Rant about fanfiction writing
I was just informed by my brother (who thinks he’s a better writer than anyone else because he has some fancy degree in writing) that fanfiction “doesn’t count” as “real writing” because you aren’t using your own “ideas.”
He doesn’t know that I write fanfiction. He probably wouldn’t have admitted his opinion if her did. But it has pretty much solidified that I will never tell anyone I know in person what I write.
I’ve already been told by several family members that my obsession with a “stupid tv show” is ridiculous and that I’m “too old” to fangirl.
Sigh. /rant
In Defense of Fanfiction
I am a professional writer and editor in real life. I have a double degree in English and writing and am currently in school once more to obtain a master’s degree. If your brother’s fancy writing degree was worth anything at all, he should be able to admit that the vast majority of all literature is in fact fanfiction of someone else’s story and its elements. In other words, no one’s idea is, by definition, original.
Let’s take a look at just a few examples to support my theory that some of the most important or well-known pieces of literature ever created qualify as fanfiction:
Ancient/Old Literature
· Around 2000 BCE: The Epic of Gilgamesh was inspired as a fanfiction of a historical King of Uruk, mixed with Mesopotamian mythology. The story includes the character Utnapishtim, who lives through a world-wide flood by building a ship per the instructions of the god Enki and ultimately landing on a mountain in the Middle East, similar to Noah’s story from the Bible (dates for the book of Genesis vary anywhere from 1400 BCE to 800 BCE). Many historians suggest that the story of Noah was directly inspired by Gilgamesh’s story of Utnapishtim. Other historians suggest the two were simply inspired by a similar source. Either way, there’s too many startling overlaps to classify Utnapishtim and Noah as only a coincidence.
· 20-ish BCE: The Roman author Virgil wrote The Aeneid, which is a direct sequel to the previously created epic The Iliad attributed to Greek bard Homer. Virgil was also known for writing pastoral poems based off and inspired by the work of the great poet Theocritus (280 BCE). As a fun addition, Theocritus himself was known for rewriting the cyclops villain (Polyphemus) of Homer’s Odyssey into a love-sick idiot in his work, Idyll XI.
Medieval Era (500-1500-ish CE)
· 700-1000: The Alphabet of ben Sirach was an anonymous Hebrew collection of satires that included a parody of the biblical Genesis story of Adam and Eve. The story gave Adam a totally different wife by the name of Lilith, the character of which was inspired by Babylonian mythology. The whole of the collection is additionally wrapped in a fictional account of telling the stories to the historical figure of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar—another real person fanfiction of a celebrity from that time.
· Around 1000: The world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, inspired the massive outpouring of Japanese Noh theater plays involving characters from the novel, such as Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), which has been attributed to a few people (Zeami Motokiyo and Inuo). This play appropriates the Lady Aoi from Shikibu’s psychological novel to explore her death and is only one example of the available fanfictions of the novel.
· 1308-1320: Dante’s Divine Comedy (known most famously for the Inferno) is a literal OC self-insertion of the Italian Dante Alighieri himself into the hell, purgatory and heaven from Catholic / biblical texts. Its format is in an epic, in an attempt to outdo the Aeneid and Iliad before it. It also includes an insertion of a ghostly Virgil, who copied the Iliad to write the Aeneid. Furthermore, Dante’s work includes insertions of real historical people that Dante didn’t like. It’s possibly the most self-indulgent fanfiction ever created while also being named one of the greatest poems in literature.
· 1392: Geoffrey Chaucer (known as the father of English literature) wrote a famous collection called The Canterbury Tales. The collection takes its basic format and inspiration from Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (written in 1351). It’s suggested that some of the tales Chaucer uses actually originated from Boccaccio’s work.
Renaissance Era (1550-1660-ish CE)
· 1590: English poet Edmund Spenser borrowed the legend of Arthur of the Round Table in his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In it, Arthur is pretty love-sick over the fairy queen.
· 1597: English playwright Shakespeare borrowed various mythologies and historical figures and mixed them together. Not even his most popular play, Romeo and Juliet, was original. He took the idea from a poem written by Arthur Brooke in 1562, called, “The Tragicall Hystorye of Romeus and Iuliet.” Even more interesting, Brooke had taken his idea from the 1554 Giulietta e Romeo by Italian author Matteo Bandello. (Shakespeare repeatedly sourced other people’s ideas or historical existence for his plays.)
Enlightenment Era (1660-1789)
· 1667: English poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost, a fanfiction epic of the biblical story in the book of Genesis about the fall of creation and humankind into imperfection.
· 1712: English poet Alexander Pope wrote a mock-heroic epic called the Rape of the Lock to make fun of all the serious epic writers before him, borrowing such images as the way epic warriors put on armor and connecting it to the way rich people put on rich clothing and jewelry. He used other standard epic elements as repeated throughout The Iliad, Aeneid, and so forth.
· 1759: French writer and inventor, Voltaire, wrote a satire Candide. It borrowed various elements from Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales from the Islamic Golden Age.
Romantic Era (1789-1850)
· 1819: In Don Juan, English poet Lord Byron took the pre-dated legend of Don Juan, which was about a man who seduced a lot of women, and reversed the original plot so that Don Juan ended up seduced by a lot of women.
· 1820: English poet John Keats wrote a poem as a retelling of the Greek mythological creature called Lamia, which was a half-woman and half-monster (description varies depending on the Greek source). A lot of his works borrowed heavily from Greek mythology and literature, and he idolized the English Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser, to a point where his first work was called, “Imitation of Spenser” (1814). In it, he borrowed various images from Spenser’s epic, The Faerie Queene.
· 1843: English writer Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, based off the various stories compiled in the 1841 and 1842 The Lowell Offering, a publication magazine written by a group of intellectual but mostly anonymous women. He borrowed the certain pieces of plot, language, and descriptions for Scrooge’s ghostly encounters from the stories “A Visit from Hope” (anonymous), “Happiness” (anonymous), and “Memory and Hope” (by someone named Ellen). A Christmas Carol is additionally littered with biblical allusions all over the place.
· 1844: French writer Alexander Dumas borrowed The Three Musketeers, as well as many of the story’s side-characters, from The Memoirs of Monsieur d'Artagnan by French author Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras. He didn’t even change the names or who the villain, the Cardinal, was.
· 1845: American author Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, in which he has the mythical Scheherazade from the Tales from a Thousand and One Arabian Nights telling another story about the legendary Sinbad the Sailor.
· 1861: Hungarian author Imre Madach wrote The Tragedy of Man, which reverses the biblical moral principles of God and Satan: In this story, God is the violent and evil ruler, and Satan is the jaded/trickster victim just trying to open humanity’s eyes to the truth.
Modern Era (1900ish-1950s)
· 1922: Irish novelist James Joyce wrote his stream-of-consciousness novel Ulysses, which was based off of Homer’s Odyssey, to a point where he took the characters and simply renamed them, as well as aligned the structure of his book to the various episodes in Homer’s work.
· 1930: The Nancy Drew series was created under the penname Carolyn Keene, who did not exist. Instead, an American man named Edward Stratemeyer would write three pages of a story, then send it to one of several ghostwriters who wanted to write Nancy Drew. The ghostwriter would take the story and expand it. The anonymous group of ghostwriters all writing about the same character still exists today. Each individual ghostwriter has made changes to Nancy’s personality, looks, and age, as well as the type of plots said character engages in.
· 1937: English writer JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and then Lord of the Rings in the 1950s. He borrowed the names of characters and places after those seen in the Icelandic sagas Poetic Edda and Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson. Tolkien admitted he based the physical appearance of Gandalf off of the Norse god Odin. He modeled the character of Aragorn directly after Beowulf, from the old English epic (700-1000 BCE) Beowulf. Aragorn himself even paraphrases the Anglo-Saxon poem, “The Wanderer,” as an example of a verse created by his people of Rohan. Another fun fact is that Tolkien specifically borrowed the phrase “my precious,” from a Middle English poem called Pearl. Additionally, Tolkien was a big fan of romantic prose/poetry writer William Morris and wanted to write like him, so he borrowed a lot of phrases, aesthetics, and even names from such works like the 1888 The House of the Wolfings by Morris, including the place called “Mirkwood.” Of curious note is that Morris’s work was massively influenced by Virgil’s Aeneid.
· 1938: African-American author Richard Wright wrote a collection of stories called Uncle Tom’s Children, with an obvious borrowing of the title from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852.
· 1930s-present: DC and Marvel comics mostly just updated the mythological gods and goddesses for a modern era, appropriating their names, special relics, and abilities for their heroes, and then mixing them with some modern-day cover identifies. As an example, Wonder Woman was originally a nod to the Greek goddess Diana, a nod to the female Amazon warriors, and a redesigned image of Rosie the Riveter. As another example, the Flash is a reproduction of the Greek god Hermes, his winged helmet further clarifying the connection. Even the name Superman was not entirely original. 1938 Illustrator of Superman, Joe Shuster, took the name “Superman” from the German “Ubermensh,” a term coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. As a final example, sometimes the appropriation from mythology is incredibly obvious, as in the case of Thor.
· 1949: English author George Orwell reviewed a book called We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. He wrote a rave review on it and declared that he would try to write something similar, which ultimately became 1984, sharing many similar plot points and concepts while bringing the story of We into a more realistic environment. The novel We also inspired Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, for which Vonnegut admitted he also borrowed concepts from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
· 1950s: The Chronicles of Narnia by British author C.S. Lewis was based on biblical stories conveyed through various mythological elements as well.
Postmodern Era (1950s-Present, debatably)
· 1977: African-American author, Toni Morrison, wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Song of Solomon, which took its title name, as well as the names of several characters and plot points, from the Bible.
· 1988: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammed. Its title is a direct reference to controversial verses once placed in the Quran but then removed. These highly controversial and sensitive connections to Islamic and Old Testament personalities of Gabriel and Satan resulted in the banning of Rushdie’s book from several regions.
· 1997-2007: The Harry Potter series by British author JK Rowling borrows heavily from historical alchemy, including the age-old legend of the philosopher’s stone and the 1652 book Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, which was about the medicinal and occult properties of plants, which helped her build how magic was used in her stories. Rowling also admits the 1652 book inspired many of the character’s names. She appropriates several historical figures as well for her own purposes (as a sort of real-person fanfiction), including references to alchemists Nicolas Flammel and Paracelsus. She even admits to, while writing Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, dreaming about Flammel showing her how to make a philosopher’s stone.
· 2003: American author Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its twisting conspiracies are based almost entirely on the books of Margaret Starbird, most of which were written between 1993 and 2003.
· 2009: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by American author Seth Grahame-Smith, is a rehashing of Jane Austen’s 1813 Pride and Prejudice. But with zombies.
· 2015: American writer of critically acclaimed The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, claims that she has posted anonymous fanfictions of her own novel, as well as at least four Supernatural fanfics, being a huge fan of the show and of the paranormal.
As a professionally educated and trained writer and editor myself, I had to study the intertextualities of several of the pieces I mentioned above. But this is not an exhaustive world list by any means and is missing some other fantastic and influential writers—I’ve included only what has come to my mind in a short time. Plots and characters and ideas have been largely passed around throughout the history of literature. Without fanfiction, a solid portion of well-known literature would not exist.
In fact, many authors and even inventors will say that there is no such thing as an original idea. Certain pieces get touted as creative because they combine previously suggested elements in a different or thought-provoking way. (Don’t even get me started on how science fiction is a driving force behind many scientific advancements today!)
If you’re writing fanfiction, then you’re participating in a tradition that spans millennia. There is no piece of literature created in some “original” vacuum. That is precisely why literary critics, and those who have professionally studied fiction in an academic setting, use the word “intertextuality” to describe how works of fiction are ultimately interrelated in some way or another.
Therefore, fanfiction is the legacy of literature. If Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Keats, Poe, Dickens, Tolkien, and Brown can write fanfiction about and expand other people’s works, you can too. So the next time someone tells you to stop writing fanfiction, or tells you that it’s not a valid form of art, tell them that they obviously have never read the most important historical works of fiction, or even many popular modern stories, which are all rehashed fanfiction stories, borrowing characters and names and setting and even syntax. Rant written for @greenappleeyes and everyone else unfairly shamed for writing fanfiction. Content was retrieved from my own class notes, as well as publically available online interviews and articles.
The modern notion of fanfiction as a Weird and Wrong Thing has a lot to do with out-of-control copyright laws. As I understand it, copyright in its original form was supposed to protect the author for a limited time so they can make a living, but as it exists now it’s strangling innovation.
Like, something in the ballpark of 90% of the Walt Disney Company’s work are fan films, and US copyright law mysteriously gets another few decades added to it every time Micky Mouse is about to fall into the public domain. It’s obscene.
Fanfiction is fighting back against that, in small ways and in large ways. Fanfiction is punk.
In the immortal words of Neil Gaiman“
“I won the Hugo Award for a piece of Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft fanfiction, so I’m in favour.”
Yeah, my writing professors called it “garbage” and said just reading it would lower the quality of our writing, but I can think of lots of published authors who openly admit to writing fanfic. Off the top of my head, both John Green and Jen Campbell used to write Harry Potter fanfiction. And I do appreciate you bringing up Marvel and DC, because frankly 95% of any comic book character’s canon is fanfic. The creator of that character has them for such a small amount of time, and everything after that is a bunch of fan continuations, AUs, and reboots.
I’m currently doing a MA in Creative Writing in the UK and the only reason I was accepted was fanfiction.
Fact: English isn’t my first language. By order of acquisition it’s my fourth, by order of fluency it’s my second.
Fact: When we started learning English in school, I was failing the class. Part of it was due to an incompetent teacher that hated teaching, but fact was, I was failing English.
Fact: I started reading fanfiction when I was around 14, over a decade ago. At first I stuck to French and German ones.
Fact: my favourite fanfic at the time was a translation from an English fic. At some point, I realized that the translation was about twenty chapters behind the original, complete fic. And I really, really needed to know how it was going to end. So I grabbed a dictionary, braced myself, tried to tell myself that English wasn’t that different from German anyway, and started reading.
Fact: I realized how much more fanfiction there were in English and that I had gone through all the decent ones in French and German in my fandoms. So I buckled up and plunged into the English side of fanfiction.net and never stopped.
Fact: The Deathly Hallows came out shortly after that and fuck if I was going to wait two months for the French translation. My cousin, who had already read it, was staying with us for two weeks and ended up being my live-in dictionary.
Fact: I started writing fic in English when I was 15, figuring that there was a bigger readership on that side and that any practice I could get in during the summer holidays would help me once class started again. At that point, I had been the first in my class for six months.
Fact: these fics were badly written and I cringe when I reread them. I don’t regret a single word of them.
Fact: I got a mention in an international competition for students from french schools in France and abroad in English. I was up against students from french highschools in the UK and the US and I still placed.
Fact: I quoted fanfiction as a way for first time writers intending on going pro to get a feel for their audience and test their writing style in my master’s thesis on digital publishing and if it could be an opportunity for first time writers writing for teenage and YA in Belgium and in France.
Fact: there’s actual University classes about fanfiction in some universities in the US. One of the books I read for my thesis was called ‘Fic: why fanfiction is taking over the world’ by Prof. Ann Jamieson if I remember correctly.
Fact: I got the C2 Cambridge certification, the highest they give, when I was applying for the C1 because my work was obviously a level higher that expected.
Fact: I have not stopped writing fanfiction in English since I was fifteen. It has helped me a lot with my writing. Playing in someone else’s sandbox has helped me work on structure and pacing and plot because I didn’t have.to worry about creating the world or.the characters so I could focus on the actual craft of writing.
Fact: I got accepted in my first choice university for a MA in Creative Writing. The short story I submitted for my application was basically a 2nd person narrator fanfiction of the Arthurian myths focusing on Morgana’s life and struggles.
Fact: two of the assignments I handed in for my first semester exams could be classified as Modern AU/Reincarnation of a.Arthuriana mythology again and b. Greek mythology
Fact: the story I’m currently working on for my dissertation is based on a legend from my hometown and could technically be classified as fanfiction too and my supervisor loves it.
Fact: I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for reading and writing fanfiction. Fuck anyone who says otherwise.
And if someone has the galls to say that it’s somehow lesser writing, point them at writers like @blackkatmagic or @deadcatwithaflamethrower or so many others who produce a truly awe inspiring number of stories and words of much higher quality than most of what you can find in a bookshop. And they’re doing it for free. We all are. Because we want to, because we like the original content or want to fix it, because we just want to indulge or because we have a story we need to tell but don’t feel like we can write it as our own, and use the characters as stand-in, because we want to practice a new language or because we want to write, no matter what, and we don’t yet have the confidence to try writing and sharing our own stories, because… Every single one of us has their reasons and all of these reasons are valid, no matter what, and all of the stories we put out there are valid no matter what anyone else says.
Many published writers have written and still write fanfiction. The amazing @neil-gaiman has already been mentioned, but the fantastic @seananmcguire does too and has spoken out quite a lot in defense of fanfiction, especially for women writers (because when men do it it’s an ‘hommage’ but when we do it it’s just silly copycating of course). @deadcatwithaflamethrower /@jer-keene doesn’t only write fic, she also has a great book out called Ashlesha that was inspired by a star wars fanfiction she was writing at the time.
Every single fairy tale or mythology retelling you’ve read is a fanfiction, and they were fanfiction to start with.
And even if a fic writer never plans on becoming a published writer, that doesn’t mean their writing is lesser for it. It just means that we’re really fucking lucky they decided to share it with us for free.
*happy/flattered because holy crap*
The creation of fanfiction inherently involves synergy—a melding of, for lack of a better description, different flavors of creation. A fanfic author, by working with things unlike what she would have come up with herself, is interacting with things alien to her, stretching her own ideas to meet the inspiration, to follow their shapes, to reconcile her creativity to someone else’s.
Everyone’s creativity has particular shapes to them. I would never have come up with Severus Snape, or Princess Leia, or Agent Coulson, and to write using them I have to grow my creativity to accommodate them.
It is this interaction, between me and not-me, the bridging of the gap, the synergy, the cooperative nature of building a story out of a medium designed for a different story, that makes fanfiction dynamic.
Fanfiction can be easier in some ways (most notably that it is satisfying due to the author’s love for established characters, and finds a receptive audience due to the readers’ established love for those characters), but it is also uniquely challenging. You’re not working with stuff you built to your own comfort zones, but repurposing something explicitly built to someone else’s scale and priorities.
Moreover, to write that character believably and true to themselves, you have to understand them enough to generate motivations and actions that are true to them, to sort out their core motivations and personalities and then adjust for any differences in your story and theirs, distinguishing what of them comes from their nature from what is built up from their history and calculating what they would be when shaped by the ways your story differs from canon.
If you’re writing Harry Potter as a Slytherin in Year Five, for example, this involves subtracting the influence of everything he did as a Gryffindor in the previous four years, calculating what he would have experienced instead as a Slytherin, and both filtering that through his nature and filtering his nature through the new batch of experiences.
And fic writers just … do that. Intuitively.
You could honestly say that just making up your own ideas out of nothing is easy in comparison, and you would not be entirely wrong. Adapting pre-existing ideas, with their form and shape not of your own control or making, to work with and build with is a challenge and a worthy one.
