The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World

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Title:	The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World
Creator:	Seanan McGuire
Date(s):	April 9, 2018
Medium:	online
Fandom:
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External Links:	The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World, Archived version
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The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fanfic and the Modern World is an essay by Seanan McGuire at Tor.com. It was first published on April 9, 2018, and reposted on October 24, 2019.

Its March 2018 sister-tweet: All right, y'all: we're going to take a moment to talk about my last retweet., ^{Archived version}.

Some Topics Discussed in the Essay, and Comments

• self-insert, wish-fulfillment, avatars, Mary Sue
• "The Default, that strong-jawed, clear-eyed, straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, vaguely Christian (but not too Christian) male"
• "(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."
• writing fanfic as an excellent training ground
• things we think of as original are not that original
• the joy of creative creation
• only one old hoary mention of the Marion Zimmer Bradley Fanfiction Controversy

Introduction

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).

Excerpts from the Essay

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Excerpts from the Fan Comments at the Essay Site

[dptullos]: 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.

[sonofthunder]:

@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.

[Silensy]:

@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 historical 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.

[random22]:

@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.

[M]:

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.

[presley]:

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.

[opentheyear]:

@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.

[Elizabeth McCoy]:

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. ;)

[AKLM]:

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).

[AeronaGreenjoy]:

“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.

[Amber]:

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.

[WOL]:

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 . . .

[NotACat]: 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.

[RH Oubouzar]:

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

[Epiphyta]:

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.

misaffection[]: 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.

[jayarieldrillowup]:

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.

[Jennifer]:

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!

[Lise]:

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.

[Wolf Lahti]:

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.

[Raichael]:

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.

[ sbursztynski:

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.

[EW]:

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?

[fuzzipueo]:

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.

[Berthulf]:

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.

[Jenny Islander]: 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.

[MichaelMJones]:

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.

[NotACat]:

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.

[kaffyr1]:

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.