Time Travel, The Old-Fashioned Way

Meta
Title:	Time Travel, The Old-Fashioned Way
Creator:	Merlin Missy
Date(s):	September 25, 2008
Medium:
Fandom:	multifandom
Topic:
External Links:	Time Travel, The Old-Fashioned Way
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Time Travel, The Old-Fashioned Way is a 2008 essay by Merlin Missy.

Series

This essay is part of a series called Dr. Merlin's Soapbox.

Some Topics Discussed

• visiting old fandoms and fanworks
• be kind to yourself

From the Essay

Be kind to your old fanfics. Even the ones that were never spellchecked. Even the ones that starred Mary Sue You, dressed in sparkly purple spandex and saving the day astride her rainbow unicorn. (The unicorns were canon, okay?) Sure, some of them are going to be a little embarrassing, and the longer you write, the longer your list of perhaps less than genius works will become. More, if you had a habit of saving your papers from your younger days, somewhere you've got a handwritten account of how you helped Luke, Leia and Han get the Falcon back into the sky after a crash.

Old fanfics are love letters to fandoms we've long since broken up with. Maybe they were the fast, furious scribblings of the first flush of love, the first hot kiss, the cracktastic crossover idea nobody ever had before (at least that you'd seen). Maybe they were the lingering goodbye, a final, gentle stroke or a hard, bitter "Go fuck yourself." The characters you created, the ones you used, for a while, each lived inside your head and in your words as truly as they ever did on the screen or the page. Rewatching the old episodes, cracking open that first book in the series, it's all a means of traveling through time and revisiting places you'd almost forgotten.

That episode you hated when it was first-run could seem much less repugnant now that you have some distance between your expectations and the reality. That book you don't acknowledge in your favorite series may very well hold up much better now that you've read the sequels and found out how bad things could really get.

Don't be afraid to go back, either. Sure, you've moved on. You've let that fandom go and discovered the Fandom of Righteous Glee, or at least the Fandom of Right Now. You've learned new writing tricks, and finally gotten over those bad habits of rapid POV switching, self-insertion, and quoting the BeeGees at every opportunity. So that those tricks, that knowledge, and take a look back. Take the pieces of your old fandom that didn't hurt, the ones that still make you catch your breath, just a little. Ignore the rest. Set it aside. Drop your old drawn-out world-building scheme from the private fandom universe you created in your head nine years ago, and go back to the simple truths: there were these people, and this is what they did, and if your readers loved the canon too, they already know why. You don't have to live there in the past. But you shouldn't fear visiting

Fan Comments

[unknown user]: This is so true. I threw away all the Mary Sue fic I wrote when I was a teenager, and now I really regret it. I would love to go back and read it again, to see how much my writing has changed and improved, if for no other reason. It would also be like a diary from those days, and give me some insight into what I was thinking and feeling that could be very valuable to me today. *sigh* I really wish I had kept it.