Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Read online

  The desire to host this conversation leaves Fic somewhere between monograph and edited collection. It might help to think of it as a tour through a curated exhibit that I’ve arranged and guided and shaped—more, in all honesty, than I originally intended, but editors are part of authorship, too, and mine is excellent and usually right. In the end, while Fic doesn’t transform authorship to the extent that “The Theory of Narrative Causality” does, I do hope it hosts a conversation in keeping with the spirit of its unwieldy and wide-ranging subject. I have tried, in the process, to tread lightly, to leave voices intact. The “rant” is a fandom genre as much as fic is. I do not want to smooth over its rough edges.

  That said, fanfiction is a subject that, like some of its favorite characters, really needed hard limits. A book cannot be coextensive with the entire history of literature and the current expanse of the internet. I limited the topic, as I’ve suggested, to written fanfiction: its production, its dissemination. Fic is not about fanart and it’s not about video, although I acknowledge that these forms are increasingly interrelated and integrated with written fanwork. Fic is organized around what I see as pivotal moments of change that also illustrate a continuity with their predecessors. I’ve largely restricted the discussion to literary- and media-based fandoms, thereby excluding a number of vast, productive areas such as anime and manga (which have their own distinctive cultures) and sports. Even within its area of focus, Fic could hardly be exhaustive; there are many vast franchises the volume doesn’t address as well as a seemingly infinite number of smaller, fascinating fandoms. Inclusion here should not be considered as a verdict on importance, quality, or even my own preference—Veronica Mars inspired some of my favorite-ever fics (a dazzling H. P. Lovecraft crossover decisively stole my heart), but it didn’t mark a sea change in fic’s relationship to technology or to broader cultural norms. I focused on fandoms that did. In an attempt to illustrate how fanfiction operates collectively and interactively with its sources and with other fics, I opted to focus on different aspects of very few fandoms as opposed to trying to represent the dizzying range of sources that attract fic. Lastly, since the material of fanfiction remains unfamiliar to many readers, I emphasized fandoms with enough cultural resonance that the thematic terrain, at least, would be familiar to many, even if the mode of engaging it seemed foreign.

  Some limitations I did not need to impose; they were unavoidable. Not every fan writer wants to be in print; some guard their privacy or do not approve of any commercialization of fic. Among fic writers I approached, a disproportionate number of self-identified men and people of color declined to participate for a variety of reasons, including professional concerns or simply time. Time was also a limiting factor in other ways, some of them media-specific. Part four, which offers a snapshot of elements and issues in fanfiction today, was compiled with the knowledge that “today” would be yesterday by the time anyone read it, and a few months is ancient history in internet terms. This discrepancy between time frame in print publishing and internet posting helps illustrate the speed at which fanfiction evolves.

  This rapid evolution—or rather, change, to avoid any implication that I’m telling a story of progress rather than flux—is driven by experiments, by which I mean not just the process of creation and its product, but the collective, porous way fanfiction is published and read. Yet fanfiction communities and their writing, however diverse these may be, hardly fit anyone’s image of experimental writers or avant-gardes, and with good reason. Literary avant-gardes tend to attract and be discovered by those who already evince a marked distaste for both the literary and commercial entertainment status quo. Fanwriting communities enjoy and consume commercial culture voraciously, celebrate it, even as they challenge and transform its products for their own sometimes radical purposes. Experimental writing in fanfiction is found and enjoyed by people who share at least one popular taste, a taste that has been catered to by mass culture. Many of these readers, however, also have tastes mass culture does not satisfy, tastes they may first discover by reading fic. Persuaded by the presence of favorite characters, even the least adventurous readers sometimes embrace stories featuring alternative sexualities and genders or enjoy more stylistically and thematically challenging material than they would otherwise have turned to. Yet fanfiction is largely driven by a love of the very elements—narrative and character—that much experimental writing of the past half-century has targeted for disruption and critique.

  At the same time, fanfiction has demonstrated that many of the values of the literary and commercial establishment—economy, continuity, pacing, “show, don’t tell,” clarity of style and of genre (what shelf in the bookstore it will go on)—can be jettisoned or systematically and purposefully violated as long as other tastes and agreements are being met: always warn for triggers, character death, specific kinds of sex; specify endings as happy or not; clearly indicate relationship pairings. And while fanfiction can be nearly indistinguishable from commercially published books in content, style, and structure, it usually is not. A fic can represent relationships and characters that would be deemed insufficiently universal or popular to justify a publisher’s investment of time and capital—and it can do so in 250 or 250,000 words. Driven by an engagement with commercial culture but free from that culture’s market constraints, fanfiction can experiment with the popular—with no need for backers, no need to sell the product before it’s been realized, and with the luxury of an audience that is already eager to see its works.

  As we’ve recently seen, some of these experiments in fanwriting have turned out to have enormous commercial value. Taken as a collective, some are changing how we see commercial culture and literature in general—how we see authors, readers, producers, and consumers. Not just economic, but cultural capital—that nebulous nonfinancial wealth of credit, knowledge, and access—is shifting in ways that have been trailblazed by those who didn’t have it or, in some cases, by those who had it and shrugged it off for the pleasure and fun of writing fic.

  Fanfiction is also transforming how readers find material. Archives increasingly are using a variety of tags or labels that help readers to sort and locate stories. Long before Amazon, fan readers and authors had found new ways of categorizing their fiction, thereby allowing it to occupy more than one “shelf” at a time (by kink, by pairing, by disability, by lack of sexual pairing, by adventure, by particular crossover source). Stories can also be made to order, written as part of games, exchanged as gifts, written to prompts and challenges. New habits of writing and reading have been created that are now shared by communities of fan writers and readers, which, taken as a whole, dwarf the number of readers for all but the most wildly successful commercially published works of fiction. Most individual fanfiction stories are likely not commercially viable for one reason or another—including the preferences of the fan writers themselves—but to measure their influence and importance in commercial terms entirely misses the point.

  There’s been worry that the commercialization of fan culture will lead to its destruction. Even excluding potential challenges from rightsholders, introducing the potential for individual profit into what had been a collective enterprise can disrupt the balance. I’ve devoted an entire section of the book to these discussions. Most of these questions come up around what I’m calling here “megafandoms” (those large enough to drive online readership for a select few fics to millions of hits), or around for-profit writing sites such as Wattpad or Kindle Worlds, the platform recently announced by Amazon for the limited licensing of fic. At least for now, most fanfiction does not work in this way. There’s only one Fifty Shades, but even for every more moderate publishing success to come out of fanfic, there are literally hundreds of thousands of fics that are not on the market and never have been. For every vast franchise, there are dozens of niche fandoms—the Michigan Beauty and the Beast group that’s been meeting monthly since the late 1980s comes to mind—whose intensity and commitment is all the higher for th
eir small numbers.

  It seems inevitable that fanwriting cultures will change in response to the broader culture’s relationship to them. They will continue to change in response to whatever publishing or posting media technologies and arrangements arise; there is no one way of writing or posting fic, and so far its venues only continue to proliferate. Commercial forces are bound to have an effect—as they always have. One thing seems clear to me, however, having now talked to hundreds of fan writers and having edited perhaps more than my fair share of them as well: they don’t seem to be showing any signs of shutting up soon.

  part one

  WRITING FROM SOURCES

  From Mimesis to the Sherlock Holmes Fandom

  A Prehistory of Fanfiction

  “It’s writing, Jim, but not as we know it, not as we know it, not as we—” LOL my bad. It’s totally writing as we know it. We just don’t know we know it.

  —Mashup: “Star Trekking” and my internet persona

  1.

  Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who theorized that art was primarily an imitation of nature. (He had a lot more to say, and his theories are readily available all over the internet, but that’s the soundbite version.) Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek historian and rhetorician who came a few hundred years after Aristotle, and he saw things differently. He held that art—at least the art of writing—was more truly a matter of imitating other good writers who’d gotten it right before you. But that’s the way of the world. Writing communities and the way they see their work change. We might say that writing is a community whose only constant is change, but then we’d immediately have to amend our cliché to include the constant wank—a term that’s recently evolved to designate irritable and strident discussion—that the constant change causes. (But don’t worry. We don’t get to that particular sense of wank for a couple of millennia.)

  Anyway, Dionysius (not the wild, sexy god, but the historian) saw good writing as imitatio, and this understanding all but totally replaced the Aristotelian conception, mimesis, among Latin writers of the day. In fact, Dionysius’ theory held sway for a lot longer than most people today have any idea of. This conflict between imitatio and mimesis plays out with greater or lesser intensity until right this very minute, where on a blog near you an Edward/Bella fic writer is taking down a Rob/Kristen fic writer with something akin to extreme prejudice.

  It could get down and dirty in the eighteenth century, too—as we see in debates surrounding the work of Charlotte Smith, who appropriated lines of Shakespeare and others into her influential sonnets. Was she engaging in the elegant tradition of imitation? Or was she plagiarizing?

  Writing. The community whose only constant is the extreme glee with which one writer tells another writer, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. It’s what Plato told all the poets, after all.

  2.

  Del CHEVALIER DE LA CHARRETE

  Comance Crestiens son livre;

  Matiere et san li don et livre

  La Contesse, et il s’antremet

  De panser, si que rien n’i met

  Fors sa painne et s’antancion

  Here Chrétien begins his book about the Knight of the Cart. The Countess furnishes him with the source material and overall spin she’d like him to give it, and he undertakes to think how to put it all together. All he’s really adding is his own hard work and some ideas about context and narrative.

  —Chrétien de Troyes, approx. 1171; writer’s note to Lancelot de la Charette from the “Arthur material” kink meme, my translation

  The well-known medieval romance The Knight of the Cart announces itself as a fill for Countess’ prompt, apparently a request for Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere with a cart (the exact wording of the request has been lost). There’s some evidence to suggest Chrétien added the whole adultery plot, which has since become canon. There’s no evidence, however, to prove Chrétien didn’t invent the request to begin with (a request from a countess makes you look pretty important, after all). Chrétien plays down his own role, as is expected of fan writers, and pays plenty of deference to his source and The Powers That Be. But, as sometimes happens, it seems that Chrétien’s version was more compelling than its source, if we are to judge by longevity. It’s hard to judge on merit, since Chrétien’s source has been lost. As we all know in the age of the internet, it happens all the time; texts just explode. Natural causes.

  My own translation (transposition?) from the Old French into a contemporary global fanfiction English is incredibly free. Like, way. So free, in fact, we might consider it fic for the original—but then, translation is what we call it when very serious people rewrite and generally mess with other people’s words in another language, which makes it all very respectable. We even talk about the difference between faithful and free translation in a way that maps handily onto discussions about canon (the story as told by the original author) and alternate universe (AU) in fanfiction. My version of Chrétien is most definitely AU, but isn’t that true of all contemporary readings of Chrétien? A thousand years is a long time, and none of us has a TARDIS.

  3.

  Sometime around 1600, give or take, William Shakespeare wrote fic for the Ur-Hamlet. But, again, as sometimes happens, it seems that Shakespeare’s version was more compelling than its source—hard to judge, though, since his original has been lost. As we all know, in the age of the internet and apparently in other ages, too, it happens all the time; texts just explode. Natural causes.

  We say Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. When I call that into question just a bit, it’s not to suggest that some other guy wrote it, as the conspiracy theorists who are invariably seated by me on planes and at weddings like to argue, but rather that Renaissance dramatic authorship was a more porous and collaborative affair than we imagine. Recent research points to how Shakespeare’s plays incorporated the innovations of actors and others involved with his company, the King’s Men, as well as multiple sources, including histories, romances, and other plays. No one really minded because you didn’t make your money as a playwright by selling copies of your own written intellectual property (if that had been the case, figuring out exactly what makes up the text of any of Shakespeare’s plays wouldn’t be such a complicated affair). If anyone was making money selling copies of plays, it was the stationer. You made money as a playwright by having your entertaining plays performed—so the more entertaining you could make them, the better. For that reason plays were (and still are) amended after early performances, adjusting for audience reaction.

  Shakespeare was and is a brand, then, a name that indicated a certain standard and style of entertainment, but also the guy who did most of the heavy writerly lifting and thus deserves the most credit. It works this way in a lot of industries today—all kinds of labor goes into writing a film script or a television show, but typically only one or maybe two writers get the credit.

  4.

  In 1614, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (a sock for some unknown writer) wrote a sequel to Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. This sequel may or may not have helped inspire Cervantes to write his own continuation. In his dedication of that continuation (whatever its inspiration), the real Cervantes claims that the real Quixote is “‘with his spurs, and on his way’ . . . so as to dispel the loathing and disgust caused by another Don Quixote who, under the name of Second Part, has run masquerading through the whole world.”5 That’s pretty much how Anne Rice feels about fanfiction, too.

  On the other hand, as the internet commentator “Berk” argues, “I wouldn’t call [the ‘dodgy’ Quixote] fanfic, even jokingly—I think the guy’s main idea was to cash in on the popularity of Cervantes’s masterpiece, not to pay homage to characters he loved or anything like that; that’s the impression I remember getting from the notes to the versions I read at least.”6

  In the late sixteenth century, though, writing based on another writer’s work wasn’t necessarily homage; it was just, as we’ve seen, standard practice. What sets this “False Quixote” apart is that
Avellaneda was publishing his work as the real sequel—not as an alternative version, an explicit parody, or homage, as Quixote himself was doing with the romance tradition. Had copyright law existed in those days, Cervantes probably could have sued, but it didn’t, so he had no choice but to write his own, better sequel, in which the real (fictional) Quixote discovers and mocks his imposter. From a literary perspective, this solution worked out better than a lawsuit anyway.

  5.

  In 1748, a lady fan calling herself Belfour writes to Samuel Richardson about his novel Clarissa, concerned about the fate of his characters—she is worried about spoilers, having “heard that some of [Richardson’s] advisers, who delight in horror . . . insisted upon rapes, ruin, and destruction.”7 She pleads for a better end. As it turns out, this fan’s main concern is not with the heroine, but with her potential rapist: “but you must know (though I shall blush again), that if I was to die for it, I cannot help being fond of Lovelace. A sad dog! why would you make him so wicked, and yet so agreeable?”