Every year or so an article gets published in a mainstream magazine with some variant on “this hitherto unexplored phenomenon of Fan Fiction”—always two words, always capitalized—which covers the exact same ground, and has no idea that in its profound redundancy it itself is technically a kind of transformative work.

Because these articles all follow the same basic structure and path. They introduce the concept of Fan Fiction, which is a thing that teenage girls* and sexually frustrated/bored housewives engage in to give their lives some interest and spice, possibly including some quotes from a particular Fan Fiction author who would like to get their name in print. They explain with breathtaking condescension why teenage girls and bored housewives want to write fic, using extreme examples of fandoms and pairings to underscore the apparently absurd nature of this particular phenomenon, and they have no idea that someone else has written the same exact article several years earlier, almost word for word.

And an article like the one you’re reading now very frequently shows up, pointing out the obvious. And nothing ever really changes.

As someone who was a fic author long before I ever got published, I’m one of the people who either gleefully dissects these articles or—for the sake of my blood pressure—ignores them completely. Because the Fan-space-Fiction article writers have, across the board, ignored the fact that the majority of, say, Western art history prior to the modern period is made up of fanart for a) Greco-Roman mythology and b) the Bible. That’s not all: God knows how many major works of literature are unapologetic pieces of fic; and there are vanishingly few new things under the sun that don’t in some way draw from, reference, or retell an existing story. This is what transformative work means: art that is based on, refers to, exists within, or retells (among however many aspects) some pre-existing work. There are so few pieces of art that do not reference, etcetera, some other work, that it feels somewhat puerile to try to list them.

For an obvious example: Paradise Lost is absolutely Bible fic. (It’s fic, not Fan Fiction. Fanfiction, all one word and preferably lowercase, is acceptable, but generally we just use “fic.”) Dante’s Divine Comedy is self-insert Bible fic, if you want to get really teenage-girl shudder-patronize-sneer about it. I like to challenge the people who think that art and literature inspired by a preexisting story is not fic to explain exactly why, possibly with diagrams, because it almost always comes down to but Fan Fiction is written by teenage girls! And sexually frustrated housewives!

So what? Teenage girls and sexually frustrated housewives get to make art too. And suggesting that anything these groups do is inherently unworthy or frivolous or unimportant simply shows more of your own prejudice than you might personally prefer. Meanwhile, a great number of people, some of whom do not fit into either of those groups, are writing fic and making fanart and getting a kick out of doing so. I said before I became a Traditionally Published Author™ that if I ever did achieve that status, I would never shut up on behalf of fic authors, and I am not throwing away any single opportunity to yell on their behalf, but the thing is I don’t strictly need to these days: more and more fic authors are making the jump to traditional publishing, and more and more fic is being published by the Big Five with the serial numbers filed off. (If you know, you know.)

Fic is an opportunity to stretch your creative muscles, to try things you don’t know if you can do, to poke ideas with a stick and see what happens, and it’s also an incredibly valuable source of feedback. I’ve gone through an entire lengthy MFA program with a fiction concentration, and nothing I got from any of that has been half as useful to me as a writer as fic comments have been (not to mention that I met and fell in love with my wife in the AO3 comments for my Star Wars stories). Fic offers the ability to explore and the ability to have other people read your stuff and immediately respond, and the great thing about fic comments and feedback is you can decide which bits you actually care about.

Let’s look more closely at the inherent bias regarding fic authors as less-than, as not-able-to-do-it-for-real: the majority of said authors tend to be, as mentioned, teenage girls and housewives with an itch to scratch—thus utterly dismissible to people who put effort into appearing to be highbrow literary critics. Why exactly is it terrible that a story is written by a teenage girl? Why should you dismiss it out of hand because a teenage girl wrote it? Should a housewife’s storytelling be ignored because she is a housewife? The thing is it doesn’t matter whether the fic is erotic or not—people tend to assume all fic is about sex, but there’s a huge variety of stories out there that have nothing to do with erotica—and it doesn’t matter why the author wrote the fic. If they wrote it because they lust after Character A pegging Character B on the TARDIS console—okay? If they want hot vampires to kiss and wrote a 500-word description of them doing so, okay? Just because something is written by a population generally assumed to be dim and/or easily influenced does not actually mean that it’s not worthwhile. Also: being a teenage girl is not a limitation. Being a housewife is also not a limitation. Assuming people in those circumstances have nothing important to say simply because they are who and what they are—that reflects a lot more poorly on the person making the assumption. And, just as importantly, not all fic is written for all audiences: if you, the reader, are not interested in these particular hot vampires making out or these particular Pokémon characters engaging in hurt/comfort, then you don’t have to read it. Fic audiences self-select; there is no percentage in seeking out stories about pairings, categories, or fandoms you don’t personally enjoy just to be snide about them.

Writing fic gives people a chance to explore ideas or possibilities that weren’t addressed in the source material. It allows people to flex their creative muscles on their own. It creates endless possibilities for derivative (alternative) universes, worlds in which the characters retain their central traits but are deposited into completely disparate settings. (This by itself is a brilliant mental wind-sprint tool for authors of any stripe: how would your characters fare being shoved into this particular specific time and place? GO.)

There will always be the “Fan Fiction!” essay, year after year, but there will also always be the fan communities who write and read fic, who create and appreciate fanart, who simply get on with it while the outside world blink-blinks in surprise that transformative works exist, have existed, and will exist until the stars turn cold. There truly are only so many stories under the sun, and someone will have written fic for all of them by the time we get to the heat death of the universe.

 

*Teenage girls, but also boys and nonbinary people: everyone writes fic.

© 2024 Vivian Shaw