Fan fiction: the bastard child in the literary corner making leaps for diversity

FAN FICTION is to the literary world what Tasmania is to Australia. It’s a pocket ecosystem plonked just off the more frequented mainland, happy in its distance and difference but altogether separated by rough waters. Rough waters that have become more turbulent with the rampant success of textbook case of fan fiction – Fifty Shades of Grey.

Fan fiction is an endless cycle of storytelling where beloved characters can live forever in the imagination of its readers. Where violently loathed villains can get their just desserts, Bella can choose Jacob and have his devilishly attractive werewolf babies, and Elizabeth Bennet can be a kick-ass zombie fighter.

Taking a text—be it a film, book, comic, play, musical or television show—and playing with its world and characters to create new stories is part of a grand tradition dating back to the likes of Homer and the Iliad. Fast forward a few millenniums and we have Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a parallel narrative of Jane Eyre; Geraldine Brook’s March that tells the story of Little Woman from the point of view of an absent character; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz; and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an alternative universe to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Popular culture is riddled with fan fiction; only it isn’t called fan fiction. To the mainstream, fan fiction is a dirty word interchangeable with soft porn and wannabe writers. From erotica about vampires, bodice-busting women, and men with washboard abdominals, to Romeo and Juliet soliloquies in broken iambic pentameter straight out of a Year Nine creative writing journal, the fan fiction community houses many of the sex-obsessed, semi-illiterates of this world.

Realistically, though, the bad and downright ugly in fan fiction get a disproportionate amount of attention. That is if fan fiction gets media attention at all—which it often doesn’t. It’s the bastard child in the corner no one in literary circles like to talk about. Unless the case in hand is Fifty Shades of Grey, which was originally Twilight fan fiction, and has now beaten J.K Rolling’s Harry Potter series to be the fastest-selling paperback of all time.

Love them or loathe them, fan fiction communities are on the rise thanks to the Internet. Fanfictiondotnet – one of the largest online fan fiction archives – holds over half a million Harry Potter stories and receives over six million hits per month. Australians make up a significant chunk of that traffic. A study of fanfictiondotnet users last year found Australia has the fourth-highest number of member accounts on the site, after the US, UK and Canada. Chances are your partner, sibling, children, friend or colleague reads fan fiction. They might even write it.

Whether they’ll tell you or not, though, is another matter entirely. It is common for authors to keep their fan fiction habits on the quiet. Dana Jenks, as she is known in the fan fiction community, is a high school music teacher and composer. Her students and colleagues don’t know that she writes fan fiction, and Dana is determined to keep it that way. Dana writes Phantom of the Opera stories to free up creative juices for her opera compositions, and finds fanfictiondotnet is a good testing-ground for her ideas. “I’m interested in learning what makes a story work musically and gaining insight into the minds of music-loving fans,” she says. “Fan fiction is a giant playground where it is fun to experiment without much risk.” It’s a private hobby that feeds into her public and professional life, but never the other way around.

Theatre stagehand, Caitlin Kenny, on the other hand, will happily tell anyone willing to listen about her love of River Song/Doctor fan fiction in the Doctor Who fandom and Sirius/Lupin pairings in the Harry Potter stories. Caitlin has battled in heated arguments on fan forums about why River – not Rose – is the Doctor’s true love. For Caitlin, reading and writing Doctor/River fan fiction is a legitimising, cathartic process for her own life choices. She says what makes a text appealing is the individual meaning and relevance people find in stories to their own lives. “[River] is beautiful, but she’s a size 12 and sexy, and the Doctor finds her attractive. I like that because it feels like my life is legitimised with my beautiful, English boyfriend,” she says. Just as writers of canonical texts insert their own values, romantic interests and personalities into their characters and plot scenarios, so too do fan fiction writers when re-crafting such stories.

It comes as no surprise, then, that fan fiction offers some of the most diverse insights into how readers make sense of themselves and the characters they interact with. Far from intellectual junk food, fan fiction academic at the University of Sydney Joseph Brennan argues that fan fiction is a useful anthropological object of study that reveals a lot about society and the way it makes meaning.

Joseph’s research focuses on slash fiction. That is, the “queering” of stories to reflect homosexual elements. In the slash community, Joseph says engagement becomes an exercise in asserting power and reclaiming a text to reflect the sexual diversity found in society. “When reading texts I look for gaps, and in those gaps I find problematic representations,” he says. The homophobic characterisation of Dean in Supernatural is a case point for Joseph. “Dean regularly cracks gay jokes on the show, but, by reclaiming Dean, [through slash fan fiction] readers can fix a lot of the negative stereotypes he projects,” he says. By allowing characters the happiness that is denied in the canon, writers and readers can share in a semblance of their happiness. “It’s quite personal,” he says.

Academically enlightening, personally fulfilling, and creatively gratifying, fan fiction fills a gap in many people’s lives. What makes Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead different from Jo Blo’s re-telling of Wuthering Heights through the eyes of Heathcliff can be whittled down to the quality of ideas and writing proficiency. This admittedly can be a deal breaker, but the action of the mind, of thinking beyond what readers are hand-fed, is the same. It’s human curiosity. In a word, it’s storytelling. The value lies in what you make of it. As fanfictiondotnet’s motto says, “unleash your imagination” and make of it what you will.

(NOTE that this is a re-working [and re-sizing] of an earlier fan fiction feature published on this blog).

Sex, sloppy writing and the Vulcan salute: moving beyond stereotypes in fan fiction

FAN FICTION is to the literary world what Tasmania is to Australia. It’s a pocket ecosystem hidden ‘down under’ where some people visit and have a marvellous time while others don’t understand why it’s so cold and wet. Not that fan fiction is cold and wet. But it can be an unpleasant place full of soggy, bastardised versions of much-loved classic texts.

Taking a text—be it a film, book, comic, play, musical or television show—and playing with its world and characters to create new stories is hardly new. Fan fiction is part of a grand tradition dating back to the likes of Homer and the Iliad. To a fan fiction writer, the Iliad is Real Person Fiction (or RPF) in the same way Cameron from Oklahoma’s RPF about Molotov taking over the Soviet Union after Stalin died is. Both used real people, places and events as catalysts to tell fictional stories. Epic poem or not.

Fast forward a few millenniums and we have Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, a parallel narrative of Jane Eyre; Geraldine Brook’s March, which tells the story of Little Woman from the point of view of an absent character; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies which has, well, zombies in it, and is what readers call Alternative Universe (or AU) by virtue of placing characters in non-canon contexts. Then there’s My Fair Lady, a fix-it musical of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and Pretty Woman, a twisted AU of My Fair Lady.

Popular culture is riddled with fan fiction. Only it isn’t called fan fiction. To the ‘mainstream’, fan fiction is a dirty word interchangeable with soft porn and wannabe writers, a copyright minefield, and supposedly a sub-culture full of social misfits obsessed with make-believe stories. With dull writing on one side and erotica on the other, fan fiction has little space to move to boost its image. And that’s only scratching the surface. Because fan fiction is one of the most prevalent manifestations of fandom, it gets all the whips and lashings attached to notions of ‘the fan’.

In a 1986 Saturday Night Live skit during peak Star Trek mania, William Shatner told a room of geeky fans sporting Spock ears and thick, black-rimmed glasses, “It’s just a TV show! Get a life!” He was only half-joking. Shatner’s notion of ‘the fan’ as someone with “excessive or mistaken enthusiasm” (courtesy of Oxford Dictionary) is prolific in pop culture. Former New York Times columnist Julie Burchill calls it the “fan in the attic” stereotype. In a Bogart-esque thriller, CSI-like cop show or Sherlock-inspired detective novel it’s only a matter of time before the crazy, obsessed fan makes an appearance as one of the “usual suspects” for the commission of crime. All from a word that in its Latin translation means a “devotee” to the temple. Ouch.

Some fans are crazy, but craziness isn’t a derivative of fandom, and the connection is largely overstated. Erotic stories about werewolves, vampires, bodice-busting women and men with washboard abdominals all exist in their varying forms of tastelessness in fan fiction. There’s also badly written stories that somehow find their way from a year nine creative writing project to a “how Romeo feels when he finds Juliet lying in the family crypt” monologue in broken iambic pentameter. But both can be avoided and, realistically, the sex and the semi-illiterateness of some readers get a disproportionate amount of attention. That is if fan fiction gets media attention at all—which it often doesn’t. It’s the bastard child in the corner no one in literary circles likes to talk about.

All hope is not lost, however, and it’s probably only a matter of time before tongues start wagging given the prolific growth of fan fiction communities internationally. Fan fiction had its popular re-birth in the 1990s with the dawn of the Internet, and hasn’t stopped growing since. Communities popped up over the interwebs, making the slow, costly and labour-intensive fanzines that traditionally connected fans, obsolete. Texts with a short shelf life could now live forever in the minds and digital words of fan fiction’s online forums. Two decades later and the community has grown from a few thousand to a few hundred million. Fanfiction.net alone, one of the largest fan fiction archives, has over half a million Harry Potter stories; some with thousands of individual reader reviews. Considering the number of readers who don’t review or write their own work, monthly site traffic figures regularly hits a cool six million.

Australians make up a significant chunk of that figure. A study of fanfiction.net users last year found we have the fourth most member accounts on the site, after the US, UK and Canada. That means chances are your partner, siblings, children, friends or workmates may read fan fiction. They might even write it.

Whether they’ll tell you or not, though, is another matter entirely. It’s common for authors to keep their fan fiction habits on the quiet, despite the growing number who get published. In the fan fiction community, self-publishing is a popular practice. Aspiring novelists use places like Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon’s CreateSpace and lulu.com to produce print and online editions of their work. For popular fan fiction writers with large followings it can also turn a profit. Lulu.com, for one, offers authors an 80/20 revenue split.

Other fan fiction writers, like Meg Cabot, have hit the big time. Cabot wrote Star Wars fan fiction as a “tween” and later went on to become the author of best-seller-turned-Disney-movie The Princess Diaries.

Before fan fiction-ers get to either of those points, though, fan fiction forums can be a good place to help novelists develop their writing skills. A good chunk of fan fiction writers ‘cut their teeth’ playing with other people’s characters and benefit from the mentorship of the fan fiction community. Older writers often act as ‘betas’ for younger, inexperienced writers by sub-editing their work and helping to brainstorm ideas.

Others find the practice of writing without the pressure of deadlines or the need to be published an effective way to free up creative juices for original works. Dana Jenks, as she is known to the fan fiction community, writes Phantom of the Opera fan fiction between working as a high school music teacher and composing an opera (Disclaimer: I am the beta for her work, “Sunset”). She finds the feedback from readers a helpful motivational boost but also a good testing-ground for ideas. “I’m interested in learning what makes a story work musically and gaining insight into the minds of music-loving fans,” she says. “Fan fiction is a giant playground where it is fun to experiment without much risk… and I can observe readers’ responses to every step of the writing process.”

While some writers use fan fiction to work towards artistic goals, others use it for pure enjoyment. For Albert, reading sci-fi fan fiction is like reading a good book (Albert, due to some of the dubious notions of fan fiction readers, wants to remain semi-anonymous). He says it’s a hobby that “relieves stress, stimulates the mind, and improves professional productivity”. By professional productivity, Albert means working as a classical pianist, recently graduating from Harvard with a degree in biology and currently studying law at Yale. (What was that about fans needing to “get a life,” Shatner?) Albert’s a busy man but fan fiction is what helps him unwind. The appeal of fan fiction lies in its ability “to explore the possibilities and ideas that other authors haven’t explored yet” in his favourite texts. It’s asking the ‘what if’, the ‘why now’, the ‘what next’.

Pondering what lies to the left of the camera or off the page, mentally picking away at gaps in a good book or threads of a story arc abandoned in a television show is what humanity does best. It’s human nature to poke and prod at the poles of human experience. What makes Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead different from Jo Blo’s re-telling of Wuthering Heights through the eyes of Cathy can be whittled down to the quality of ideas and writing. This, admittedly, can be a vast disparity for reader enjoyment. But, the action of the mind, of thinking beyond what audiences are served up in a creative text, is the same. It’s human curiosity. It’s the desire to learn about yourself and others from the texts you read. In a word, it’s storytelling.

“Storytelling is the most basic sapience of humanity. We were storytellers before we were anything else,” says Caitlin Kenny, a performance studies major at the University of Sydney. Caitlin thinks the attraction to tell stories online stems from the liberating nature of the Internet. “The Internet is this happy, faceless world where people can be very open and intimate with people they don’t know, and share opinions and fantasies about characters that by all rights they are embarrassed to be obsessed with,” she says. Obsession seems an odd word when Caitlin says it with such warmth.

In the world of fan fiction, obsession comes from the desire to be accepted, Caitlin says. Writers insert their own values, romantic interests and personalities onto characters and plot scenarios when crafting stories. Caitlin’s poison of choice is Doctor Who fan fiction and the relationship between the Doctor and River Song. Caitlin has battled in many a heated argument on fan forums about why River, and not Rose, is the Doctor’s true love. The reason why hits closer to home. “[River] is beautiful, but she’s a size 12 and sexy, and the Doctor finds her attractive. I like that because it feels like my life is legitimised with my beautiful, English boyfriend,” she says.

When thinking about it that way, they’re not imaginary characters at all. Imaginary characters have always stood-in for real life characters. A good book is not simply so because of the ‘good’ writing. What makes a text appealing is the life lessons, the individual meaning, and relevance people find in stories to their own lives. For Caitlin, reading and writing Doctor/River fan fiction is a legitimising, cathartic process for her own life choices.

There will always be Rose crusaders and River advocates at war with one another, says fan fiction academic, Joseph Brennan, because of the different ways people read and respond to texts. “In the process of reading, you rewrite the text,” he says, so Doctor Who can mean something entirely different to someone else because of the thousands of individual contextual factors shaping their response. Joseph is an academic fan (or aca-fan as coined by seminal US media professor, Henry Jenkins) half-way through his PhD on fan fiction at the University of Sydney. Far from intellectual junk food, Joseph argues that fan fiction is a useful anthropological study that reveals a great deal about society and the way it makes meaning.

One such way society makes meaning, and the focus of Joseph’s research, is what the fan fiction community calls slash. That is, the ‘queering’ of stories to reflect homosexual elements. In the slash community, Joseph says engagement becomes an exercise in asserting power and reclaiming a text to reflect the sexual diversity found in society. “When I consume texts I look for gaps, and by looking for those gaps you find problematic representations,” he says. Dean’s homophobic characterisation in Supernatural is a case point for Joseph. “Dean regularly cracks gay jokes on the show, but, by reclaiming Dean [through fan fiction] I can fix a lot of the negative stereotypes he projects,” he says.

In the process of then sharing these stories with others in the community, fan fiction can act as a support network for those who may not find acceptance in wider society. By allowing characters the happiness that is denies in the canon, writers and readers can share in a semblance of their happiness. “It’s quite personal,” he says.

Much can be learnt from this underground literary genre. Firstly, no text is safe. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is debatable depending on who you’re talking to. Readers love it; the original authors aren’t such big fans. We also know sweeping brush strokes do the subgenre little credit. There’s sex, there’s badly-written poems, but there’s also engaging and insightful work that takes characters on thrilling journeys. And, let’s face it, readers and writers don’t walk around in inter-galactic spacesuits giving the Vulcan salute. They have “a life,” thanks Captain Kirk.

At the end of the day, people ‘get’ different things out of fan fiction. It may not always be ‘good’ by literary standards but there are so many other, arguably equally valid, values other than what the English textbook taught us in high school. For some, it’s the English class they never had, a sex-ed teacher, a stress reliever, a friend, a voice for the disempowered. It’s a community and it’s storytelling. Iliad or not. Published or not. Profitable or not. The value lies in what you make of it. As fanfiction.net’s motto says, “unleash your imagination” and make of it what you will.

Fans camp in the hundreds outside theatre for Eclipse premiere- but why?

Twilight stars out at Eclipse premiere

The third installment of the Twilight saga, Eclipse, was welcomed by fans in Los Angeles with open arms, squeals and some dizzy spells. Apparently the 'awesomeness' of the modern-day gothic/vampire/werewolf teenager flick induces nausea and a whole lot of obsessiveness.

Said nausea is brought about for various, often completely opposing reasons. One being the disbelief humble, everyday 'Jane' is standing a few meters away from eye candy Jacob and his youthful buffness (aka Taylor Lautner) and the pasty, scrawny Edward (aka Robert Pattinson). The other instigator of nausea is the sheer multitude of extensive 'newsworthy' coverage that graces our newspapers, magazines, televisions, radios and online sites for days feeding off Twilight mania.

That being said, the following images will probably be of little surprise to you:

Yes, many people camped outside the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles on some sort of pilgrimage to welcome the new Twilight film and its stars. Some set up camp on Sunday when the premiere was not until Thursday night. Of course, many had movie t-shirts, cardboard cutouts, snuggly rugs, posters, the novels and each other to keep themselves company.

But the question that begs to be asked is why?

I cannot answer that question because I do not understand the obsession myself. The observation that Twilight has struck a chord with much of the nation and particularly with young adults and tweens seems rather obvious. So much that in a hundred years time film studies and literature students will probably be analysing the significance of Twilight as a marker of early 21st Century culture (I already feel sorry for them).

Perhaps I am being dramatic and using too many cliches. Perhaps I really shouldn't have spent four hours of my life watching the first two films when my ears began bleeding after the first 50 cliches.

On a serious vein, it is 'something' to witness a mass of young people frantically screaming as human beings walk by, desperately reaching out for a kiss, hug, photo or a signature (a similar crowd have jumped on the Bieber bandwagon).

Stephenie Meyer was shocked by her novels' reception. She told Time Magazine: "I'm waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me ... But it keeps being huge ... I still have no idea". When Eclipse, the novel, was released about this time two years ago it bumped the final Harry Potter book off the top spot of many best-seller lists. Is Meyer the new J.K Rowling? This time for an audience that is essentially the same in age but different in sensibilities? What is an accurate measure of the series' success anyway?

I think the key ingredient that can be contributed to the novels' success is the formulaic plot. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love with girl. Girl falls in love with boy. It is a forbidden love. They are both at odds with each other as to how to get what they both want. In the mean time the sexual tension builds. Then another boy is added to the mix. He is attractive too and a love triangle develops. The latter relationship is easier but the forbidden one is deeper. A battle ensues as their loyalties and hearts are put to the test. Only one boy can win. Who will it be? How will it come about? Oh, the suspense!

But really, here are some other possible reasons why the Twilight saga holds so much appeal:

1. The two stock standard formulas of forbidden love (think Romeo and Juliet) and a love triangle (think about almost every rom-com) are successful for a reason: we all understand them. We all know what it feels like to want something we can't have and the pain, joy and heart-ache that goes hand-in-hand with such an experience.

2. We all like fighting for a team. Team Jacob? Team Edward? Team Bella die so I can take Edward or Jacob? Whichever hunk (open to interpretation- not exactly my sentiments) you side with it is fun to be taken on a ride where your hopes and expectations are either fulfilled or dashed as the story develops. Everyone loves to belong to something and taking a 'side' allows you to relate to other like-minded people (however seriously you take the rivalry).

3. Vampires and warewolfs are sexy. (Again, not my sentiments. As my sister likes to remind me, not more than 30 minutes into the first film I rolled my eyes and said, "vampires are so tacky" and I still think vampires are tacky. Nonetheless...) There is something erotic about the constant threat that, yes, 'I am a vampire and I have come to suck your blood because you are just so attractive I can't keep my hands off you'. Scary for some, not for brave (*cough* naive Bella). Exotic, foreign, mystical animals/humans have a charm about them; the supernatural has intrigued people since the beginning of time. Besides, it certainly doesn't hurt that said vampires have teenage boy feelings (aka bipolar complexes when it comes to love) and like standing around being all angsty.

4. Bella is just like you or me. She's young, naive, a bit lonely and unhappy with life, secretly smart and waiting for prince charming to come and sweep us off our feet. Right? Oh yeah, and most importantly she is a human! So if YOU could be Bella then you could also one day find a handsome/lanky, young, strapping lad sitting across the cafeteria staring intensely at you and bam! Love at first sight. Lucky you. It happened to Bella, it could happen to me? In my dreams maybe? There's always hope, right?

5. The books are like Mills and Boon toned down for a younger audience. You don't have to invest lengths of time stressing over every line to understand the text. Most likely you could get through the books during a weeks vacation while tanning under the hot sun with a pina colada by the pool (maybe a Cherry Coke for the kiddies?). They offer hours of mindless entertainment, an escape from your present reality and a bit of unrealistic romance which never did anyone harm. 'Why not?' some would say.

These are my opinions on the cultural phenomenon that is Twilight. Like it or not, it is intriguing to watch the films/read the books if in nothing but an attempt to 'understand' what the hype is all about.

So what do you think? Why do you like/dislike the novel/film/phenomenon?