Why I Write Fanfiction (2003 essay)

Meta
Title:	Why I Write Fanfiction
Creator:	Jeanne Rudmann Grunert
Date(s):	2003
Medium:
Fandom:	a focus on Land of the Lost
Topic:
External Links:	Why I Write Fanfiction
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Why I Write Fanfiction is a 2003 essay by Jeanne Rudmann Grunert.

The fandom focus is Land of the Lost, but really, it is about all fandoms

Excerpts

Stolen Moments

It's five thirty in the morning. I power up my computer, fetch my favorite white Portuguese ceramic coffee mug, and begin writing. I'm not penning the great American novel. I'm writing a Land of the Lost fan fiction story. My fifth, actually, and what's looking to be the first full length Land of the Lost novel.

"Why do you bother with this junk?" my husband cries. The show plays on the TV from a well-worn videotape. Claymation dinosaurs chase basketball players in green diving suits. Orange furred monkey men scatter in the forest.

I ignore his comments and keep on writing. I'm pouring over words that only a select few Generation Xers scattered throughout North America are waiting to read. Why do I get up at 5:30 a.m. every morning and write fan fiction for an hour before leaving for my demanding job as a marketing manager? Most normal people are snug in bed and catching the last few minutes of zzz's at this hour. They're not immersed in the jungles of ancient Altrusia.

For those who do not read the genre, fan fiction consists of stories written by lovers of a novel, television show, or movie, who take the original creation and using the characters, craft new adventures for them. Fan fiction abounds for lovers of Star Wars, Star Trek, the X-Files, and Dr. Who. Star Was fans have legitimized fan fiction with the series of George Lucas-approved novels that are regularly best sellers; authors are hired to take Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Darth Vader through new adventures.

But for most readers, fan fiction is the shadow side of writing. Whereas writing is seen as a creative act akin to an haute cuisine chef making his signature dish, fan fiction is the poor wretch who pops a TV dinner into the microwave. Fan fiction writers are seen as writers who couldn't, writers who just didn't, writers who can't write. Writers who haven't outgrown their adolescent fantasies and who really want to be Buffy, Deanna Troi, Mr. Spock, or Holly Marshall. A jazz connoisseur who enjoys listening to Louis Armstrong on his stereo rather than takes up the trumpet and attempt to emulate the master does not fall under scorn. Why, then, do we deride the fan fiction writer as a hack? I'm not a hack writer. Since winning a national science fiction writing contest at the age of thirteen, I've gone on to write over thirty articles and short stories. Some have been anthologized; my writing has been read by several million readers in North America.

So why, then, do I bother writing fan fiction? Why do I get up at 5:30 every morning to write it?

My love affair with the subculture known as fan fiction started early, before the term fan fiction was even coined. And the reasons I write fan fiction are inexorably entwined with who I am as both a woman and a writer, so that to know me is to know the reasons why I write fan fiction.

One day when I was twelve I read a truly awful children's science fiction book. It was so sappy and condescending that I threw it across the room and made a black skid mark on the wall of my bedroom. I remembered the Land of the Lost. It was never condescending or simplistic, although some episodes like 'Dopey" bordered on sugary sweet. How dare that writer think that kids wouldn't like science fiction! I thought. And then came a thought into my head as revolutionary as Newton's thought when the apple conked him on the head: "I can write better than this."

I took out a notebook and stretched across a chaise lounge in the yard and began to write. And write. And what did I write? I wrote my Land of the Lost stories, the stories that I had woven during those long lonely grade school years to keep my mind out of the darkness of reality and into the light of imagination. Since I still thought it was illegal to write using another author's characters, I called the planet "Landost" and created a civilization that looked surprisingly like feudal Earth's. The heroine resembled me; what a Mary Sue I created! (Mary Sue is the common term for an author who writers herself into a fan fic as the heroine. It would be akin to rewriting Pride and Prejudice and making Elizabeth Bennett a secondary character, while a new girl named Jeanne-Marie – a Rubenesque writer with long blonde hair – marries Mr. Darcy).

I made stories the way other kids make mud pies. I played with words like kids play with blocks. I wrote every day after school and on the weekends, often forgoing trips to the movies or roller skating with friends to be alone so that I could write. By eighth grade, I had written two novels.

Every writing magazine that I read stated with assurance, "If you get back handwritten comments on the preprinted rejection letter, you're doing great." I received reams of handwritten comments. Editor after editor penned the same message: "Close but missing something. Try again." "Something missing but a good story overall. Try again." My stories were grammatically correct but lacking true emotion. Instead they were filled with the hysterical over-wrought emotions of the beginning writer who has to use adverbs after every 'he said, she said' to liven up leaden prose. My emotions, after so many years of dealing with my mothers' illness and her subsequent death, my father's rage, and both my parent's neediness were sealed behind the closed doors of my heart. I kept true feelings at fingertip distance, only occasionally touching them, and frightened like a skittish horse when I felt something other than numbness.

The only release was in my imagination. I pretended to be in the Land of the Lost in my imagination, although I never wrote down the stories. After all, professor said science fiction wasn't literary enough, and why should a writer like me who was going places waste her time on it? My imagination wouldn't let it go. Always in my mind I saw the jungles, the Sleestaks, the pylons and the temples that would set me dreaming. In my mind's eye I could still wander the jungles with Will and Holly. When the sci fi channel began showing the episodes again right after I graduated from college, I had my father tape every last one of them. I used to watch them on Sunday mornings while my dad was at church. I would spend one blissful hour every Sunday morning, immersing myself in the sights and the sounds in that land far away. But I thought that it was illegal to write the stories down, and certainly I had no way to publish them or share them. Besides, who else but me still remembered the old show?

And so it went for many years, with my nonfiction writing published in numerous national magazines but my fiction going nowhere. It was flat and lifeless. I received my graduate degree in Creative Writing from CUNY Queens College and decided to give up writing fiction. What had been a burning passion to tell stories of fantasy had turned into a fruitless search for one genuine paragraph expressing real emotion.

The end to the metamorphosis came with fan fiction. Until this year, I did not even know that fan fiction existed. But one day I was surfing the Internet trying to find information about the new Star Wars movie. I cruised through the science fiction pages on the 'Net and was hit by a wave of nostalgia for my old Land of the Lost show. I wondered if there was anyone like me out there who still watched the old videotapes, if there was anyone else to whom the old show meant so much. And then I found it. Not one site, but two dedicated to the Land of the Lost: Landofthelost.com, with an episode guide and more, and Tyrannosaur Lex, an even better site filled fan fiction, a Marshall timeline, and more updates. With pleasure I began reading my first fan fiction, and once more I was transported back to that magical land...to the dinosaurs and Sleestak and Enik and Chaka...

Could I write a fan fiction? Could I take the tales lurking in the dark corner of my mind and set them to words? Could I capture that feeling of awe and mystery that clung to the old show like the mists of the time doorway in Enik's cave? That college professor be damned, I wanted to write what was in my heart to write. I no longer cared if I became rich and famous or if I penned the great American novel. I decided that if only one other person read my fan fiction and it made them happy, then I was a success. I knew that I could write a grammatically correct story with a beginning, middle and end. The characters were already established. All I needed to do was concentrate on my plot and the rest would take care of itself.

And so it began - my love affair with the genre known as fan fiction. My first fan fiction, 'Outside In,' began with the old tales of Landost. Taking up writing again was like learning to walk after a long convalescence. I was shaky. It was hard to form those first sentences. But having characters and motivation already established eased the transition back into writing.

During the three years after my father died when I wrote not a word, when my voice had been silent, it had matured. Emotions now flowed naturally into the writing. Suffering and grief had changed me. Words danced from my fingertips across the pages. After the initial writing I returned to the story and with a ruthless editor's eyes I cut myself out of the story, focused on the character, and suddenly, I had it. Not just any story, not just a fan fiction, but a character driven story with emotional resonance.

When I listened to my heart and wrote what it told me, I wrote well. And what I wrote happened to be a fan fiction. I published the story to the Web with the familiar old tremor of fear, a tremor I hadn't felt since I first began sending my infant works into the world many years ago. But when the emails from other Land of the Lost fans started coming in, sometimes at the rate of two a day, asking when my next fan fiction would be posted, I knew that I had finally written a real story that made people feel things inside themselves and made them realize things about the character of Will that they had never realized before.

So I began writing again by writing fan fiction of the Land of the Lost. Like the river in that mysterious world that always runs full circle, plunging into the ground to rise at the swamp and circle back through the Lost City and the mountains, I too circled back again to writing. I had tried to escape it, but the relentless fire that had burned in my heart since I first took up pen at the age of twelve merely smoldered until it was stirred again. Now it burned hotter than ever. I wrote six articles for a professional journal this year, and emails from readers trickled in, thanking me for the writing. One email contained a request to excerpt my article on email list management in another professional journal. A short story that had lain dormant for ten years resurrected into a decent enough sci fi story that with a smidgen of rewriting I plan to complete and sell it this year. And a fantasy novella that I wrote in college (before meeting the anti sci fi professor) has been dusted off and is being edited with the goal of publishing it this year.

But I'm a changed writer from the childlike woman who put down her pen the day her father died. I used to write to please my father, as if my success would make him happy and soothe the wounds of all those years of my mother's illness. Now I am not quite so driven to write as once I was. When the work begins to dry I take time off and experience life for a while. I play with my pets, I take long walks with my husband, I call upon my friends. I no longer hide myself in the basement and in the land of the imagination but burst forth into life with eagerness and vivacity to experience all that it has to offer. The long dark days are over and I have come full circle to the rich life that had been denied to me by circumstances beyond my control during my childhood.

The closing song from the Land of the Lost still echoes in my head when I think of those years when my fan fictions were taking root. "I'm lost, I'm lost, find me." It was by finding that lost child through the world of the Land of the Lost that I found myself, and the voice to express the wondrous world of emotion hidden in my heart since childhood. And that, truly, is the reason that I write fan fiction.