When I first heard about fan fiction, I was … oh let’s be honest, I was a kid and I reacted like all the worst, reactionary blowhards you can imagine. “Why would you do that?? Those are SOMEONE ELSE’S CHARACTERS! Where is the creativity? The AUTOUR?”
And so on.
But then I binge-watched a TV show and fell in love with the characters only to be stricken by the choices the show made and … I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The show was long-ago-cancelled and I wanted solace, wanted more, wanted to FIX IT. Then the show ended and I wanted MORE SHOW. I opened my web browser and googled “fan fiction” and found so, so much. I found people who had the same problems with the show and read their attempts to fix it, and I found a vibrant and complex community with passionate arguments and supportive threads and “gift fiction” and its own jargon and sub-genres.
There were some breathtakingly good writers, too, and I quickly made myself a just-for-fanfiction account so I could follow them and eagerly read every little note they posted.
What I really found was WHY YOU WOULD DO THAT.
1. It’s about character.
We inhabit story through character. If I were to give instructions on how to write a good story, I’d say “Make me care about someone, then make me care what happens to them.”
What drove me into the arms of fan fiction as a blushing thirty-year-old was caring about a fictional character.
Playing with an already-created character helps a writer because they already know how they feel about her, how they want the audience to feel, what they want them to see.
Most of writing is making decisions. That’s the hard work. If you already have a main character picked out, you’ve saved a lot of effort and can get to the meaty stuff – the secondary choices, the twists and deep themes.
You can see the importance of character just by browsing a fanfiction website — fanfiction.net or archiveofourown – first they sort by what show/book/movie/comic/videogame — what “fandom” — but the second thing you sort by are characters.
2. We Contain Multitudes
The number one source of “Fandom Wank” and “Drama” and “Flame Wars” isn’t who-should-date-whom, it’s Character Interpretation.
And the thing that’s hard to swallow is … they’re all valid. Yes, this person’s Captain America is nothing like yours, but if you do the forensics, you can find the places in the text that support that interpretation, as much as you hate it.
What is Out of Character? In the eye of the beholder, and you’ll see passionate arguments on both sides. I know … this makes it sound like what even IS character, right? But people are complex, and even fictional people are a little complex. (It helps the complexity when they are written by different writers in different seasons or their role in the show/movie/book changes.). In Buffy, Spike starts out as a cold blooded killer and becomes a softie romantic interest — but the real trick is exploring how he was both all along.
3. Plot is Emotion
Around the time I was wasting hours every day reading the length-equivalent of War and Peace 800 times because “just one more fanfic and I’ll go to bed” … I was also struggling with my own writing, particularly with plot. I thought I couldn’t do it.
I also thought plot was … mechanics? Like a sort of puzzle you played against the reader.
But as I read all this fanfiction, I started wondering, “Why is this so good? Why am I enjoying this so much? Is there a plot? They’re just … talking about their feelings and getting pizza.”
Reading a lot of different examples of story does help you understand story, and slowly I began to realize that what I thought plot had to be … wasn’t it. A plot can be:
Establish the problem in a relationship between two people.
One of them tries to address the problem and makes it worse.
The other one tries to address the problem and also makes it worse.
The two of them finally realize they are both upset by the same problem and talk it out.
BOOM. Plot.
Person in a place with a problem. Try-fail, Try-fail, Try-succeed. I knew that formula, but I thought it had to be external conflict, all about fights or heists or building machinery. I wasted a lot of time in a lot of story drafts moving people around and building action-reaction pairs that added up to nothing.
What makes conflict is emotion. Conflict can be going to get pizza.
4. What Is and Is Not One’s Cup of Tea
Nothing you write will appeal to everyone. The Fan Fiction community is almost finely-tuned to showcase this, with tags to sort out the people who want to read Character Exploration verses Fix The Plot verses Smut.
And oh, oh the smut preferences are infinitely fine-tunable. I want BDSM but only if THIS character is on top, and also make them chubby.
I learned that I wasn’t as broad-minded as I thought when it came to smut. Nope, I have exactly one kink and it’s pretty boys in trouble. I’d see tags that I thought meant that and discover the pretty boy was causing the trouble, and nope out. One person’s turn on is another’s ‘yikes.’
… and that’s okay. It’s hard to let go of that need to be All Things to All People, but “A point in every direction is the same as no point at all,” as The Rock Man from “The Land o Point” says.
4a – taste isn’t about quality
Weirdly enough, I found myself willing to read the most painfully-written, amateur prose if the content was what I wanted. (And I’m talking some typo-riddled flat told stories but they were TELLING what I agreed with about the characters.). Conversely I’d drop out of perfectly polished stories if, say, they had Captain America be mean.
(Character has fine-tuning too – a well-realized character is multi-faceted, and you see fanfiction fans gravitating to different facets, so you can have fans of the same character disagree passionately about what is or isn’t intrinsic to that character, highlighting one aspect or hiding another. Captain America can be uncompromising, or he can be kind, or he is both, and different fans want to see those different aspects of him.)
I digress. How much purple prose or painful punctuation I was willing to endure just to see a pretty man suffer prettily was an eye-opener as to the subjective nature of enjoying fiction. Sometimes, the editor just wants horny werewolves and your unhorny werewolves are not going to cut it. And that’s okay.
5. Feed the Id
The main thing I’ve learned from reading fanfic is that, when we are freed from the constraints of writing “Sale-able” fiction, when we publish anonymously to a built-in-audience of like-obsessed fans, we are free to explore what interests us the most, and that zeroes in on what interests readers, in general: emotional conflict, emotional stakes, the dissection of character through conflict with one’s self.
… for other writers this might be deep exploration of the economics of space wizards, too. The point is, good fiction feeds our intellectual curiosity, our emotional voyeurism, our deep-seated interests. Don’t fight it. This is what all those writing instructors meant by “follow your weird.”
And if I could manage to write any of that in my “original” fiction? I’m having a pretty good day writing.
