What are your thoughts on fanfiction authors who start writing and publishing original stuff? As someone who writes fanfic, it means a lot to see that a lot of my favorite authors did/do it too, but it also seems like it brings a LOT of crappy internet abuse with it, because sexism. :/
Hi! My name is Seanan, and I’m a fanfic author.
My first “serious” writing–IE, had a continuity, was not abandoned as soon as it got hard, went through an actual editorial process where a red pen was applied to my precious pages–was for an ElfQuest fanzine called Dreamberry Jam. I wrote about a glider/sea elf cross named Gull, who basically hopped from one disaster to another, because I was a sixteen year old girl with the power of life or death in her pen I WAS UNSTOPPABLE and I was having so much fun. So much fun.
My high school LJ (which became my college LJ, which became my post-college LJ) was studded with Buffy the Vampire Slayer fic (not gonna lie: lots of porn there, much of it written for my girlfriend of the time, who had a thing for Buffy/Faith), with Veronica Mars fic (including my Shakespearean adaptation of season one), with Halloweentown fic (I am most of the fandom). I have participated in every single Yuletide. My agent knows I will turn down work in December so that I can remain a pitch-hitter for defaults.
What are my thoughts on fanfiction authors who start writing and publishing original stuff?
I’m in favor.
But you’re right: people do get some shit for their fannish pasts, and by “people” I mostly mean “women,” because “being a fanfic writer” is a “giggle giggle let’s show porn to the actors and see if they get mad” thing that girls do, while “putting myself in the story” is a manly masculine imagination thing that boys do. Almost every guy in my high school creative writing classes began with a self-insert Trek or Wars character, assuming they weren’t writing up their D&D or World of Darkness campaigns, but they never got the scorn from the teachers or other students that the girls got for admitting that maybe they gave their OCs the hair color they’d always wanted. It goes all the way back to elementary school. It was totally normal for the boys to be racing around BEING STAR WARS PEW PEW PEW, but weird for the girls to want in.
(I know this is gender essentialist, I know, and I’m so sorry about that, but I’m talking about my elementary school experience, where girls would literally be pulled out of aggressive pretend play, and my high school experience, where the boys were encouraged to file off the serial numbers and the girls were told to write what they knew. The lens of the past is dusty and cold.)
Most of the shit I see slung at former fanfic writers (or professional authors who still write fanfic) is thrown at women who write YA, because, well, fanfic is juvenile and YA is juvenile (unless you’re a man writing YA romance and then it’s world-changing and revelationary). They are hence easy targets. You’re right: it’s sexist. It’s unfair. It will, hopefully, decrease and even go away. It will not happen fast enough for people to stop leaving bruises on my friends.
But here is the thing about fanfic: fanfic never dies. From kids playing on the playground to elementary schoolers writing their first stories to adults on the internet, fanfic is the human urge to interface with the stories that make us. A lot of very successful, very powerful works are saved from being fanfic solely by the fact that their source material is no longer under copyright. As the number of those works increases, as the scholarship on and around fanfic increases, the stigma is going to decrease. I genuinely believe that. I look at fandom now and compare it to fandom ten years ago, and I see so much more acceptance of fanfic on both the fannish and professional levels.
Crappy internet abuse aside, fanfic is restorative and powerful and important, and if it’s a thing you enjoy, you should absolutely embrace it with all the joy you can. The abuse may be here for a while yet. I will not lie about that.
But I think our stories are stronger.
