In defense of fan fiction

All right guys, gals, and non-binary pals, I am here and ready to start some DISCOURSE about fan fiction. Or at least add to it. (Also, notice I didn’t say fighting. I may box but arguing makes me so sad and I don’t want to cry in the club right now.) The topic of fan fiction comes up from time to time in the world at large, I think less so now. I feel like I grew up right in the midst of its controversy, though, which left me with some THOUGHTS that now, as an adult with some sort of platform, I actually have the space to share. So let’s just say I’ve had some time to…consider this a bit.

Right, so some quick qualifications. As far as original fiction goes, I have:

• Written 2 novels to the point of querying literary agents

• Written 1 novel for a thesis defense

• Written at least 1 draft of at least 5 other novels

• Written at least 50,000 words of 4 other unfinished novels

• And a bunch of other stuff. Shorter excerpts of novels, poetry, short stories, so on and so forth.

Now let’s compare that to fan fiction:

• Written 2 full novels over 100,000 words.

• Written 1 novel of almost 50,000 words.

• Written 2 short stories between 5,000 and 20,000 words

• Written a handful of shorter short stories under 2,000 words.

• Am currently working on a novel that I expect to come in near 100,000 words (currently in maybe the 50,000 word range?)

• Plus a bunch of other stuff. Unfinished novels, short stories that will never see the light of day, yada yada, so on and so forth.

So we can see that I have some breadth on both sides of the writing fence. Let’s get that out of the way right now. Because one of the first arguments I hear about writing fan fiction is always: “Why are you wasting time working on someone else’s work when you could be learning to write your own?”

Shut that argument down right now. Writers who love writing can be prolific. I’ve written more original fiction than some writers ultimately do in a lifetime and I did it while writing fan fiction. Really, that argument is so silly and written by someone who maybe doesn’t know joy.

I’m just guessing.

Now that we’ve got that mess out of the way, qualifications and the silliest argument I’ve ever heard, let’s get to the meat of this post.

I started writing fan fiction back when I was eleven years old. I am still writing fan fiction. In fact, I started a fan fiction trilogy back when I was twelve and the story I am working on now is the third book of that trilogy. No joke. That little girl I was back then would be proud to know that I kept going with this one.

Funny enough, when I started writing fan fiction, I had literally no idea I was writing fan fiction. I had no idea that such a concept even existed. At the time, the stories I told were just for me, just something I wrote in my head. But eventually, there were too many stories to keep track of so I started writing them down on paper. It wasn’t for another year before a friend informed me that other people did this thing too. Other people played make believe with the characters they loved and then shared those stories with other people!

I think it was the strongest feeling of belonging I ever felt.

It was like the world blossomed open. This world that I loved was loved by so many other people so much so that they also played make-believe in it. They also wrote their own stories. It was a life raft in the big bad world of adolescence, especially when the actual franchise wasn’t putting out the kind of stories that made me fall in love with the world in the first place. Instead, I could read someone else’s interpretation of the world and it felt like home. It made me pay attention to the idiosyncrasies of the world and its characters and fall more in love with it everyday.

And finding these idiosyncrasies made me want to write them, to dig into them more, and so I crafted my own stories, though for the longest time, I just held them to myself. Maybe let a couple friends read them. A little bit because I was shy, a lot a bit because fan fiction was still an unknown territory, especially in the Internet world of 2006-2007. I was under thirteen too, for a while, so the rules were messier. But I loved fan fiction and I wrote it and doing so made me love writing more and more.

I don’t really remember when it became shameful to love fan fiction. I don’t remember if it was the Internet that taught me this or classmates or some combination of the world. I think I was shamed for being a fan in my fandom long before I was shamed for loving fan fiction. At twelve and thirteen, I think this was my first real experience with the feeling of shame for enjoying something. Of feeling like something was wrong with me. It created such a strange conflict in my head because I couldn’t understand why what I was doing was a bad thing. I loved telling stories, I loved loving these fictional characters as if they were my friends, I loved learning about growing up through it all, but I was told that I was bad.

It’s muddled now, since it’s all those years ago, but over time, I learned the assumptions people made about people like me. Fan fiction is super sexual, fan fiction isn’t real writing, fan fiction is just self-inserts by lonely people, fan fiction won’t teach you anything about writing, fan fiction is bad and you should feel bad.

And when you’re in the midst of seventh-grade (ah…the worst year of most people’s lives…), that hurts. That’s the time when you’re trying to figure out who you are. Transitioning from child full of joy and thrill in exploring the world and awkwardly moving into this adult-thing-creature? Kids start to look for people to other. They picked me.

I worked really hard not to give up writing this thing I loved. I was in the midst of writing the first book of that trilogy I mentioned earlier and it was the longest, hardest thing I’d written up to that point and I didn’t want to give it up. So I kept writing, but…I kept it quiet. I hid my fan fiction. It began to feel like it was a shameful secret. When I started posting fan fiction online early on in high school, only my very closest friends knew.

Don’t worry; the bullies found other ways to pick on me.

I ended up sort of living this double life. In the light of day, I was working hard in school, part of a bunch of theatrical productions, awkward and tired and trying so freaking hard to be invisible. But when no one was watching, I worked on a murder-mystery fan fiction and an action-adventure fan fiction that had some complicated time travel ideas I needed to figure out at some point.

It wasn’t until college that I started trying talking about fan fiction again. By that point, ideas of fan fiction seemed to have solidified so that ALL fan fiction was perceived to be…well…smut. Which meant that I had to explain the kind of fan fiction I liked to read, liked to write, so that the people I talked to would understand what I was saying: No, like action-adventure. Just like…the characters going on new adventures. Maybe some fluff occasionally, but mostly fight scenes ha-ha.

I started getting the sense that my reasons for liking fan fiction wasn’t why most people liked fan fiction. I still don’t think it is. But it’s true about me and it was important that people knew this part of me. Because my fan fiction was so important to me at this point. I finished up the second book in my trilogy and started my third. All while writing a BUNCH of original novels. The stories fed each other and both fed me and made me who I am. In fan fiction, I liked exploring the world and the characters and learning who they were as I dug through the layers the actual writers gave them. It made me think about how not one-dimensional people are.

Which brings me to today. I am 28-years-old and I am proud to say that I have almost 300,000 words of fan fiction available on the Internet for anyone to read. My biggest story has over 41,000 hits (and the second place has over 36,000), which is just WILD to me. People all over the world are reading my work! I wonder if it’s a safe haven for them like it was for me when I was younger. When none of the books being published for my age were my reading level and the books that were my reading level weren’t for my age and I needed something fun to read. The other day when I checked my stats broken out by country, my second-highest readership was in Trinidad and Tobago. I mean, THAT IS SO COOL! The spot’s been usurped since then, but now in front of them are places like Italy and Peru. Literally, all over the world people are choosing to click on something I wrote using characters they love so that they can exist in that world for just a little longer.

That means something.

Okay, so this got a little autobiographical and I haven’t really gotten into the nitty-gritty of defending fan fiction. But I think it’s important that you know why it’s important to me that I defend fan fiction. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of arguments against fan fiction from strangers and well-meaning authors. And some of those arguments actually have some solid points, I won’t lie. But they also miss a LOT. So let’s get started here with the things I’ve heard over the years.

Fan fiction is highly sexual. - Yup. Some of it. SOME of it. So are some books. If I remember correctly, romance is the best-selling genre among all books. So it’s not surprising that people come to fan fiction for that. I don’t. Not interested in it. Stop making blanket statements. And besides, if you’re not reading fan fiction for that purpose, it’s pretty easy to avoid. The site I’ve always used has a rating system. Easy-peasy.

Fan fiction is just self-inserts for lonely people. - Some, sure. People write fan characters that are just fictionalized versions of themselves. I write fan characters too! They’re not intended to be fictionalized versions of me, but it happens when you’re writing—even in original fiction. Some people even just write themselves into the world. Again: who cares? Some people play 200 hours worth of Animal Crossing (whistles innocently as if this isn’t also me). Some people build puzzles in their spare time. Some people just watch hours of Netflix. Let people have fun.

Fan fiction isn’t real writing. - Sigh. This one is going to take a bit. I have to break down A LOT here.

Fan fiction is not the same as writing an original work. No disagreement there. I’ve done both and they are very different. In some ways, fan fiction is easier to write and in other ways, it’s harder. But either way, IT’S REAL WRITING. A lot of what I’ve written in fan fiction informs how I write my original work. Let’s talk about some of the things that fan fiction helps writers learn:

Character consistency - This one is a doozy. When you are writing fan fiction, you are writing characters that don’t belong to you. They already exist. Well, most of the time. You could write your own characters and just drop them into the same world too. But I’ve been one to write pre-existing characters. Which means I have to pay attention to how they act in canon. How they react to hardship, how they deal with tough decisions, how easily they laugh. Early writers find making distinct characters hard. In fact, early writers often make all their characters sound the same. Fan fiction teaches you how to break that habit. Speaking of which…

Dialogue - I’m a bit lucky in the fact that the fan fiction I write is for a world that wasn’t formulated in a book but instead in a more interactive medium (video games, though it’s expanded into other mediums as well). Which means much of that world is defined by its dialogue. This one relates to character consistency as well. In writing fan fiction, I learned how different characters sound from one another and how one person might say something one way but another character would choose different words for the same feeling. I actually think my dialogue is one of the strongest parts of my writing and I thank fan fiction for it.

Discipline - Maybe this one sounds a little weird. But when writers start out, I think one of the hardest hurdles to overcome is the thought that: oh no, I actually have to write this whole thing. Fan fiction is an easier way to ease into such a concept. If anything, fan fiction taught me I can write long works. It keeps me calm when I get overwhelmed. After all, I’ve done it before.

Just…writing - Have you ever heard that “practice makes perfect?” I mean, ignore the fact that such a concept doesn’t always work out. But the way I see it, you get better at doing something the more you do it. Fan fiction was a way to keep me writing fiction. It gave me a place to experiment with techniques. I remember, when I was much younger, I couldn’t figure out if you were supposed to keep contractions out of your work, except in dialogue. A safe place to experiment with that was fan fiction (and, as I learned, contractions are fine; just don’t over-use them).

Now, let’s talk about a couple things that fan fiction may help you with a little but may be what makes people say that fan fiction isn’t “real writing:”

World-building - To be fair, when you are writing fan fiction, you are using a pre-existing world. It’s a bit like drawing with a stencil. You don’t have to spend time agonizing over place names and governing systems when it’s already existing for you to play in! You do have the opportunity to expand the world, however. And this does give you a bit of a different exercise because you have to expand the world in a way that makes sense for the world you’re playing in. If there’s no space travel common in canon, you’re going to be hard-pressed to get your characters on a space adventure. You can do it! But either you do some mental gymnastics (which you can) or you’ve got to spend some time world building a solution, which is really good writing practice.

Character creation - You have pre-built characters to play with, unless you’re populating the world with all your own characters, so you don’t have to spend as much time figuring out who all these people are. Not only that, but you don’t have to spend time making your audience care about them. It is nice that you can dabble in this a little bit with fan fiction, by creating fan characters, which allow you to introduce new characters to care about in small doses if you want. But populating a brand new world with brand new people is a different ballgame entirely.

I imagine most people reading this blog post don’t read fan fiction (at least not much) and don’t write fan fiction. If this somehow gets wide distribution: hi there! Welcome to the inside of my brain! It’s filled with anxiety and coffee! (And I wonder why I have anxiety…) But assuming that most people reading this haven’t given much thought to fan fiction at all and are very confused about why I’ve written so much about it, let me leave you with this:

Let people have their joy.

That’s it.

Let people have their joy.

At some point along the way, I somehow ended up inundated with this idea that I needed to be productive. All! The! Time! If you are not doing something you can sell, you are wasting your life! Ah…the American Dream…

I’m working on unweaving such a toxic idea from my brain. And one of the ways I do that is by writing fan fiction. Guess what? None of this is ever going to make money. It literally can’t! I put disclaimers on all my fan fiction that I post online that my work is fan-made and none of the characters belong to me. So why do I do this thing? Because I want to. Because it brings me joy. Because not every little piece of my life is in the pursuit of the creation of consumable content that helps me build a platform (the beautiful irony of explaining this in a blog post). I also play video games that are about task management and not at all about the story. You know what value that offers? Joy! Just personal joy. It just makes me happy. And that’s enough.

And also, don’t make assumptions about the thing that brings a person joy. Don’t be a part of the faceless mass that lists off all the stereotypical reasons why a person’s pursuit is stupid. Listen to the person themself. Ask questions. And watch their eyes light up with the kind of life you’ve never seen. It’s a much better world to create.