t really see a legitimate argument to the contrary. Some may argue that this kind of fanfic ultimately increases the value for the author by providing free publicity and so forth, but it seems to me that ultimately it’s for the author to decide whether anyone else is permitted to make money off their characters.
As to the question of whether writing fanfic helps burgeoning authors, I think it may be a more mixed bag. Does it help some? Certainly. Without question. For others, does it teach them bad habits – tired tropes, hackneyed phrasing, over-reliance on manufactured drama and smut to the exclusion of plot – I think that’s a fair point too. That’s not to say that there’s not great fanfic out there. There is. IMHO the best of it is that which doesn’t *read* like fanfic.
Shared world anthologies and novels based on a media product (like Star Wars an Doctor Who books) are a close cousin to fan fiction. People get the opportunity to play in another author’s sandbox. The only difference is, they get paid for it.
I tend to think that fanfic is primarily female because it’s unpaid work. (This isn’t a criticism – I agree with comment #18 that there’s more to life than money.)
I still remember quite a few fanfics very fondly – and wish I could know if their authors ever continued writing under other names/their real name – whether professionally or not.
Shout out to the writers of the stories I remember just as well as the novels I’ve read, even a decade later:
The Red Dragon Tetralogy (& all Lisalu’s other stories), which turned the often-hokey/comedic Dragonball Z universe into a R-rated space-faring epic.
“Ghost in the Shell”, an alt-S5 Buffy fanfic where resurrected Buffy comes to in Faith’s body.
“Tales From the House of the Moon”, a Inuyasha what-if about Kagome in college, who discovers stories from the feudal era that lead her back to the well.
Great article, thanks for sharing it. I just wanted to point out that ‘cisgender’, just like ‘transgender’ is an adjective and shouldn’t have -ed tacked on to the end. It is a descriptor of someone’s identity, not something being done to them (as in the case of ‘being misgendered’). It might seem like a small point to certain readers but for many of us it matters quite a bit. Thanks!
Fanfic can be drawerfic – Nyarlahotep knows I’ve written my share – and it can be included on the Tiptree Long List, as referenced on this here website. If you read nothing else of Known Associates, have a look at the bibliography: the research into queer culture of the 1930s is impressive.
Like any hobby, the end results of the effort can be all over the map, but I’d never tell my brother or nephews that if they aren’t working towards a slot on the PGA Tour, they shouldn’t bother to pick up a golf club. Not everything will be to everyone’s taste: I personally think of the Moffat/Gatiss Sherlock series as fanvids with a really rockin’ budget. The books by Conan Doyle remain unaffected on the shelf.
@No. 22: I literally gasped out loud when I saw your mention of RDT. It’s been 15 years and three computers since I first stumbled across Lisalu’s works and I still look for them now and then. Frigging amazing. And the fanart!
As an author of both fanfic and originalfic, addressing the “but my characters!” part…
Yeah, I’m sure that people could write fanfic, with my characters or even my worlds, that I would get peevish about. (Indeed, true story: I’ve had fanfic-about-my-fanfic that I went… “Welp, fine; that’s not canon for my fic. It’s AU of AU. AND THAT’S OKAY. (But I’m not gonna incorporate any of it.)”
But A: I don’t have to incorporate it into my own canon. (Indeed, must not do so, if it’s my originalfic!) And B: I don’t have to read any of it if I don’t wanna, ahahahaha! Write all the twincest you want, ficcers! Fic the orgies! Drop in a disclaimer that this is out of character — well, the orgies, anyway — and I’m more than good. And C: to prevent people from worrying that I’ve been filching the good ideas (see A, above), I probably shouldn’t be reading any of it anyway.
(Now, it can be polite to discover and respect the wishes of the authors you fic. E.g., I know of an author who was burned by someone writing wildly out of character orgy-type stuff and then sending it to the author. Which, uh, kind of ruins it for the rest of us because someone wanted to hurt the author through their own characters. So don’t do that, geeze. People who use fanfic to hurt an author instead of just quietly writing fix-fic for themselves and everyone on AO3… Ugh, no. That’s different from honest transformative work. Even if you hate it and are fix-ficcing it, don’t tell the author. Allow the screen of civility to protect us in a civilized fashion!)
But anyway. Out of sight, out of mind. A good idea for anyone hoping to have so many fans that, statistically, some of them will be fanfic-writers. ;)
Okay I read the whole article and I don’t really get what you’re trying to say fanfic news fanfiction I love fanfiction I’ve been reading fanfiction since the 70s that’s right I’m old and I’m proud of it and I know how to use these new-fangled computers I’m going to be honest I really don’t understand what you’re trying to say it was kind of weird to me but again I’m from a different error so I will admit that
“When men write fanfic, there is a tendency for the media to report on it as “transformative” and “transgressive” and “a new take on a classic story.””
I assume this is why tor.com has been shilling Ready Player One so aggressively.
@22
Let me tell you about the time I stumbled blindly across TRDT and left Lisalu’s archive 13 hours later, gobsmacked, confused, and viewing the entire idea of Literature from a profoundly different perspective. Good Lord in Heaven that woman can write. I still to this day think about that story whenever I see anything DBZ related, and that was YEARS ago.
In other cultures where “the default” changes based on genre, women/girls are still the main fanfic writers. For example, Japanese manga; there is plenty of manga focused towards and staring teenage girls, just as there is plenty focused towards and staring teenage boys. And there’s quite a bit of manga staring gay men (though its biggest buyers are women rather than gay men). Yet, the majority of fanfic and fan-manga is still written by women. (And since a lot of fan-manga is sold, it’s not about it being unpaid work either.)
So, there must be something else that attracts women, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people to fanfic.
Now I have no idea about the women part, but as a pansexual, slightly effeminate/flamboyant transman I can give my opinion on the rest. I think it’s that heterosexual, cis, gender-conforming people are just more likely to be able to lead the life they desire without anyone ever telling them (nor implying) it’s wrong/bad or not available to them. They’re fine with putting the pretending behind them as they grow up because their real life is good enough. But the rest of us still have a longing.
I suppose the same might go for women when they’re told they can’t be the hero, but that doesn’t explain what happens when they aren’t told that (to use the example of manga again, there’s a prolific genre dedicated to girl-heroes, the Magical Girl genre; ironically the first stuff in this genre was inspired by the American sitcom Bewitched).
“I am supposed to be ashamed of my past. I am supposed to repudiate the school where I learned to hold an audience; I am supposed to bury the bodies of all the girls who made me. I refuse.” YES.
I discovered fanfiction.net at age 19. I didn’t grow up reading other peoples’ fanfiction. But I wrote my own, for myself. And indeed it was self-insert wish fulfillment fantasies – like all of the fiction I wrote, from then to now. When I started posting on FFN and reviewers gently pointed out that I was warping the setting to an unbelievable degree, I literally responded “Well, that’s the point. If this story hadn’t been unthinkable to canon characters, I wouldn’t have written it.” When I later learned the term “Mary Sue,” I embraced it as a convenient shorthand description for what I wrote and a community of like-minded writers. Friends have since convinced me that I do myself no favors by labeling my work with the term, but I continue to mentally use it and do what it describes, because it’s what I have always loved to do. My girls are what they are, what I meant them to be, made for myself, and I will not reject them. With no intention of becoming a published fiction writer, I see no need.
Sure, it felt a bit different when I thought I was the only one doing such a thing. Discovering fanfiction communities can be the death knell for our delusions of originality. But so can ordinary fiction. As TV Tropes demonstrates, everything a person can imagine has already been portrayed many times. And as I’ve learned in recent years, pretty much every plot point I ever envisioned or wrote has already been written by Seanan McGuire. Though as far as I can tell, I’m still the only person to ever write fanfiction about the puzzle book Monster Mazes.
Honestly, I dabbled in fanfiction a bit, but I’ve always been more interested in coming up with my own original stuff. I’m not going to criticize anybody who enjoys writing fanfiction, though, just because it’s not my thing. Anything that gets people to flex their creative muscles can only be a good thing.
Fanfiction is, primarily, an act of love. And, yes, an act of creation. Every fanfic can be traced back to the simple “what if” that forms the root of any story.
Fanfiction is often saying to the original authors, “I love your work so much. Here, look what I did! Look what your story inspired me to do.” And I think that’s beautiful.
If I ever write a story that gets published in print, I would think it the highest honor to discover fanfiction of my work.
For anybody considering reading Lisalu, she takes the then-popular tropes (Saiyans bite when they mate, Saiyans rut like stags, Kidnapped by the Deadly Space Prince, etc.), removes the wish fulfillment safeties, and examines the result. Some of what she comes up with is just plain brutal. But if you want to read about how a smirking planetary mass murderer could plausibly end up married to a resident of one of his targets without Stockholm syndrome being involved, it’s most definitely worth your time. Must be familiar with Dragon Ball Z.
The Red Dragon Tetralogy is here. (It’s still there! Adimra’s still paying for the site!) Click “Back to Fanfiction” for more works by Lisalu.
I notice a bunch of LMB readers in this thread, and Herself is certainly a great exemplar of what this piece is about.
She originally started writing Star Trek fanfic in the 60s, and her own attitude to fanfic writers riffing off her own work is refreshingly pragmatic (don’t send it to her and don’t publish).
Since more than one multi-award winner has done it, starting off in fanfic seems to be an excellent incubator of the craft of the talented and persistent.
I’ve heard authorial advice to the effect of “Write the kind of stories you want to read.” Isn’t that what fanfic is? You come across a book, graphic novel, film or TV show with great characters, a great “-verse” but the stories didn’t go quite the way you wished they had, or the author seemed to ignore certain story potentials you thought would be interesting. You take the step, make the commitment and write a fanfic that re-imagines character dynamics in a different way or creates a story plot that pushes those characters into territory you feel was not explored, and you want to explore it, so you write a fanfic that does.
Now, another point. Action figures. What are “toy” action figures for (apart from those who collect pristine never-unboxed complete sets of same for “investment” purposes) if not to encourage you (to spend big bucks buying their action figures) to create and “play out” your own stories using what are essentially other people’s characters and story settings? How is this different from creating fanfic?
And isn’t writing fanfic just like writing for a TV show, just without the requirement of having to make the stories conform to “biblical” canon? (and not getting paid. . .)
When the original Star Trek first came out, I hadn’t watched too many episodes (yes, I’m that old) before I started shipping Spock and Uhura in my head. Guess I wasn’t the only one . . .
As I understand it, the idea of writing wholly original stories about wholly original characters is relatively new in the history of storytelling: before printing stepped into make transmission of stories easier, they were all told in person by someone speaking out loud to an audience, and the custom was to tell and retell old stories maybe with a bit of a twist. Oh, sure, people wrote them down eventually but the main point was to preserve the story rather than to produce something new.
Shakespeare was already mentioned, but I know I’ve heard Homer discussed in this context: I just wish I knew enough to recall whether he was the original or the fan-ficcer ;-)
@@@@@ 37 If I recall correctly, Homer was probably the fan-ficcer. Not the originator of the stories, he’s just told the best-known version, in other words.
Oh, also, now that I’m thinking of it, in the same vein of ancient Greek literature, the only “fanfic” I ever finished was a riff on Catullus’s “Death of Sparrow” that I wrote for a Greek Classics course in college after my pet mouse died.
I don’t know, taking a poem about the death of a pet sparrow and writing an homage about the death of a pet mouse seemed appropriate somehow. I think I wrote several poems for that class, in the form of a Greek lyric or elegiac poem, but I think that was the only one that had a direct correlation to a specific work that I recall.
@38 Not Greek but Norse, but I imagine people sitting around a fire shouting prompts at a skald: Crossdressing! Fake Relationship! Thor! *raucous laughter*
Especially for the written versions we have which would not be the same as those spoken. It’s like a reverse podfic.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I’ve been reading and writing fanfic since I was 10 years old (24 years, holy crap). Some of what I’ve read is terrible; some is absolutely the best storytelling I’ve ever seen. I’ve shared very, very little of my own, but I can see just how my stories from back then (shudder) compare to the stories I write now because PRACTICE.
I would love to write something of my own, but I haven’t yet been able to structure that world. I’ve struggled with that frustration for a while, but this helps remind me that IT’S OKAY to just write my little fics and enjoy it. Thank you so so much. <3
@19 “IMHO the best of it is that which doesn’t *read* like fanfic.”
But what “reads like fanfic”? I think what you’re trying to say is that some fanfic is good writing and some isn’t– obviously. You’re conflating fanfic with bad writing, which is kind of shitty. Fanfic communities give amateur writers a forum to put their work out in the world without any of the supposed checks and balances that published works get– you can just write a story and hit submit, no editing or proofreading needed. So there’s a lot of rough fic out there– but there are also terrible books that have been published by pro publishing houses the world over, and fanfic that has been rigorously reviewed and researched and edited before being put out for the public to read. The two are not synonymous.
To say something “reads like fanfiction” is part and parcel of the dismissing and diminishing of a body of work that is mostly written by women. It’s an insidious false equivalency that feeds into this idea that fanfic is somehow less worthy, that it’s not “real” writing. Which is kind of the entire POV Ms McGuire was encouraging people to interrogate and deconstruct in her essay.
@39 Denise L – Interesting you should mention Catullus, as I was reading the article I was thinking about Catullus 16, which effectively comes at the “men write literature, women write romance” problem from the other side, in that he’s defending himself (in really quite… colourful… language; definitely NSFW) against the insinuation that writing romance poems somehow makes him less of a man. And he, like many of his contemporaries, was a fanfic writer – Catullus 64 is a Peleus/Thetis fanfic with a one-sided Ariande/Theseus fanfic inserted via tapestry-based flashback.
I cut my writing teeth on fanfiction and I’m proud of that. Its community was welcoming, encouraging even, and it did wonders for the shy young woman I was. Feedback was critical but never cruel. I got better with every story I put out. And yes, several did involve sex, but then again, so does the original fiction I write. I’m not ashamed of that, either.
Thank you greatly for this article. I think I am the only person online who writes Forgotten Realms crossed over with Magic the Gathering fanfiction. I began thinking up my fanfiction ideas after discovering Forgotten Realms in 1995 and 1999.
A few years ago I made a mistake that almost made me give up writing fanfiction. Being naive, I decided to link a fanfiction story to a certain author in a certain website community group on their birthday to show how much I appreciated their writing. Ouch awful mistake. Turns out I was entirely unaware that Wizards of the Coast has outlawed fanfiction of Magic the Gathering and Forgotten Realms. I was told by many group members and the author to delete all my said fanfiction and never write again.
As a result I had a temporary nervous breakdown. This is because I turned to writing the fanfiction in question based on our Earth to save my sanity after I learned I had Asperger’s Syndrome (Autism Anxiety Disorder) in high school in 1999. In real life I still have problems making friends but I found out my family and many people I game and rp with online like my stories. I even term my fanfiction as “roleplaying based fanfiction” because each story came about by me roleplaying into the fanfiction being written.
I lost a major free safe outlet for my fanfiction to be seen online when the Creators.co portion of Moviepilot ended and not long afterwards when Moviepilot.com recreated their website so Creators like me could no longer submit their articles online. I tried AO3 a few times until I lost my website access.
So I am an advocate for letting people write fanfiction as long as they publicly say they are doing it freely to honor the authors, to make more people interested in where the characters events and settings first were canonized, and as a safe outlet to express one’s freedom of expression.
I am a published author of young adult novels, and I cut my teeth writing fanfic. I started when I was about 10. I will not lie. I still love to read and write fanfic. It’s a not so guilty pleasure of mine. I completely agree that writing fanfic is the most rigorous writing school. If my characterization was not on point, I was told my characters were OOC. I feared that. I learned how to write in many styles and different voices. I tried on things until I found my own blend of writing, and from there, I went out and did my thing. Fanfic helped me hone my writing skills.
As an author, and English teacher, I love fanfic. My students have asked me before what my thoughts are, and while I know some authors do not like their works to be written about, I personally do not mind it, and I told my students that. Imagine my surprise one day when a student of mine rewrote a scene from one of my books. To me it was the highest form of flattery, and I loved to see her interpretation of my characters. It gave her confidence in her writing, too, because she was able to take what she already knew and go from there, focusing on a different conflict. She didn’t need to create characters, setting, backgrounds, basic plot, because that already existed for her to play with.
So HELL YES to all of this. Fanfic forever!
I have no doubt that the things you are saying occur/have happened/will continue to happen. It’s sad, all the trolling and flaming that goes on on the Internet, most of the people doing it feeling safe in the relative anonymity the Web provides. I’ve written blog posts, response blurbs to Internet stories/news, lots of stuff. No one knows my gender or color generally speaking, and that’s fine. I happen to be white, male and predominantly English speaking, with a dash of french for good measure. I personally try to limit my critique (s) to more substantive issues, like whether or not I agree with the subject matter or like or dislike the way it is presented than any remarks on gender or whatever. If the subject is one I have no interest in I simply will decline to continue reading in most cases. No sense ripping into anyone because their hero is a gay man in my opinion, I’d be more apt to criticize if I thought the characterization was weak or unrealistic. Nicely.
That said, I don’t enjoy reading sci-fi/fantasy novels that contain graphic sex scenes no matter what the couple is, be they one guy one girl, 2 men or 2 women, or alien on human, or whatever. The scenes add nothing to the story, and imo, the culmination of the budding love can be dealt with tastefully and behind the scenes. Implied rather than written.
All that said, I have no intention, now or ever, of reading books that have say, a transgender protagonist. I can not see any way that I could ever identify with such a character. I would protest to the death over everyone else’s rights to read and write such stories, as I have no issues with any particular sexual preference a person could have or wish to read about. It just isn’t for me.
I’ve been writing fanfic for about ten years, and really, the joy of it for me is giving free entertainment to others.
I LOVE hearing that someone was so moved that they laughed or cried (well, I specialize in humor, so prefer the former) or thought about it later, but basically, it’s hugely satisfying to get the likes/kudos/upvotes and fantastic feedback from other fans of the films/shows I write about.
Could I write original stuff? Sure, probably. And then get it published or self-published, and maybe get some Amazon reviews and a few bucks out of it, but I have thousands of comments from readers now, and tens of thousands of “likes” and nearly a million hits.
I mean, I have a day job already. This is for fun.
It seems like this would be a productive spot for people to place links to their favorite fanfiction stories. If one of the problems with fanfiction is sorting the wheat from the chaff, then it would help to have “editors” who can help other fans locate good works rather than having to rely on random chance.
It would also be an opportunity for posters who write fanfiction to share what they’ve done and get feedback. I see a lot of posts from people talking about what they’ve written, and it makes me curious.
dptullos, that editing process has existed for decades. It’s what fan fiction zines were all about. The modern trend toward posting just anything at all on some fanfic websites has blurred this, but responses from readers can still help separate “the wheat from the chaff.”
The obvious question, though, is whose decision is it about which is which? Clearly the writer liked it, or it wouldn’t exist. If folks are reading a fanfic piece and enjoying it, then it should exist.
I’ve only been an occasional reader of fanfic, and following Sturgeon’s law, 90% of it is crap, but the fact is that there’s good stuff out there, too. Seanan McGuire isn’t the only modern pro who started out by writing fan fiction. She’s just one of the best from that side of fandom who wanted to turn pro. Other pro writers, Mercedes Lackey being my other favorite, got their starts from writing stories, poems and even songs for other fans. Fans writing fiction and dreaming of turning pro goes back to at least the 1930s in science fiction. I’ve seen some of the stuff that Ray Bradbury and his friends wrote back then. Most of it was awful, but there were the good bits, too, and that’s what matters.
This thread has been discussing Classical intertextuality and ancient fanfic for this long and no one has mentioned Ovid yet???!!
@39 Since we’ve been talking about racy fics already I’m going to ruin your memories and let you know that many Latinists don’t think the sparrow poems are about a sparrow. Hint: Martial has a poem in which he brags “My dove is bigger than Catullus’ sparrow. . .” OK, now go reread both the “playing with a pet sparrow” and “the sparrow died”. Sorry/notsorry.
@49 Great idea!!! The Silmarillion thread has been fantastic on this, but obviously it only links to Tolkien First Age fics. I just don’t have time to sift through bad fics looking for good ones.
I wrote the following in May 2010. Nothing has changed since then.
What happens in fanfic… shouldn’t happen
Fanfic seems to be the hot topic right now, and I’ve done some thinking about it.
I understand that Terry Pratchett takes the stance that, as long as he doesn’t have to read it and they’re not stealing from him, he’s okay with it.
George Martin, on the other hand, feels not unreasonably that his creations are his children, and he’d rather not see someone messing with them.
I’ve personally felt that, as long as no one was interrupting my income stream or breaking any copyright laws, I wouldn’t be upset finding fans doing non-canon things with characters I have created. It would be flattering, I felt, that anyone would care enough about who I’ve written into being to create further adventures for them. (I said this, mind you, not having seen any of my darlings subjected to fannish whims; I might feel differently if I knew people were actually doing this.)
But, having thought some upon the subject, I’m edging away from thinking it’d be all right. I don’t have Martin’s reservation but a rather different one:
I don’t want my characters to suffer from bad writing.
Face it. Most fan fiction is of the quality that makes the editor in me want to tear out my eyeballs. It can make David Weber or Dan Brown or even Stephenie Meyer appear literate.
There was a time when anything that was expected to be seen by a lot of eyes had to make its way through a labyrinth on its way to publication – readers and agents and editors and publishers (even fanfic usually went through a fanzine editor before many people read it) – but the Internet has changed all that. Anyone can publish anything that happens to fall off their fingertips into their keyboards and have it seen by hundreds or thousands or even millions of people. As James Burke asked, “When everyone can publish, what happens to standards?” Well, we’ve seen the results on the Net, and they aren’t pretty. They are, in fact, downright frightening. (Half the people who read LOLcats don’t realize the words are misspelled.[Citation needed])
I, for one, would rather spare my fictional characters from being subjected to the brutal ignominy of hackneyed story arcs, mangled syntax, gruesome grammar, and just plain bad Bad BAD writing.
On the other hand, if a producer wants to make a horrid movie from something I’ve written—fine, no problem, full speed ahead, and gawd bless. Just be sure to spell my name right on the check.
I write fan fiction, and while I may not want people associating some of the content with my real name, the fact <I>that I write fan fiction</I> is something I’m not remotely ashamed of. If Dante and Milton are still famous centuries later for writing fanfic of the Bible, it can’t be all bad, can it? :)
I’ve written Star Trek (original series) fanfic for the past five years, and I’ve learned SO much and had SO much fun and made contact with some truly lovely people. Plus I finally have a use for the Spock who lives in my head. :-)
Thanks for defending fanfic, Seanan, and for pointing out that men’s transformative works tend to be seen in a different light than those written by women.
Thanks also for inventing the hilarious religious mice, which I think we should all steal and put in every possible story. :-)
This! Omg, so much This!
Fanfic is THE best school for writing out there! Another thing it teaches? Consistency. Keeping the characters consistent, writing the story over a period of weeks or months…it’s a great exercise.
And the fans have no problem telling you when you get it wrong.
I have my own very embarrassing self-inserts from when I was a kid, and though I have since moved away from that, it gave my lonely child-self a place where I could have friends, and matter. My characters since then, both my own and those I borrow in fic, are shades of me. It’s a safe space, even when concrit is less than constructive and more vicious. I struck a nerve, and sometimes that says more about my audience than my writing skills.
I will never stop reading Fan Fiction, even if I devote myself to my own worlds and my own characters. People should stop degenerating it and sit down and read some pieces. They might learn something about themselves.
I am the author of some mildly popular Harry Potter fanfiction. While I now cringe at the thought of people reading some of it, there is one aspect of the fanfic community that nobody has touched on: the built-in audience. My sort of “main” story has over 13,000 views on the *least* viewed chapter, and one of my better stories (a short, five chapter story) has over 44,000 views on the least-viewed chapter. Some of those are duplicates, perhaps, but as at least one of my stories has been translated to Russian and posted elsewhere, I think in all it’s safe to say I’ve entertained tens of thousands of people with my writing. Though I’m not writing anymore, that’s pretty awesome to think about. I suspect there are a fair number of published authors who can’t say the same (even if they are more skilled than I was and deserve those views more).
I agree in a lot of ways with the article (though I am a Default myself): writing fanfiction and participating in the community taught me so much about writing a story. It gave me a much deeper appreciation for the art and skill involved in creating works of fiction, and a greater respect for professional authors and editors in general.
@@@@@ 52 Wolf Lahti – I can think of one thing that’s changed since you wrote that.
The tense used to refer to Terry Pratchett :(
Not only do I write fanfics (and ironically, MLP fanfics) but I run a server of like-minded authors and readers. I’ve seen stuff in fanfics that rival the best published stuff out there. Sometimes, they go far and above what’s considered the best. And as someone who technically fits “The Default” (but not quite), writing different characters in a primarily female-dominated society is incredibly liberating.
Bless you for this article.
I know of at least two pro writers still doing fanfic online, under pen names. I know a lot more former fan writers who have gone pro, because of what they learned from writing fanfic. I’m one of them. I started writing fanfic because Star Trek was gone and I missed it. I wanted more! I wanted to work out why certain things had happened in those stories and fill in some of the holes.
It’s true, you do learn from it. You have critical readers who will not hesitate to tell you where you got it wrong. You learn characterisation and motivation. You may even learn to publish – I did some fanzines back when everything was printed. So when I was called on to put together a semi-prozine where the contributors were actually paid, I knew exactly what to do.
I always thought slash fiction written by straight, happily married women was because “I can’t have him because he’s fictional, so no female character will get him either!”
I should add that my gay friends laughed at those stories. But I’ve heard interviews about fanfic on the radio and it’s ALWAYS about slash fiction. There’s a certain,”Ooh, aren’t I naughty to be interested in this!! Giggle!” from the interviewer.
Great article. First up..I’m a 63,straight female reader. I read a lot. I usually have 3 books going, a romance, a fantasy and an adventure spy something (love James Rollins), but, everyday I read a lot of fan fiction. II can’t get enough of it. My daughter introduced me to anime a few years ago. The leap to fanfics was a given. I read mostly 12 Kingdoms (not nearly enough of that around), Bleach, Inuyasha (I adore Sess/Kags), Tolkien and anything else that catches my eye. Some of it is terrible but most of it is amazing! The bad stuff is usually due to horrible grammar, misspelling and run on sentences. I try and be a good reader and review. Sometimes I will mention the grammar in the review or I will PM the author. I don’t want to discourage anyone that is brave enough to put a piece of themselves out there. I have made friends with authors much younger than myself and I love the spirit they bring. Really everything old is and can be new again. Like 27 and 36, I’ve been around awhile. Hey all those Star Trek and Star Wars novels are basically fan fiction. Cheers!
I’ll say off the bat I detest fan fiction. I think it is disrespectful to the creators- I feel strongly that the creation is sacred, and that the creator is the only one with the right to add to or take away. The more egregious examples that end up on my radar as someone who avoids it only futher cement that feeling.
I harbor no ill will towards those who like or write it and who (clearly) have different opinions than me. I know some creators encourage or allow it, and I believe the article writer that beautiful writing can be found within fan fiction as well- but it is definitely not a universal rule that fanfiction should be celebrated.
I would love to visit Ged or House Atreides or Lankhmar or any number of worlds again- alas, the portal is closed. Stealing back in or at its worst twisting what has already been given is just not an option for me.
I remember at school being given exercises to rewrite certain parts of novels in a different styles and it was valuable writing practice. I wrote some fan fiction about ten years ago and again viewed it as good practice. Being the worst kind of procrastinator, I was mostly proud of the fact that I actually finished something – I rarely finish anything before or since. The fan fictions were the few creative things I’ve done over the years that I actually completed.
I’m in two minds about fan-fiction. On the one hand, I respect the creators of such worlds and works to not have their visions messed about with. I remember reading Jane by April Lindner (a modern retelling of Jane Eyre), being absolutely outraged by it and wondering how she’d managed to miss the complete point of that book (IMHO of course). I was even more annoyed when her next book turned out to be a modern retelling of Wuthering Heights. I gave it a miss, but can remember my opinion at the time – why couldn’t she get her own ideas instead of bastardising better works? I kind of feel that way about fan fiction, particularly as a lot of it is … well … very badly written and researched.
On the other hand, I do think writing fan fiction is good practice for those who want to eventually write original stuff. You get valuable feedback from people who liked or disliked your writing and, for me anyway, it made me fairly disciplined about writing regularly. I think writing is like any muscle – it atrophies without regular exercise. Fan fiction is great for this.
More interestingly, and something I never see written about, is the changing scope of fan fiction. What was once done through a small fan club, now had a global reach thanks to the internet. There have been several instances over the past few years of fan fiction writers repurposing their fan fiction into “original” works and who have made a hell of a lot of money from it. What are the ethics around this? Rather than debating whether or not fan fiction writers have an embarrassing reputation or not, I’d like to see more debate about that thorny issue when fan fiction writers start making money based from their fan fiction reputations. What do others think about this?
My first two books started as anime fan fiction. I saw all the work I put into them, saw the word count and thought – hey, there’s no reason I can’t turn this into a new book!
My, with the risk of being the unpopular one here, I wonder how we transitioned from gender binary and mostly-white-possibly male centered everything to a disclaimer several paragraphs long because diversity and gender have become high-sensitivity topics where it’s easy to make a false step.
All in all I imagine there is some progress. I’m just perplexed one has to apologize because they’re expressing with polite terms their opinion, and that opinion happens to be from their own experience and consequently, not all-encompassing.
Respect is a monumentally difficult concept indeed.
@56 That’s one of the more appealing things about fanfic for me. I’ve finished a couple of stories that just sit on my hard drive because there’s no obvious market (even if they’re good enough to get someone to pay for them). But any fanfics I finish have an easy to find set of readers.
There is nothing wrong with fan fiction. Write what you love. I know it’s not seen as legitimate by snobs, but unless you’re trying to sell copyrighted material as your own, who cares? Hell, some genres *coughSTARWARScough* are much better in the fan fiction than in the “original” shit that’s been put out. Reminds me of another article/blog:
Dear Dark Dream – Go Ahead: Be a Creative Copycat
@59/sbursztynski: “I started writing fanfic because Star Trek was gone and I missed it.” – That’s the best reason.
“I did some fanzines back when everything was printed.” – Wow. I love fanzines. They have so many things online stories do not – editorials, layout, and especially illustrations. I started reading Star Trek: TOS fanzines when I had run out of pro novels, but I would have liked to be around when they were new.
@61/Mike: “I think [fanfiction] is disrespectful to the creators” – Is this still true when there isn’t a single creator but a whole bunch of people who made up a fictional world together? Most TV shows and some book series are like that. In the original Star Trek’s third season, some of the actual episodes were written by fans. It isn’t a big step from there to fanfiction.
I agree with PN Elrod and her public stance on fanfiction – which is, basically, don’t write fanfic based on stories that still have active copyrights – but then she goes on to point out that there’s a lot of non-or out of-copyright material out there for the picking as has been mentioned upthread (Shakespeare, Ovid, Dante, Homer, etc.). Project Gutenberg is a great place to find such stories.
For the most part, I don’t read fanfic, because I’d rather read original fiction, whether bought and paid for, borrowed, or for free off of such places as FictionPress.com, etc. I’m a big fan of worldbuilding and exploring those worlds, something that rarely happens in fanfic. I like original characters and ideas that result from an author being inspired by something they’ve read and contemplated and then produced their own take on the subject. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy fanfiction. After all, most Arthurian stories have been fanfic since the very beginning, and is a treasure trove for anyone who’s got the time or inclination to write such stuff. I love new takes on old themes and enjoy reading about those characters in settings that would have been alien to their originators.
@52: Oh the irony:
I had to laugh: the writing of some Fanfic can be dire. Especially as SM’s own works are distinctly terrible fanfic!
Interesting fact: I fully support TP’s views on fanfic and love his works. I disagree entirely with GM’s views on fanfic and am completely ambivalent towards his works. Maybe this is because an author’s mindset comes across in what they write, whether they intend it to or not, and GM has always been far to self-important and arrogant IMHO. Maybe this is the Seanan’s pointthough: the one @1’s comments completely miss:
It is arrogant to think that fanfic is lesser than any other work of fiction. As such, it must also follow that it is the epitome of egotism to believe and/or assert that your interpretation of a character is any more important or definitive than anybody else’s interpretation of that same character, regardless of who the original IP belongs to.
I have always believed (and been taught, actually – good parents and good teachers – I’ve been really lucky) that when you publish a work and place it in the public domain, through making that act, you give up all rights to dictate how that work and its constituent parts are interpreted by others. If somebody is then inspired to create their own work based on their interpretation of those constituents, you, as an author, are not being impugned by that other, you are being thanked!
Honestly, to feel threatened by fanfic is to be either extremely shallow and self important (you may as well assert that your work was not even remotely inspired by every single other work you have ever devoured) or to suffer from such a severe frailty of ego that such realisation would be the kind of trigger that would actively prevent the publication of your works in the first place.
Granted, I have never published a direct fanfic (though I have published artwork inspired others), or even published much at all, but some of that work has then been riffed on by others. I did not find it insulting or diminishing. I found it rewarding and gratifying because it means I have been the cause of somebody else’s inspiration. I have been somebody’s muse!
This is one reason why the majority of fiction I read these days is fanfic: because a fanfic author is more likely to be grateful you read their work to start with.
It is by no means the only reason of course. I am one of the ‘lucky’ ones and was born a cisgender white male, but I’m far from straight and Fanfic allows me to have a Default that I can identify with as a gay and a bloke: a Default that is still not very common outside of Fanfic). How much non-pornographic ‘high-brow’ fiction is out there that shows a (predominantly) mundane, everyday gay, like me, having a (predominantly) mundane, everyday life? That’s right: practically none to none, and what there is of it is difficult to find.
Fanfic on the other hand? OH MY GODS! All of my Gods! There is so much fanfic available to tell those stories (some of it dire, some of it amazing, some of it’s not even remotely fabulous, but worth the read more because of that) and it’s all nicely arranged and categorised on free-to-read websites, like Tor, or AO3, or Reddit, or Wattpad, etc.
I’ll finish my TLDR (because damn, can I ramble) with another interesting fact:
Most of the (copious quantities of) fanfic I read is written by female identifying or feminine authors, male identifying and masculine authors (gay or otherwise) barely coming in as honourable mentions. I do not believe for one second that this represents a true demographic of fanfic authors, regardless of how I enjoy their works.
And oh boy do I enjoy them!
@56: Not always a guaranteed audience, depending on the fandom. My four-chapter Keys to the Kingdom story got four reviews by two people on FFN and none at all on AO3 because those books are far less popular and it seems very few of their fans frequent those corners of the internet.
It took you 10 years to go from your first fanfic to getting published?
Good Lord.
I scribbled around with a few lame short stories for a couple months (literally, about 2 months and 4-5 short stories) then wrote a novel. It took about 6 weeks, start to finish. Didn’t sell it, but I did at least get a request for a full read from a major NY agency. That puts us at about 5 months into my career as a writer, I if I’m remembering the timeline properly. 8 months after that–13 months after the first try at a short story–my pen name was on the USA Today Bestseller list. (And no, not because I borrowed someone else’s name. :p )
@No. 70: Yes! It’s part of why I read fanfic. In published fiction I kept running into people like me (autistic) who were victimized, and then dead; or victimized, and then not dead but the story was about the person who rescued them and/or made them “normal;” or inscrutable and somehow magical and not quite human. In fanfic, it’s a lot easier to find a character who needs to practice their self-care in order to avoid a meltdown but then goes on to do things and have adventures. Or somebody who makes a social faux pas for the Nth time, endures the brief embarrassment and frustration, and goes on with life instead of soliloquizing for the rest of the story about how dreadfully abnormal they are.
I also like that the big archives will let authors tell you in advance whether there’s going to be sex instead of just putting it on your plate like grits at a southern restaurant. I am not interested in sex scenes unless they drive the plot somehow, and I get tired of scrolling past them in search of the actual story.
@@@@@#73 I am with you on this for most of what you say. I commented as #45 before registering here.
I have been bitten by the muse to write fanfic on two occasions, for two TV programs – one that had finished with a terrible resolution. The other had been cancelled and then at the last minute picked up by Netflix and there was a long gap in between series and we had no idea what we were going to get (it got another 3 seasons and a pretty good send off)
I write complexity, I write the voices inside the characters heads – the things they think and feel and don’t say. I write the scenes and events that should have happened, the bits the fill in the gaps for when we aren’t there to view them.
And if I say so myself, I write steamingly hot, scorchingly good sex as well, and it was pretty well received by my readers. I don’t talk about it much with people, some of my close friends know, and have had the opportunity to read some. Am I ashamed? Hell no! I don’t talk about it because its a particular interest to me, and not necessarily shared with the people I know, but if it came up in conversation, and they genuinely asked to read it, I would send them links.
I read some stunningly good original fic on AO3 recently based on a rec I saw on Twitter, and it kept me up til 3am to finish it was so damned good. I really hope that author does more in the world, or gets picked up cos it was amazingly good, it even spawned some fanfic of its own :)
https://archiveofourown.org/works/9720611 – this is the stuff that kept me up all night reading it
Until I read this, it hadn’t occured to me that I’ve been creating fanfiction since before I could really write.
I remember when I was a kid hearing fairy tales with my younger siblings and being so irritated that the eldest children were all Bad and the youngest got to go on all the adventures (I was the eldest), and retelling those stories to myself. Then reading mythology and imagining the plethora of doomed maidens as warriors who died in valiant last stands beside their love interests instead of poetic suicides or broken hearts afterwards. When I first read The Lady of Shallot, it never occured to me that the title character fell in love with Lancelot just from seeing him out the window; I was sure that as soon as she looked outside she realized that her curse had been that she’d wasted so much time afraid to look out at the world that she’d never really lived, and was determined to go see it even if it killed her. Which, my English teachers told me later, was not at all a valid interpretation. There are songs on the radio that I constructed stories around: Mrs. Robinson is about a poisoner in an insane asylum after she killed Joe DiMaggio with poisoned cupcakes; Ventura Highway is about a wandering woman searching for a portal to a fantasy land of dragons and purple rain instead of marrying the singer and staying in the singer’s hometown; Invisible Touch is about an invincible assassin; Maneater is about a vicious were-tiger.
There is a lot of bad writing on fanfiction sites. But that’s a natural hazard of beginning writing. And when you find something that is well-written, in-character or has convincingly altered characters, and interesting, it’s like seeing a rainbow or finding $5 in the laundry. And there is so much published bad writing–I think the worst book I ever read was by James Patterson, called Toys. And that”s a widely-read author!
“Fanfic taught me pacing. Taught me dialog. Taught me scene, and structure, and what to do when a deadline attacks. Fanfic taught me to take critique, to be edited, to collaborate, to write to spec. FANFIC MADE ME…An MFA takes three years. My path from fanfic newbie to published author took me more than a decade. It’s not a structured school. There aren’t classes or finals; you don’t get a degree. How fast you learn is tied to how fast you listen, and you can stop whenever you find the place that makes you happy. “
Yes. This. So much this.
@52: Clearly, you’ve been reading the wrong fanfiction. I could name you at least a dozen DBZ fic writers (nothing against other fandoms, that’s just my current mini-obsession at the moment) who write stuff that’s at or near published-fiction quality–and some are better than a lot of stuff I’ve read. I imagine there’s equally good-quality stuff in other fandoms that I just haven’t seen yet.
(Warning: this is going to be a looooong comment.)
I’ve read fics that have a character rescued from a traumatic situation–and then don’t ignore or downplay the fact that it’ll take YEARS for that character to psychologically heal. Unlike a lot of mainstream fiction that’s all “the hero has saved the abuse victim, so now they’ll all live happily ever after,” one of my favorite fics deals in detail with the hero, his family, and the rescued survivor’s family all trying to help the survivor (who’s gone almost completely feral as a result of his trauma) to recover and have the best life he can in a safe, sheltered environment.
I’ve read fics that throw a character into a darker scenario than the original series (and some of DBZ is pretty dark already) and have them basically fight their way out the best they can without breaking character.
I’ve read fics that take characters with a horrible backstory and Fix It. I’ve read fics that take characters with peaceful, happy backstories, swap them with the Horrible Backstory characters, and show how differently each would react to the other’s upbringing.
I’ve read fics that swap one or more characters’ genders, to see how that does and doesn’t change their story. (And no, not all of these have Graphic Adult Content.)
I’ve read crossover fics that ask how one series’ hero would deal with the other series’ Big Bad.
And that’s remembering that most of the DBZ fics I read are romances (or in some, less-proud moments, outright smut). Because of the romance convention that we already know who’s getting together by the end, fanfic writers can focus on making the other aspects of the plot more interesting, so that even if you focus on ONE pairing from ONE fandom, you might find thousands of different versions of them getting together. (Because I’m using DBZ as an example: the canon couple Vegeta and Bulma have literally hundreds of “3 years” fics, focusing on the 3 years that the show skips over, in which V and B end up falling in love–or at least enough “in lust” to make their future son exist. And all of them are different.)
There are some authors whose writing has potential, but is…grammatically unpolished, shall we say. And there are some authors who, when I read their fics, I’m like “Wait a minute–they said English wasn’t their first language, but they write in my first language way better than I do! Why are they apologizing for ‘awful English?'”
The tl;dr version:
“My Immortal” and the various first attempts of 14-year-olds are not the whole of fanfiction. I used to think this, too, but I’ve never been happier to be wrong about something. Ask around for the best authors in a given fandom, and give ’em a shot.
Ah, fanfic.
I spent a lot of my high school and college years writing X-Men-inspired fanfic. It was the ’90s, after all, and dark times for comics in general. Disgruntled and dismayed by the direction the X-line had taken, I worked up my own take on the franchise, populated it with original characters who shared in the same dynamic, and had a lot of fun along the way. I posted it all to the GEnie service (RIP, GEnie). I made mistakes, I learned a lot, and I made some friends along the way… who decided to join in and write their own stories which overlapped, borrowed characters, crossed over, and so on. One of those was Jeremy Bottroff, whose “Brothers in Arms” fanfic lives on in the dusty memories of many. Another was our very own Keith R.A. DeCandido, who, in his typical way, “borrowed” characters and breathed extra life into them, and who inhabited the world even better than I could. (That’s right, KRAD, one of the undisputed kings of licensed fanfic… I mean tie-in novels.)
Honestly, my contributions were lost to time when GEnie went kerplutz, and only exist as 9th generation saved files on copies of copies of jump drives, proof that the Internet doesn’t remember everything. I feel like the 5th Beatle… :)
The point is, I really honed myself as a writer over those years, writing for fun and a small but appreciative audience, and for a small but awesome group of co-conspirators, and it laid the groundwork for what success I’ve accumulated since. Fanfic definitely helped me out when I needed it… and I can only imagine what it would have been like had I started 20 years later.
I did look but I can’t see anybody having addressed one major reason why an author might be opposed to someone writing fanfic of their work: authors have been burned on copyright issues.
I think it was MZB’s Darkover series where a fan caused a fuss over story elements that they claimed to have originated in a fan-fiction, resulting in the book being scrapped, and this is why even if authors say they don’t mind people writing fan-fiction they really don’t want to be able to see it.
Another thing nobody has mentioned is trademarking, which is not the same as copyright, which is passive: if you don’t aggressively pursue infringers of your trademark you stand to lose your trademark rights. I don’t know how many authors resort to trademarking their work but I’m sure I’ve seen the odd ™ dotted around the place.
@80/NotACat: “I think it was MZB’s Darkover series where a fan caused a fuss over story elements that they claimed to have originated in a fan-fiction, resulting in the book being scrapped […].”
Not quite. According to Marion Zimmer Bradley, this is what happened:
“My next project was going to be ‘Contraband,’ […]. Somebody had written a fan novel covering the same time period, and I had read it. It […] contained a few ideas I liked, so I offered the author a reasonable sum of money […] and an acknowledgment in the dedication for incorporating those ideas (not her writing) into my book. […] She wrote back saying that, while she could live with the monetary compensation Id offered, what she wanted was a shared byline.” (Holes in My Yard, 1992 open letter)
Coming to this oh, so late, to say “What she said.” Fanfic was what coaxed me back into writing fiction. I’ve spent a lifetime writing nonfiction for a living, and my early attempts at writing original fiction in F&SF, my chosen niche, had withered and died, leaving typewritten corpses in old boxes of carbon paper … and then the Internet happened, and I discovered online communities (TWoP and RASFF of blessed memory being only two of them), and then Doctor Who got rebooted, and all those factors lured me back into writing fiction.
Well over a decade later, I’ve written more than 100 pieces of fic and meta, from drabble to novel length, in several different fandoms, and I am very happy that I’ve had the chance to do so. I still haven’t returned to writing original fiction, a decision with which I’m quite comfortable, but I have become a much better writer (of fiction and nonfiction) than I was at the beginning of the journey. My creative urges are served, and I try to treat the characters I borrow with respect. Seeing fanfic treated with at least a modicum of the same respect makes me happy as well. Thank you for writing this.
I once read a blog post by a writer for the tv series ‘Blood Ties’, who made fun of fanfic and fanfic creators and basically said, ‘write your own characters’. Not only was he painting fanfic authors with that broad brush, but also authors who write authorized novels like Star Trek or Star Wars, because they’re not writing their own characters. But I really had to laugh at the irony, because HE also made a living writing Other People’s Characters.
Additionally, I bought my mom a ‘Murder She Wrote’ novel for her birthday, which she liked very much because she could imagine the characters as she read it. I told her that she’d basically just read fanfic, only written by someone who got paid for it instead of someone who did it for the love of the characters, some kudos, and a lot of squee.
Fanfic (a retelling of the source material) has always existed, and will continue to exist. How many stories have been told about King Arthur? Dracula? Sherlock Holmes? Mythology? The only difference is that it’s written by *girls* and so seen as lesser. Instead of letting them embarrass us, let’s PWN it.
Fantastic read.
I remember at 12 years old, rewriting Scream 3 on like 80 pages of fax machine paper because I didn’t like what happened. And then seven years later, about a year after Charmed finished and I had re-watched the series on DVD, I opened word doc on my laptop and started to write a fic based on a one off side character I wanted to know more about it went nowhere but three years after that I penned and posted my very first Castle fanfic online (I did take a few years off to find other shows I wanted to write about) and haven’t looked back since.
(Is that Faith/Buffy Porn Fic still available to read somewhere?)
“ew, fanfic is a GIRLY thing, ew, it’s all PORN, and most of it is GAY PORN”
In the salad days of rec.arts.sf.written on USENET, this sort of thing was called “girl cooties”. This might have been a coinage by Lois Bujold.
As a long time fanfic reader and writer, and aspiring author, I love this! I agree with you wholeheartedly. Fanfiction has saved not just my creative soul but literally my life and mental wellbeing on multiple occasions, and has introduced me to some of my best friends. When I finish my current BA I’ll be pursuing a full doctorate specialising in fanfiction.
PS, is your fanfic work still available? Link me!