Fan fiction is everywhere, if you know how to look

Washington Post

5 days ago

When Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings began pitching literary agents 15 years ago, they kept their interest in fan fiction a secret.
Known by their combined pen name, Christina Lauren, the best-selling romance duo met through their shared love of Twilight fan fiction. At the time, Billings says, coming from fandom 'was much more of a black mark on you' if you wanted to break into mainstream publishing. This was just before 'Fifty Shades of Grey' — a novel that began as a rewriting of 'Twilight' — became a global publishing phenomenon. Now, Hobbs and Billings work in a publishing industry with a vastly different attitude: one far more receptive to authors who got their start writing unauthorized works online for other fans, based on previously existing characters and worlds.
Fan fiction's ascendance comes as entertainment and media companies are turning to established intellectual property to shore up the eroding economics of their industries. It also helps that many of the decision-makers grew up online, with active accounts on Wattpad, Tumblr and other fan-fiction-friendly platforms. Agents directly solicit writers of popular fan-made works, and new books proudly advertise their 'fic' roots. Fan fiction didn't invent tropes like 'only one bed' or 'friends to lovers,' but fic websites popularized tagging and searching through them, and these categories have become a mainstay of promoting genre fiction of all kinds.
The interest of many readers, meanwhile, has caught up with what fic writers, often women and queer people, have been up to all along: Joyful same-sex romances and stories told with the immediacy of first-person present tense, for example, now fill bookstore shelves.
If you know how to look, fan fiction is everywhere, often climbing the bestseller lists and sometimes collecting awards.
Percival Everett's novel 'James,' which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction, is basically 'Huckleberry Finn' fan fiction. (The Pulitzers seem to be especially fond of this approach: Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead' reimagines 'David Copperfield,' and Geraldine Brooks's 'March' finds its story in the hollows and silences of 'Little Women.') Madeline Miller's 'The Song of Achilles' reworks 'The Iliad' with more explicit gay sex, a familiar approach for fan fic writers, who have long loved to pair up male characters with chemistry either implied or imagined. 'Rodham,' Curtis Sittenfeld's novel about an alternate history where Hillary Rodham never married Bill Clinton, is basically Real Person Fiction, popularly known as RPF. To say nothing of the many modernized versions of 'Pride and Prejudice': 'Pride and Protest' (Nikki Payne), 'Ayesha at Last' (Uzma Jalaluddin) and 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' (Seth Grahame-Smith), among others.
Traditionalists may bristle at some of these comparisons, but it's hard to say what distinguishes any of these books from those that populate fan fic sites such as Archive of Our Own unless we start from the assumption that fan fic is Bad and mainstream publication is Good. (Plenty of fan fic is crummy, of course, but it's not like the gatekeepers in traditional publishing aren't whiffing it some of the time, too.) Once we begin down this path, though, where does it end? Think about classics like 'Paradise Lost' and 'East of Eden' — are they not Bible fan fiction? Isn't all Roman mythology simply Greek mythology fan fic? Isn't 'Romeo and Juliet' just Shakespeare's take on 'Pyramus and Thisbe'? There are some characters, worlds and stories that we just like coming back to, and it's hardly surprising that other writers — some blessed by the muses (and hefty book deals), others merely enthusiastic — want to take them for a literary spin.
This may be where the usefulness of the category starts to break down. If everything is fan fiction, that 'means that there's not anything really distinctive about fan fiction as we mostly encounter it now,' says Anne Jamison, the author of 'Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World' and a professor of English at University of Utah.
Elizabeth Minkel, a fan culture expert and co-host of the podcast 'Fansplaining,' used to want to claim the monoliths of classical literature as fan fiction. A big part of that impulse, she thinks now, was a hunger to legitimize fan fic by expanding people's notions of what it is. But she's telling a new story these days.
It started when she got involved in the fandom of the BBC show 'Sherlock,' a contemporary depiction of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. People would often describe the show itself as a work of fan fiction for the way it modernized the characters and setting from Arthur Conan Doyle. Minkel disagreed.
'They're making a lot of money to write the sanctioned big-budget thing on the BBC. And they have a different set of priorities. They have a different set of monetary rewards, different relationship with the source material, with the rights holders,' she says. By contrast, 'fan fiction is all about the gift economy.'
Jamison has also come to a narrower understanding of fan fiction, one that has more to do with writing for its own sake, without an eye to profit or reward. It's about 'the personal satisfaction of [writing] and then the personal satisfaction of reading something by somebody else who loves or has strong feelings about the same thing that you do,' she says. 'In many ways, fan fiction is so much more free because you don't have to worry about the market or the demographic.'
And it's that freedom that makes fan fiction so delightful. Even as publishers are glomming onto its potential, most of the people writing it are still doing so for themselves — and for one another. They're puzzling through their feelings about desire or power. They're in conversation with the source material, and they're crossing swords with other people in their fandoms about their interpretation of the canon. In exploring this character's heart, might they better understand their own? Or maybe they just really think that Captain Picard should hook up with Lt. Commander Worf. And they're making it so, at least for the thousands — sometimes hundreds of thousands — of words they conjure.
For Minkel, the urge to write about preexisting characters was instinctual. As an elder millennial, she didn't have internet in her home as a 10-year-old, so she wasn't inspired by other fics when she wanted to scrawl stories based on the characters from Sweet Valley High in her notebook. That's an experience that she finds many people in her age cohort and older share. 'They just had an instinct when they really enjoyed a story or when it really frustrated them and they wanted to fix something or felt like something wasn't done well,' she says.
These days, teens living online are saturated with fan works. They find what they're looking for on sites such as Archive of Our Own, which has basically centralized any fandom you could imagine and some you probably couldn't, all with robust tagging and search. Many of the stories are straightforward. What if these two characters had sex? (Fan fiction tends to be most associated with smut — and you can absolutely find many of your favorite characters getting it on in a cornucopia of ways — but it's not all salacious.) What if this person who died in the show actually lived? What if we got to linger with these people, or in these worlds, in the mundane moments between all the action?
Unbound by the constraints of the market (or even of good taste) and often buoyed by anonymity, fan fiction ultimately represents the primordial soup of storytelling, pushing forward the bounds of the stories we can or would like to tell.
Jamison sees fan fiction authors sipping from the same wellspring as bards and troubadours. 'It connects with a storytelling culture where there would be wandering storytellers and stuff like that,' she says. 'They would tell stories about the same characters that everybody knew because that's what people wanted to hear about.'
While many of those characters come from other works, there's also Real Person Fiction: stories about actors, athletes, politicians and other people in the news. After the arrest of Luigi Mangione in the murder of a health insurance executive, writers produced hundreds of fics about him, in genres such as legal drama and vampire romance — using conceptually familiar frameworks to explore a fascination with an alluring outlaw, itself a well-trodden archetype of storytelling.
And there's a delicious strain of fan fiction in which writers set formal or narrative challenges for themselves just to see if they can pull it off. Can you write an entire fic through social media posts? Could you take the characters of ABC's first-responder procedural '9-1-1' and plop them into the world and plot of the NBC sitcom 'Parks and Recreation'? Sure, why not. (The '9-1-1'/'Parks and Rec' mash-up works shockingly well.)
Hobbs remembers reading a fic about the boy band One Direction, only 'each of them were an apple and they were, like, living in this fruit bowl. And it was so weirdly emotional,' she says, because the apples observed one another as they rotted and were cut. 'It was just like the craziest thing that at the end of this fic you were like, wow, that was really deep.'
There's a kind of puckish absurdism at play in such works that's not so far removed from postmodern literary fiction, but it's underpinned by very real, relatable feelings. And a built-in audience, too. Drawn by their investment in familiar characters, readers who wouldn't necessarily seek out experimental literature will eagerly dive into a story in which, say, the Harry Potter protagonists argue about the principles of philosophical rationalism, or Bucky Barnes's and Steve Rogers's love story is revealed through court transcripts. While some fic is achingly earnest, it's a mistake to think all of it is: A lot of writers are in on the joke.
Cecilia R. Aragon, a professor at the University of Washington, conducted a deep ethnographic survey of different fan fiction communities of teens and young adults: 'These young people, who everybody was saying, 'Oh they can't write, they don't like to write, teachers can't get them to write,'' she says. But that's not what Aragon found.
They were writing what they wanted to write and had 'a large crowd of peers that were giving them little tiny bits of mentoring,' she says. 'We showed that, as people got more feedback, it was correlated with an improvement in writing ability.'
For Hobbs, who 'stumbled into fan fiction … it was a place to not only learn how to write, but also I didn't know that I had anything to say until I had this kind of community and platform to say it.' Hobbs lives in Utah and sees herself as more liberal than many of the other people in her town. Fan fiction 'really did surround me, in a way that I didn't have in my real life, with like-minded people — people who saw the world I did, who saw it the same way I did, who loved the things that I love.'
It's possible that the egalitarian openness of fan fiction — the way that it invites anyone to try anything — explains something about its ubiquity.
The likes of Percival Everett and Madeline Miller may be writing in a different key than the online fan fic masses, if only because they're getting paid for their work, and so are the people who edit and publicize it. But when their stories sell, and sell to a lot of people, it's partly because readers can feel the joy they take in playing freely with the stories and characters that we love, too.
There's a pleasure to witnessing other people's passion, whether it overlaps with our own or merely entices our curiosity. Fan fiction is brewed with passion. And sure, some of the results are profoundly mediocre, riddled with typos, confusing, even offensive. Feel free to close those tabs.
But there is also incredible fan fiction. Stunningly written, deeply moving, keep-you-up-all-night gripping, creative in ways that shock and linger. And what makes the form feel especially lovely is that each of these stories is a gift. Someone, somewhere has toiled, and perhaps giggled, over their keyboard. The only glory in it for them is the hope that their words might intrigue, arouse or amuse you. They're stirring the old storytelling soup because it's nourishing but also, even more important, because it's delicious.