Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

Introduction: Why Fic?

Why fic? Why Fic?  

Fic. Fan writers call it "playing in someone else's sandbox" or "borrowing someone's toys." I call it "writing." Opponents call it "stealing"--and I call that bullshit. Whatever else we call it, though, today we largely understand fanfiction as writing that continues, interrupts, reimagines, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about. Fanfiction means writers getting their feet wet, their hands dirty--and if in their stories other body parts are sometimes getting wet and dirty, too, that doesn't mean those same stories can't be smart. If we call a piece of writing fanfiction, we usually (though not always) understand that it wasn't published for profit.  

I've been studying fanwriting communities for a while now, but I never really was part of one, not from the inside. I wrote a few fics eventually, but they started as thank-you gifts for a community I was looking in on with an academic interest. I've been a fan of Sherlock Holmes since grade school, but I just loved the stories and movies, mostly memorized them, then moved on. I might have read Sherlock zines when I was younger, if I'd known they existed--much later, I listened to and admired fan-produced works for the Grateful Dead--but the way my fannishness worked was more academic: I like Kundera, I'd best learn Czech. I'd written things that amounted to fanfiction for classes that didn't call it that--narrate Notes from Underground from the prostitute's point of view! Write Ten Ways of Looking at Socks!--but like many writers who have done such things alone in the isolation of a notebook, I didn't refer to this kind of writing by any special name. Unlike many who call themselves "aca-fans" (and I don't), I was not a fan first. (Well, there were those years following the Grateful Dead around, but we didn't write Jerry/Bobby slash, an omission that may well evidence the existence of a merciful God.) 

Fanfiction is an old story. Literally, of course: fanfiction takes someone else's old story and, arguably, makes it new, or makes it over, or just simply makes more of it, because the fan writer loves the story so much they want it to keep going. But fanfiction is also an old story in that people have been doing this since--to borrow a phrase I absolutely disallow my students--the Dawn of Time. Reworking an existing story, telling tales of heroes already known to be heroic, was the model of authorship until very recently. This book is organized to highlight both this kind of continuity with the past, and also what I see fanfiction doing that I believe to be new. Often, what is new in the history of fanfiction--as in the history of writing itself--comes down to writing's relationship to technology and media. New technologies enable new and different kinds of stories to be told--and read--by different kinds of people. Paradoxically, fanfiction, the cultural enterprise apparently dedicated to revisiting familiar ground, ends up leading us to new models of publishing, authorship, genre, gender . . . and to voyeuristic aliens who resemble lava lamps, vampire peaches, sex pollen, and an entire universe based on the structure of a canine penis. None of that is in Homer (lotus flowers just made people drowsy).  

Sex pollen aside, part of what is new in fic in recent years simply comes down to scale. Look at some of the 500,000+ works of Harry Potter fic on FanFiction.Net alone. Remixings, crossovers, astonishing Lego-like recombinations (if you can find a "tab A" on any character, it's been in the "slot B" of some other character in fic), but also serious alternate point-of-view or alternate-ending retellings: what-ifs, could-have-beens, or (more often) should-have-beens, rewritten because the original writer, from the fan's point of view, lost her way, got it wrong, needs correcting. Or suggested a different path she couldn't or wouldn't see or fully explore on her own. Or maybe her charcters should end up in space, or in a TARDIS, or just in a coffee shop--alternative worlds imagined and populated with familiar, loved voices. 

Who writes this stuff? Kids. Parents. Teachers. Married couples--together. Professional writers moonlighting, free from market forces. Tweens working out sexual and writerly grammar online, simultaneously: fumbling "first time" stories written, fumblingly, by and about middle-schoolers writing for the first time. And, lest we forget them, legions of fan writers horrified by all the sex, fearful that with the publication of Fifty Shades, sex is all their work will be known for. The world of fanfiction is a very big, very mixed bag.