So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic

Buckle up babes, we’re all in tonight. In a ridiculous moment of hubris a few weeks ago, I posted on Twitter that I was debating between writing fanfic and doing work while on a plane home from a work trip. My editor saw it, and now, wouldn’t you know it, I’m doing a whole slideshow to introduce you to fanfiction, fanfic, or just fic. Life is funny. (I posted that fic I wrote on the plane last week, btw, I’m very pleased. You will never find it.)

Let me take you on a journey through fanfiction—the history, the drama, the good, the bad, the ugly. All of it deserves its moment in the sun. Or on your screens. We’ll figure it out together.

Fanfic is simply a piece of fiction that is based on another piece of fiction, done with intention to transform the source material. Easy enough, right? It can be as simple as a “missing scene,” or it can be a “fix-it fic” where an author rewrites parts of the narrative that they disliked. It can also just be straight up porn. Whatever you want to do. It’s all fair game.

Fanfic has, in a lot of ways, been around forever. If you take an expansive view of what fanfic is, you could easily argue that Dante’s Inferno is just self-insert Bible fanfic. It is in human nature to tell stories, and retell them, and then tell them again. Fanfic is just a very modern term for retelling old stories with your own spin. I think that contemporary fanfic is also inherently tied to community, fandom, and sharing that fic. It’s not necessary that fanfic be shared, obviously, but I think that it’s a major component when judging where contemporary fanfic started.

All right, fine. Contemporary fanfiction—i.e., fanfiction emerging from a collective, community fandom—can be traced to one of two main sources. The first is Star Trek. The second is Sherlock Holmes. (Hilariously, not much has changed. The Star Trek and Sherlock fandoms are still around!) Star Trek fandom is generally credited with a lot of archival work and with producing fanzines that regularly made it into the hands of Gene Roddenberry himself. He even said in a letter to the Spokanalia fanzine publishers that the zine was “required reading” in the office.

In fact, Star Trek: The New Voyages is a collection of fanfiction that was traditionally published by Bantam Books, with a forward by Roddenberry that reads:

It is now a source of great joy for me to see their view of Star Trek, their new Star Trek stories, reaching professional publication here. I want to thank these writers, congratulate them on their efforts, and wish them good fortune on these and further of their voyages into other times and dimensions

Okay, this part is great, actually, because it’s part contemporary fanfic history and part historical fanfic. Let’s start with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. Generally speaking, Sherlock is considered the first contemporary fandom, not only because of the massive fandom that spawned around it, but because of the fanwork that occurred around Doyle’s characters.

So, because Sherlock Holmes stories were incredibly popular, serialized, and the main character eventually killed off by Doyle as he became less and less interested in his work, fandom kicked in. Fanfiction was published in serialized magazines, although back then it wasn’t called fanfic, it was called pastiche.

If you want to get a look at the history of fanfic, an incredibly rich place to start is with this archive of Sherlock pastiche, starting in 1888 with a story written by “Donan Coyle.” A particularly famous pastiche was written by J.M. Barrie—yes, the Peter Pan author—titled “My Evening with Sherlock Holmes.” Pastiche is, by many accounts, the start of contemporary fanfic.

I won’t go into commonplace books, there’s too much, I get too emotional, but just know that in the late 1700s and into the 1800s young girls obsessed with the Romantic Poets also engaged in transformative work by rewriting poems to be about themselves, their friends, and subjects close to their own lives. They also shared these books, trading them with friends, engaging in both transformative creation and distribution, the two key components of fandom. Sadly, this is not quite in io9’s wheelhouse enough to go into more detail, but just know I would write 2,000 words about commonplace books, EASILY.

Here’s the tea. As fanfic became more and more public, not everyone was like Gene Roddenberry. Some authors got, well, a nice way to put it is protective of their work. What this means is that some authors came right out and said they didn’t like fanfic, and some authors did more than that. Enter Interview With the Vampire’s Anne Rice. I really enjoy Rice’s work and her energy was really next level, but in 2000 she began threatening fic writers with legal action. What happened next is going to take up 4,000 words (I’m working on it), but essentially, fandom became tainted by her shame-and-blame letter campaign. She adopted a scorched-earth policy and drove her fandom underground, and this affected fandoms for literally decades. Regardless, fandom survived. Enter… the modern age.

Sorry for the history lesson. (I’m not sorry.) We’re going back to modern fanfiction. Most modern fanfic is online, obviously, but there are still zines being made and circulated. Online fanfic resides in a number of places; fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, Livejournal, and, of course, the Archive of Our Own.

Generally speaking, you can choose any one of those sites (fanfiction.net, Wattpad, Tumblr, Livejournal, and, of course, the Archive of Our Own) and find fanfiction, but really what you want to do is identify the kind of fanfiction you’re looking for and figure out where the fandom is posting. Generally speaking, the Archive of Our Own is probably one of the largest and most active places to find fic, mostly because it does not have a lot of restrictions on the kind of content you can post, which is great! But it can also be… not so great, for the same reason.

Great! All you gotta do is pull up a Google Doc, Notepad, or even (god forbid) the native text editor in the CMS of whatever site you eventually decide to post on. Your fic can be anything! It can be a deep exploration of a single scene from a minor character’s POV; it can be a fun alternate universe where everyone is in high school (or college, or grad school, or even some kind of magical school for weird kids); it can be straight up smut (I’m not judging); or it can be an entire novel that continues the show you love because it got cancelled too soon.

I’m sorry. I know people would love to tell you that hits, comments, shares, subscribes, or even—in Archive of Our Own parlance—kudos means something, but it doesn’t mean anything other than someone clicked, liked, or said something about your fic. Success is what you make it! There is no algorithm on Archive of Our Own or Fanfiction.net. Using a system of tags, fanfiction writers can only hope that their fic reaches its intended audience. But success doesn’t matter, fanfic is written for fandom, for yourself, and for the love of the game. Well, the love of the original media. You get it.

Yup. There is. A lot of it is great. It’s NSFW but the fact that it simply exists isn’t that big of a deal, especially considering that it’s all very fictional and usually involves something like… vampires, or magic, or something. Most fanfic writers who do write smutty fiction will tag it appropriately, so if you don’t want to read it, you don’t have to! But if you do want to read that sort of thing, there is, like, a lot to choose from. Go nuts. Explore your own gender. Discover something about yourself.

Many fanfics have a lot of tags. Read them. Heed them. If you see something that squicks you out, makes you feel bad, or is just generally something you’re not interested in reading (for instance: I’m in the minority who does not enjoy a coffeeshop AU and you wouldn’t catch me dead reading one), you should simply move on. Flaming—or leaving bad reviews—is generally considered in poor taste. Fanfic authors, at any level, are giving you art for free, out of the goodness of their hearts and the joy in their lives. Maybe just let people have fun.

So here’s the thing—comments are great. But there are some rules; first among them is don’t be rude. Don’t ask for updates (that’s pushy and weird) but definitely say you’re looking forward to reading more (much nicer! grateful!). If you want to point out minor typos this is generally acceptable, but any deeper negative critique of the line writing, plot, characters, etc. is generally unwanted and can be super depressing to read. Keep it positive, light, fun, and energetic. Or, if you don’t feel up for commenting, even leaving a string of emojis followed by a quick “loved this” is perfectly acceptable and absolutely encouraged.

Yes, right. So the greatest thing about a lot of fanfiction sites (including my favorite, AO3) is that they exist to create a safe space for fanfic authors. What this means is that while they protect authors who write fic from corporations and authors who might not like that they are writing fanfiction, they also protect authors who write fanfic that is actively damaging, bigoted, or hateful. There is a moderation process on each of these sites but so far, there isn’t a lot of marked movement that sites have made to actively combat bigotry, more or less relying on a report to spur them into action.

What this means is that you need to actively curate your own experience. Report, block, move on. It’s much less about following the “dead dove/don’t eat” rule and more about reminding the sites that this hateful context exists and they need to do something about it. Report! Block! Move on!

There’s really not much else! Fanfic is super fun to write, there are fantastic fandom communities out there, and it’s a wonderful hobby! I love being a fanfic writer—I’ve met some incredible friends through fandom and fanfic was a big part of that. Whatever idea you have, whether it’s requiting that unrequited love, giving a character the ending they really deserved, or even just transing your favorite character in an attempt to explore your own latent gender hangups (who’s done that?? Not me! I’ve never had a gender crises in my life!), fanfiction is a wonderful, storied tradition of playfulness and earnest critique of media. I hope you all try it, at least once. Just to see what it’s about.

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