I was cruising through the net, following the cold trail of one of the periodic “Is or is not Fanfic the Ultimate Literary Evil?” arguments that crop up regularly, and I’m now bursting to make a point that I never see made by fic defenders.
We’re all familiar with the normal defenses of fic: it’s done out of love, it’s training, it’s for fun. Those are all good and valid defenses!
But they miss something. They damn with faint praise. Because the thing is, when you commit this particular Ultimate Literary Evil you’ve now told a story. And stories are powerful. The fact that it wasn’t in an original world or with original characters doesn’t necessarily make it less powerful to any given reader.
I would never have made this argument a few years ago. A few years ago I hadn’t received messages from people who were deeply touched by something I wrote in fanfic. So what if it’s only two or three or four people, and I used someone else’s world and characters? For those two or three or four people, I wrote something fucking important. You cannot tell me that isn’t a valid use of my time and expect me to feel chastened. I don’t buy it. I won’t feel ashamed. I will laugh when you call something that touches other people ‘literary masturbation.’ Apparently you’re not too up on your sex terminology.
Someone could argue that if I’d managed the same thing with original characters in an original world, it could’ve touched more people. They might be right! On the other hand, it might never have been accepted for publication, or found a market if self published, and more importantly I would never have written it because I didn’t realize I could write. The story wouldn’t have happened. Instead, thanks to fanfic being a thing, it did. And for two or three or four people it mattered. When we talk about defending fanfic, can we occasionally talk about that?
I once had an active serviceman who told me that my FF7 and FF8 fic helped get him through the war. That’ll humble you. People have told me my fanfic helped get them through long nights, through grief, through hard times. It was a solace to people who needed solace. And because it was fanfic, it was easier to reach the people who needed it. They knew those people already. That world was dear to them already. They were being comforted by friends, not strangers.
Stories are like swords. Even if you’ve borrowed the sword, even if you didn’t forge it yourself from ore and fire, it’s still your body and your skill that makes use of it. It can still draw blood, it can strike down things that attack you, it can still defend something you hold dear. Don’t get me wrong, a sword you’ve made yourself is powerful. You know it down to its very molecules, are intimate with its heft and its reach. It is part of your own arm. But that can make you hesitate to use it sometimes, if you’re afraid that swinging it too recklessly will notch the blade. Is it strong enough, you think. Will it stand this? I worked so hard to make it. A blade you snatched up because you needed a weapon in your hand is not prey to such fears. You will use it to beat against your foes until it either saves you or it shatters.
But whether you made that sword yourself or picked it up from someone who fell on the field, the fight you fight with it is always yours.
Literary critics who sneer at fanfic are so infuriatingly shortsighted, because they all totally ignore how their precious literature, as in individual stories that are created, disseminated, and protected as commercial products, are a totally modern industrial capitalist thing and honestly not how humans have ever done it before like a couple centuries ago. Plus like, who benefits most from literature? Same dudes who benefit most from capitalism: the people in power, the people with privilege. There’s a reason literary canon is composed of fucking white straight dudes who write about white straight dudes fucking.
Fanfiction is a modern expression of the oral tradition—for the rest of us, by the rest of us, about the rest of us—and I think that’s fucking wonderful and speaks to a need that absolutely isn’t being met by the publishing industry. The need to come together as a close community, I think, and take the characters of our mythology and tell them getting drunk and married and tricked and left behind and sent to war and comforted and found again and learning the lessons that every generation learns over and over. It’s wonderful. I love it. I’m always going to love it.
Some badass arguments for the next time somebody pooh-poohs on fanworks in your vicinity.
Do you think there’s any point in writing fanfiction if no one really reads it?
Absolutely. I write some pairs that I know very few people will read or care about, but I still write it because it makes me (and maybe one or two other people) happy. I write fics sometimes just for me that I end up not posting at all.
If writing makes you happy, do it. It doesn’t matter fuckall what other people think. It doesn’t matter if one person or 5 or 10,000 people read it. Write because you want to. Write what you want to write because you want to.
I know sometimes it can be discouraging to think no one is reading what you put out there, but people will come. And you’l find those that support you through it. Heck if you need to, my ask is always open.
I strongly support writing, any writing. Don’t let anyone tell you that what you write is worth less then anyone else’s just because it’s fanfiction, or something they aren’t interested in. Write it anyway.
My lovely Merinda, I hope you don’t mind if I happen to hijack the shit out of this post.
Dearest, Darlingest Nonny,
It is of utmost importance that if you feel like you want to write, that you write.
On my blog, if you search the term “fic rec”, you’ll find 152 pages, with 15 posts per page of fics that I have read and rec’ed. Currently, I have three browser windows open, one with 18 tabs of fics, one with 56 tabs of fics, and another with 19 tabs of fics. I have more than 550 drafts saved and over half of that is fics. I rec at least two fics every day, and I have dedicated Fridays for the saving of all the NSFW fics that I have found to post then in honor of Penis Fridays. I am planning for this coming Friday to hit my post limit by rec’ing my favorite authors for the one year anniversary of this particular tradition. I asked people what they wanted to read, and I have hopefully found fics for them that they can enjoy.
There’s going to be someone out there who will read what you’ve written. Maybe you’re not sure about where to post? Make a friend with someone on Ao3 and get an invite. If that doesn’t work, there’s always livejournal and FF.net. If you’re not sure you want your name attached to your work, there are kinkmemes galore out there. And just because it has ‘kink’ in the title, doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily all crazy wild sex all the time.
Have you ever looked at some of the stats on ao3? If you check them out, you can see that there are nearly 56,000 fics having to do with Sherlock Holmes in some way, shape or form. Doctor Who has about 30,000 fics, Supernatural has around 66,000 fics. And this is just on the ao3. I remember when I first started reading fics, on FF.net, there were tens of thousands of fics for the fandoms in which I happened to read.
Maybe you’re not sure about your grammar or other such technicalities? There are betas who volunteer their love and kindness to help both aspiring and well-established authors along the way. As someone who used to beta heavily (about ten years ago), it’s kind of thrilling to get to watch a fic evolve in many ways, shapes and forms.
I know enough people in fandom that answer my calls for fics. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had wonderful people drop links in my inbox. People tel me, “hey, I saw this fic and thought you’d like it”. And you know what? OMG it’s the best thing ever. I’m actually stockpiling fics of 10K+ right now on my iPad because in July I’m going to South Africa and the flying time is going to be about 28 hours each way. I’m going to need something to keep me entertained. I’ve got over 250 fics saved up. I’m pretty pumped.
Since I got home tonight at 7:30, I’ve already read and decided to rec 10 fics. I’ve obviously read more than ten tonight, but so far only these ones have caught my eye.
Did you know that there are tumblr blogs that have been set up that are ao3 feeds? There’s a blog that makes a post for each and every johnlock fic that is posted to ao3. I follow it. That’s how I find most of my johnlock fics. There are SPN feeds. Accidentally, I was following the SPN master feed, which makes a post for each and every fic in the SPN fandom, while simultaneously following the destiel and wincest feeds. Suffice to say, I was overloaded with a lot of fic repeats.
If you want people to read what you write, put it out there for it to be read. Ask people to read it and see what you think. As you can tell, I’ll pretty much read just about anything. I’ll pass along my recommendations for just about any fic, as long as it doesn’t have too many errors and has a general sort of coherence. If you’re an author I like, I’ll pretty much rec every fic you write. Because you’re just that damn awesome.
Not everyone can write, you know. Not everyone can make gifsets. Not everyone can draw. There are those of us who are mostly just consumers of fandom. I know that I’ll never have photoshop talent, but that doesn’t stop me from reblogging awesome manips and tagging them and gushing over them. I know that I’ll probably never write for fandom again, but that doesn’t stop me from reading voraciously within my tastes, and occasionally stepping outside my normal reading parameters.
Writing doesn’t come easily for everyone. Sometimes you’ll think you’ve got a picture perfect idea in your head and when you sit down to bust it out on your computer, you find that you hopped on the struggle bus and you’re riding it all the way downtown. There are support groups within fandoms, like Sunday Six, where you post six sentences of a fic you’re writing. Six sentences, you may be thinking, isn’t a lot, but when those sentences are your blood, sweat and tears on the screen, it’s something of which you can be really proud. It might motivate you to not just stop at only six sentences.
There’s NaNoWriMo too, which happens in November. There are tons of prompts going around different fandoms at different times. About a month ago, I saw a list of cute prompts that had been collected on tumblr of like, alternate meetings. It had about six different ideas, and then about fifty bajillion reblogs underneath it saying something along the lines of “omg i have to read this fic right fucking now omg write it yesterday”.
There is an appetite for fics. It’s not a weak appetite. It’s strong and healthy. Some fandoms, obviously, lend themselves more easily to the written word. Some fandoms are bigger than others. But fandom is inspirational. Look at Sherlock Holmes in general. There’re the original writings by ACD, but if we look around, we see creations such as Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century, BBC’s Sherlock, House MD, The Great Mouse Detective, the Guy Ritchie Films, the Granada Holmes series, just to name a few. ACD wrote in the late 1800’s, and we’re still obsessing over it today.
We can also look around many many fandoms and see how so many authors who write fanfiction also are published authors. And you don’t have to be just a regular person to be a fan of something. SE Hinton, the author of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish is a huge SPN fan.
Nonnie, there are safe spaces for you if you want to write. Fanfiction is a very large presence of many fandoms. It’s how fans deal. Two years of hiatus in the BBC Sherlock fandom is slowly becoming the norm. How many fics are ‘fix-its’? There was that one glorious moment this last year, when all the shows were on Winter hiatus when suddenly we had 10 days of Sherlock that came and went. The post-airing fics were the best parts of the fandom. As a reader, I want to see what a writer can do with what’s been given to us by TPTB. I can and will read 475 different fics of the same two characters meeting in slightly different ways. The AU is one of the most precious things given to fans. The ability to say, “Merlin and Arthur are so totally going to work for Torchwood because you know what, I want to see what Arthur would have to say to Captain Jack Harkness”.
Your creativity is a precious and valued thing. I want to know how you imagined “the pizza man and the babysitter” idea really played out in the middle of season 6. I want to see how many more adventures Donna and Ten went on. Hell, I think River and Nine would have made for smashing friends. I’d read the daylights out of that.
There are people around who are waiting for your creativity. Do what you want with it.
Best,
-Cinco xoxo
