The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me
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| Title: | The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfiction and the Modern World |
| Creator: | Seanan McGuire |
| Date(s): | April 9, 2018 |
| Medium: | online on Twitter, Tor.com |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | fanfiction, meta, gender |
| External Links: | Full text on Tor.com |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
"The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfiction and the Modern World" is an meta essay by Seanan McGuire. Initially an extended Twitter thread, it was later expanded in a longer piece posted on the Tor.com website.
In the essay, McGuire describes her own history with fanfiction, the relationships humans have had with stories throughout history, the varying forms these relationships take in the modern world, and how the reception of these works frequently depends on the gender of the author.
Excerpts
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. ...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.
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.)
“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.
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.
Reactions and Commentary
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.[1]
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. [2]