S. E. Hinton

Name:	S.E. Hinton
Also Known As:
Occupation:	Novelist, Writer
Medium:	Novels
Works:	The Outsiders
Official Website(s):
Fan Website(s):
On Fanlore:	Related pages

S.E. Hinton is the author of the The Outsiders, a young adult novel she wrote when she was sixteen years old.

She has also written fanfiction and is pro-fanfiction of her own works. She has sometimes criticized fanfiction of her works, but has also claimed to enjoy some of it.

I’ve written three or four stories for Supernatural, which is my favorite TV show. And a few years ago I wrote three Outsiders stories to see what kind of a response I would get. I use a different name, naturally. People would say, “Wow, you really got the characters down right!” And I’d be like, Glad to hear it. The feedback from fanfic readers tends to be really simple. Along the lines of, “Oh my God, I love this! Keep going!” Nothing specific, like what you’d get from an editor. But it is immediate, and there’s something to be said for that.

I seldom spent more than a day writing a fanfic story, sometimes less. It’s something I did for fun, and none of the stories are really meant for more than a few minutes of enjoyment. For The Outsiders fanfiction, I will say that I set the characters in a different time period. And I mean really different. This story would have been historical even when The Outsiders came out. The boys face their first Christmas after the end of the novel, and the death of Ponyboy and Darry’s parents. I was amazed at how incredibly easy it was to get back on the page.

I told two stories from Darry’s point of view, which is an indication that I’m older now. I don’t know if I’d even try one from Ponyboy’s point of view anymore. In the original story, Ponyboy sees Darry as this annoying parental figure who is bossing him around all of a sudden. But writing from Darry’s point of view, I felt a lot more sympathetic towards him. I saw that he was trying his best to be a good caretaker. I didn’t have to alter Darry’s character at all in the new story, because there was plenty there from the original to be enlarged upon.

Two of the best stories I’ve ever read in my life, published or not, were fanfiction. One was actually an Outsiders story. The writing was gorgeous. Really beautiful — the way the writer conveyed the characters. So I wrote to her. She was European, and it took her a while to believe that it was really me. I said, “I think you’ve really got a future in writing, so keep it up.” Fanfiction can make me cry as easily as any other story.

Lev Grossman, S.E. Hinton, and Other Authors on the Freedom of Writing Fanfiction by Emma Whitford for Vulture (APR. 13, 2015)

Hinton and Supernatural Fandom

In a twitter exchange in 2015, S.E. Hinton was dismissive of Supernatural fanfic writers who thought they could write better stories than the show writers, despite writing SPN fanfic herself. See screenshots, here (offline).

One fan responded by writing a screenplay for a SPN episode. The fic, Suck My Dick S.E. Hinton by mnwood, used a quote from Hinton's comments to summarize the work: "One thing that really gets on my nerves:People who think they can write a better #SPN than the writers do. Try it. Just fucking try it." - S.E. Hinton

Further Reading

• Why Fans Dislike S.E. Hinton: A Beginner’s Guide by mishcollin (Nov 12 2013)
• 50 Years After ‘The Outsiders,’ S.E. Hinton Is Sure The Characters Aren’t Gay by Claire Fallon (Jan 9, 2017)

Links

• Wikipedia:S. E. Hinton