-- Hey Princess. -- Hi Lindsay.
So... have you ever... done the fanfiction before?
Yes, many moons ago.
Oh yeah? What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?
Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zutara lives on forever. What about you?
Phantom. [LAUGHTER] Phantom of the Opera, not the Billy Zane Phantom.
The uh... the bad one. The problematic one.
So on a scale from disappointed to disheartened, how deep is your shame?
Um... pretty deep, how about you?
You know. Sometimes I feel ashamed, but other times I'm like, "You know what? I like my trash."
And that is what we are: trash.
Our relationship to fanfic as a concept has changed, but not just fans' relationship to it - the professional
publishing world also has a wildly different relationship to fanfic even from, like, ten years ago.
So what has caused this shift, and what does that change even look like?
Part of the human fascination with narrative is a desire to expand on the stories we hear.
One popular narrative is the story of the trickster hero, like in the American South
we have the Jack tale about a guy named Jack, or in the black diaspora we have the spider-god character
Anansi - these characters have no original author, but over the years have gained popularity
in their communities through oral traditions.
But the modern concept of copyright complicates our relationship to characters and narratives,
which are no longer the intellectual property of a culture, they’re the IP of a person
or a company.
Fanfiction website Archive of Our Own, who I lost a Hugo to last year, co-founder Francesa
Coppa defines it simply as “creative material featuring characters [from] works whose copyright
is held by others.”
There’s kind of an unspoken understanding that you aren’t supposed to make money off
of fanfiction, which is part of why copyright holders usually let it slide.
And as a result it exists in a legal grey area - most IP owners let it exist, and some
even encourage it because it facilitates a good relationship with fans.
But for me, what’s really interesting about fan fiction is the negative connotations that
have dogged it for the last few decades; that fan fiction is embarrassing, that it's neither
real writing, nor a good writing exercise, and that it is something to be relegated to the
daydreams of pre-teen girls.
But not only that, professional authors' relationship to fanfiction has changed.
Many authors began as fanfiction writers, and are kind of out and proud about that now.
Some continue to write it for fun, and sometimes they just
swap out the names of the copyrighted characters and publish their fanfic as original fiction.
Where fanfiction used to be seen as a joke, writers today have been “coming out of the closet"
so to speak about their own history with fanfiction and how it helped form their professional careers.
That’s right, we have Hugo and Nebula winning fanfiction writers now.
*air horn*
Some history -
What we know as fanfiction has its roots not on the internet but in fanzines, specifically
science fiction fanzines from the early 20th century, which actually published fanfiction
at the time.
To Harvard English professor and writer Dr. Stephanie Burt, fan fiction is a phenomena
that has always existed in some form or another as a way for fans to meaningfully interact
with media they like. Says Burt:
“First there were fans of science-fiction novels and magazines who held conventions
and traded self-published journals as early as the nineteen-thirties.
Or: first there was Sherlock Holmes, whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, pushed
for more stories, formed clubs, and wrote their own.”
Some say that fan fiction itself isn’t writing--that real writers don’t participate in it.
That, if you want to write, you have to write original stories.
You know, James Joyce and William Shakespeare and Dante and Salman Rushdie.
Says Burt again: “No clearer path from new writers to potentially interested readers
has existed in the history of civilization….
not all stories are stories that other people will seek out.
If you can work your memories, hypotheses, or fantasies about living away from home,
or about gender transition, or about retirement into a story about Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, maybe
the many people who care about Batman and Robin will care about your thoughts and experiences, too.
This challenges the idea that fan fiction is the toy of the creatively-bereft; that
the only good fiction is writing that is 100% original--why, for example, is John Milton’s
Paradise Lost or James Joyce’s Ulysses 'canon' without ever questioning their originality, even
though they are retellings of the Bible and The Odyssey, respectively?
Well, part of it is copyright jankiness - Ulysses and Paradise Lost are based on stories that
were never copyrighted, because copyright was not a thing in Homer’s time.
We have a wholly different relationship to copyright than James Joyce and John Milton did.
But that can’t be all of it.
Ever since modern fanfiction gained in fanzines, particularly Star Trek fanzines, it’s predominantly
been the wheelhouse of women.
Best-selling author and Hugo winner Seanen McGuire sees the phenomenon as partially a
response to a lack of female-oriented storytelling in mainstream and published mediums.
In her essay “The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fan Fiction and the Modern World”, she writes:
“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.
[...] We stopped writing about ourselves and started writing avatars, characters who could
represent us in the stories without quite being us.”
It’s no coincidence that a large part of the fan fiction community has been built by
women, POC and LGBTQ writers in a professional publishing world that has only relatively recently
begun to represent them.
Fanfiction is having something of a reckoning over the last few years: writers like Seanan
McGuire or NK Jemisin, successful authors who are vocal proponents of what fan fiction
has meant to them as creative minds,
or websites like Archive of our Own creating living documentation of fan fiction’s vast
community while advocating free speech, or academics like Francesca Coppa publishing
both commercial fan fiction and research on the subject.
Star Trek fandom was the starting point for many science fiction professional writers.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg was an early Star Trek fanfic writer.
She went on to publish her own fantasy series, starting in 1974, and Lois McMaster Bujold,
one of the most prolific and beloved science fiction writers still writing today and writer of
the Vorkosigan saga also dabbled in Trek fanworks early in her career.
But these are early examples of professional authors getting their start in fanworks - which
is NOT the same thing as repackaging your fanfiction as original fiction and then publishing it.
When fictional fanworks are re-written and sold as profic, the fannish code for this
is “filing off the serial numbers.”
50 Shades of Grey — which originated as Twilight fanfic — might be the cliche of
fanfiction reworked for publication, but it’s actually been a thing for a while.
There are a few obscure incidences from the olden times - for instance, in 1985 author
Teri White published a Starsky and Hutch fanfic as "Cowboy Blues,” and in 1997 author Susan
Matthews reworked her Star Wars fanfics into "An Exchange of Hostages" and the Jurisdiction series.
You love to see it.
But since the 2000’s, perhaps in no small part because publishers have taken note of
fanfic authors who already have big followings of their own, it’s gone from anomaly to actual trend.
Cassandra Claire was a Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings BNF, which for those not in fandom
parlance know means “Big Name Fan."
She became hugely popular in Harry Potter fandom for her Draco Trilogy, much of which
was reworked into her bestselling Mortal Instruments series.
And a shocking amount of one fanfic subgenre called RPF – which means 'real person fic', which is exactly
what it sounds like – has been reworked for publication... probably because you can’t really copyright
a person, so there’s a lot less copyright jank there.
You can just write about a real person and... pretend it's a fictional character.
After is the most famous example, reworked from the fanfic of the same name about a college
alternate univere, or AU, featuring Harry Styles from One Direction as a... bad Harry Styles,
but there is a truly staggering amount of One Direction fanfic
that has had its serial numbers filed off for publication.
So not only are some authors permissive of fanfiction, even starting their careers as
fanfic writers before making the transition, some just cut out the middle man and publish
their slightly reworked fanfiction as original fiction.
JK Rowling has been generally supportive of fanfiction,
but not all authors have such a benign relationship to the concept of fanfiction.
Authors who aren’t so keen on fanfic range from the mildly disapproving, like uncle
George RR Martin, who has said "My characters are my children…I don’t want people making
off with them, thank you.
Even people who say they love my children.
I’m sure that’s true, I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affection, but still.
No one gets to abuse the people of Westeros but me.”
And the writers of Game of Thrones.
And that brings us to vampire chronicles author Anne Rice, who was once very hardcore with the whole
cease and desist letter thing, to the point where pretty much the entirety of vampire chronicles fanfiction
throughout the 90’s and 2000’s existed on locked down livejournal groups, with some
fans even claiming to have been harassed by Rice’s lawyers.
The characters are copyrighted.
It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters.
I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters.
It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.”
That’s my Anne rice voice.
Although, to her credit, she has mellowed out a little since then.
Even pro authors like Seanan McGuire, who continue to write fanfic themselves, would
prefer that you don’t send your own to them, because it can muddy the waters of whose
idea is whose.
Said McGuire in a tweet from 2017 - “Fanfic is awesome and amazing and I love it and if
you try to tell me about your fanfic, I will shut you down like a Blockbuster Video.”
Some authors have cited a 1992 incident involving author Marion Zimmer - she was initially very
supportive of fandom and fanfiction in particular.
But while writing a new novel, she realized that it touched on themes of a fanfiction
she had already read.
Bradley decided to scrap the novel altogether rather than
risk a lawsuit.
So where fanfic used to exist mostly in the underground in the realm of pure hobbyism
and sometimes in locked LiveJournal communities out of fear of litigious authors,
fanfiction's emergence into the mainstream has changed our relationship to it.
Professional authors are fine admitting their past, and sometimes present, as fanfiction
writers. It’s no longer this shameful activity done in shadow, but an activity that is recognized as
a valid way to improve your skills as a writer.
As Neil Gaiman puts it…
“I think that all writing is useful for honing writing skills.
I think you get better as a writer by writing, and whether that means that you’re writing
a singularly deep and moving novel about the pain or pleasure of modern existence or you’re writing a
Smeagol-Gollum [slashfic], you’re still putting one damn word after another and learning as a writer."
And that is my best Neil Gaiman impression.
How did you know about my Smeagol-Gollum slashfic, Neil Gaiman??
Cease and desist!