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Thoughts After Writing My First Official Fanfiction Story
Folks have been talking more about fanfiction lately, partly in response to an incident that took place at a Sherlock Q&A session, in which Caitlin Moran brought up Sherlock fanfic, and pushed two actors to read an excerpt of what turned out to be sexually explicit fanfic. Without permission from the author. For what was presumably supposed to be a joke. Because fanfiction is funny, and tricking people into reading sexually explicit stories in front of an audience is funny, and so on.
Yeah, not so much. But it does highlight the disdain with which a lot of people view fanfiction, the idea that it’s “lesser” writing, that it’s all laughable, amateur crap, and so on.
I’ve talked about fanfiction before–
- My Updated Fanfiction Policy
- Fanfiction is Fanfiction. Have Fun! (A guest piece I did for the Organization for Transformative Works)
–but it’s never been something I chose to write myself … until last month, when I was listening to my kids watch Christmas special #1,826, and my brain wandered off to imagine what a Rudolph vs. Frosty throwdown (snowdown?) would look like. So I wrote up a quick, silly little introductory scene of Frosty killing an elf guard at the North Pole, because hey, that’s what writers do when something interesting burrows into our brains. I posted it on the blog because I enjoy sharing the things I write, and I thought people might get a kick out of it.
I didn’t expect to get so caught up in the story. The plot bunnies dug deeper, eventually setting up a nice, snowy colony in my temporal lobe. I ended up writing a ~6000 word story and posting each scene as I went — something completely foreign to my usual writing process, which involves multiple completed drafts and rewrites before I let anyone else see what I’ve written. (Click on the Crimson Frost cover if you’d like to read the finished story.)
While this isn’t likely to become a habit — I also have contracted fiction to write, and I really like being able to pay my mortgage — it was certainly educational and eye-opening. Not to mention a lot of fun.
Here are a few of the things I took away from the experience.
Writing good fanfic is just as challenging as writing good anything else. I’ve sold close to 50 pieces of short fiction in my time. That silly little Frosty story took as much work as any piece of professional fiction I’ve done. I struggled with plotting and characterization, I lay awake at night trying to work out the problems, I went back and did last-minute edits before each scene went live. Sure, it’s possible to write lousy, half-assed fanfiction, just like it’s possible to write lousy, half-assed anything else. But nothing about fanfiction makes it inherently easier to write than other kinds of fiction.
Instant feedback is dangerously addictive. I turned in the manuscript for UNBOUND a few months ago, but it will probably be close to a year before I start to hear from readers. Whereas I’d post a scene from Frosty, and people would be commenting and emailing within minutes. I like this whole instant gratification thing!
Fanfic can be freeing. As I wrote this story, I found myself playing in ways I don’t allow myself to do in professional fiction. I dropped a Jurassic Park reference into one scene. I amped up plot twists and cliffhangers. I took risks with things that could have been potentially were completely over-the-top. And it was awesome! (At least for me.)
I can do “realtime” writing. The scariest part of this thing was changing my writing process. I didn’t know how this story would end when I started writing. I would post one scene without knowing what would happen in the next. I was terrified that I’d get stuck and the story would die a miserable death, like a Bumble choking on a hairball. Or that I’d figure out that the story needed to go in another direction, but it would be too late. But I did it. There are some things I’d go back and change in revision — more foreshadowing of the importance of memory, for example — but the story worked. And for me, that’s a huge and exciting victory.
A writer is someone who writes. I’ve never understood why some people jealously protect the coveted title of “Author” or “Writer.” The way I see it, if you write, you’re a writer. I don’t care if it’s 100,000 words of professionally published novel or 100,000 words of Star Trek fanfic. Having done both profic and fanfic, I don’t get it. Calling someone who does fanfic a writer or an author doesn’t in any way diminish or dilute me and my work. Why is this even an argument?
Like I said, I’m not planning to make a habit of this. And I won’t be changing my policy about not reading fanfiction of my own work. But writing this story was a fun, interesting, and eye-opening experience.
And for the record, anyone who’s ever thought about who would win in a fight between the U. S. S. Enterprise and an Imperial Star Destroyer, or whether or not a kryptonite-powered lightsaber could kill Superman, or if Marcie and Peppermint Patty were gay, or whether or not Ferb was actually a Time Lord, or if Tron survived his fall in Tron: Legacy and if so what happened next … y’all might want to shore up your glass houses before you start hurling stones at fanfic and the people who write it.
Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.
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Oh, and about that fight between the U. S. S. Enterprise and an Imperial Star Destroyer, it depends a lot on which generation of Enterprise: Kirk automatically wins, because Kirk; Picard wins, but after much struggle and/or debate, with possibly positive diplomatic aftermath; dunno about Capt. Archer, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be pretty; overall, I'd put Janeway as most likely to encounter one in the first place, and whether she'd negotiate or blow them out of the sky depends on the quality of their coffee. I believe that a kryptonite-powered lightsaber could totally kill Superman. Marcie and Peppermint Patty were definitely gay. And I now have a burning need to watch Phineas & Ferb and Tron: Legacy.
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Heh :-)
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Fanfic can also play what-if a lot more easily (one of my favorite genres of fic is the canon-departure AU [alternate universe], of the "what would happen if this one particular ten minutes in canon had happened differently" sort) since you have a baseline that your audience is presumably familiar with, and therefore you can tweak a few things and not have to worry about your audience missing the implications; that's something you can only accomplish in profic if you're writing alternate-history, really. There's a lot of stuff that you can do in fanfic that profic doesn't embrace anywhere near as much.
The people who are most viciously anti-fanfic trot out the same things over and over again every time the discussion comes up -- it's intellectual laziness! you aren't creating your own characters or setting! writing that isn't original and creative is worthless! -- and they don't realize that using existing characters and setting enables a whole range of stories that literally cannot be told otherwise. (Or rather, can't be told easily and without a ridiculous amount of extra setup, or can't be told within the confines of commercial conventions.)
Like, I once wrote a hundred-thousand-word spy-thriller novel about identity, loyalty, terrible necessity, and what it means to be an ethical human being: I could have written an original-fic novel with those themes, sure. (And I probably will someday, since 'terrible necessity' is my One True Story.) But it was also a story about how you have to reinvent your life when you wake up one morning and discover that you've gone from being a slightly grumpy fiftysomething ex-Special-Ops military colonel leading a team of people who are regularly Saving the World From the Evil Aliens to being a fifteen-year-old clone of your former self, and it was also a story about having to retire from the Secret War and being forced to take the road-not-taken, and that part of the story would have been very very damn hard to accomplish if I'd had to spend twenty books' worth of words setting up the premise before being able to twist it, rather than being able to just say, "So, remember that episode of Stargate SG-1 where Jack O'Neill woke up one morning and found out he was a fifteen year old clone?"
For people who want to tell certain kinds of stories, fanfic is the best way to do it. I've made pro sales before, and I probably will again. But most of the stories I find most compelling are the ones that work best in the fanfic aesthetic.
(Right now I am happily wallowing in being able to leisurely take hundreds of thousands of words to have three of my very favorite characters fall in love with each other and learn to be better human beings while, incidentally, saving the world. It's a Final Fantasy 7 story that's been living in my head for fifteen years or so. The climax of one section of the story is literally two characters sitting in the kitchen and yelling at each other for ten thousand words. I am having so much fun.)
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And that right there -- what more do you need? What's the problem? In addition to everything else you mentioned, you're writing and loving it and enjoying the story you're creating. How is this a bad thing???
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Exactly!
I mean, my day job is kind of busy and occasionally stressful ;) Writing fanfic makes me happy! (As do ridiculous browser games yes I'm looking at you Cookie Clicker.) It drives me nuts when people sneer at that and call it lazy or intellectually dishonest. Writing fanfic is fun and a lot of hard work and can be incredibly rewarding and people who turn up their noses at it probably kick puppies and don't tip their servers when they go out to dinner. That million or two words a year I was producing for a few years (before my hands gave out, sigh) weren't fake just because I couldn't sell them to one of the Big Houses.
I mean, sure, fanfic is subject to Sturgeon's Law just like anything else (and a bunch of the "badfic" people produce is stuff I personally don't read because it's not to my tastes and I have limited reading time, but I'm not going to tell people to stop writing it. If you're enjoying it, rock on with your bad selves.) But I can think of a double dozen things I'd put up against the slate of, for instance, Hugo nominees in any given year, without even having to think for more than fifteen minutes. There's some incredible stories being told.
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I can see Marcie being gay with a huge unrequited crush on Peppermint Patty, but I can't see Peppermint Patty as anything but completely hung up on 'Chuck.' Sorry...
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Post-as-you-write has different story aspects--you can't go back and edit Chapter 2 to make sure Whatsizname makes an appearance; fanfic readers expect a certain sloppiness in the storytelling. OTOH, there's also the ability to incorporate details from the comments, or spinoff ideas inspired by the comments.
Re: Marcie/Peppermint Patty... the trailer for the (nonexistent) horror movie Charlie Brown: Blockhead's Revenge makes it pretty clear they're gay.
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Not because I mind that Peppermint Patty and Marcie could be gay, but because Peanuts & horror? Eep.
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