Stop Hating on Fanfic!

I’m a huge supporter of fanfiction. It’s a great way to hone skills, develop good voice, dialog, learn how to keep characters consistent, and explore or experiment. It’s low stakes for the writer, since most folks don’t make any sort of living off fanfic, and there’s already an audience for it on Archive Of Our Own (AO3), no matter the fandom or pairing or plot you want to use. Plus, it’s just fun to read! But inevitably, the “fanfiction isn’t real writing and it’s sad that writers think they’re learning from it,” discourse rises up every, what, six to eight months? It crashes like a wave over Book Twitter and there are a lot of takes on the timeline for a few days as everyone weighs in. I’m tired, y’all.

For some writers, fanfic is their school. It is for me. Before I really knew what fanfic was called, I was writing it. Assignments where we had to write a letter as a fake historical person were my favorite. A homesteader on the Oregon Trail and a soldier in WWII are the two I remember most vividly (I tea-stained a handwritten letter to “age” it. I was Extra.) but there were others. I also remember writing a few “missing scenes,” including from the short story All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.

Writing has always been something I’ve done, but not having to make up the characters myself, or the setting, was fun. I didn’t have to build my own world or anything, it was just there for me, fully formed, waiting for me to fill in some blanks, including those missing scenes. I applied the idea to my favorite shows and books. There’s a trove of Teen Titans fanfic somewhere on the depths of the internet by 13-14 year old Ash. No I will not give you a link; it’s all very short and… I don’t want to call it bad or cringey. But it’s best left in the past, where it belongs, just like the stacks of red spiral notebooks (I color-coded my notebooks, red was for fanfic and I’m not sure why) with pages and pages of fanfiction.

In college, I read a metric butt-load of fanfic. I sobbed late at night over long fics, then sent them to my friends so they could suffer with me. One year I even bought a friend a birthday present that was 100% a reference to a fanfic we had both gotten obsessed over. Elvis’ Blue Hawaii album on vinyl. If you can tell me what fanfic this was from, we need to be friends. I was in several fandoms, wrote crossover fic, and roleplayed a ton. Cosplay is how I met my spouse, but roleplay was how we got to know each other. I feel like my queerness, and having been able to recognize and slowly celebrate being agender and demisexual, were in a large part because of fandom and the people I met through it. I owe a lot to fandom.

Then came the years after college. I moved. I worked. I had multiple jobs. I hardly had time to keep up with my favorite fandoms and have a social life, let alone write! A hobby? In this economy?! This point in my life was really… weird. I think a lot of my creativity was just sapped by the cold shock of Real Life™ that I had been in no way prepared for. Retail jobs destroyed me, mentally. If I had the energy to do anything other than let my brain melt out my ears on my days off, I wanted to take full advantage of the amazing city I lived in at the time with my wonderful spouse and my friends who are still there and whom I miss dearly.

When we moved to the South, I was scared of not being able to be myself. Still working multiple jobs, I was still always tired, but this time with a feeling of isolation (pre-quarantine days). Living across the country from everyone I knew except my spouse was really difficult, and I turned back to my old comfort: writing fanfiction.

I had already gotten back into writing, doing NaNoWriMo on a whim with a book idea that I finished a draft of, but ultimately went nowhere, but it was fun to write scenes, and puzzle them into a coherent shape. Then, Avengers: Endgame came out.

Okay, this next part involves outing myself as a diehard Stucky shipper. I’ve lived my entire adult life along side the MCU—seriously, Iron Man came out just weeks before I turned eighteen—and been (mostly knowingly) queerbaited for over a decade. Well, longer, but I’m only talking about MCU right now. Either way you shake it out, the end of Endgame does not sit right with me. Not Steve Til the End of the Line Rogers running off to the past, where Bucky is actively being brainwashed by Hydra somewhere! I was even angrier the second time I saw it a week later (shh). But something in the second viewing that I noticed made me realize we hadn’t gotten to see a talk that must have happened. I decided to write it out.

It was the first time I’d written fanfiction in years. It’s not even that long. I spent the better part of the few weeks after Endgame came out working on it. For the first time in years, I had something I was fairly proud of, actually written out and thoughtfully edited. It felt amazing.

Good Omens came next, the whirlwind summer of 2019, the Before Times, when I thought I would buy a sewing machine and make my own Aziraphale cosplay (I did manage to get a few pieces for it but it still hasn’t come together). I’d read the book back in college and really enjoyed it, but the show brought Aziraphale and Crowley and their obviously queer relationship to the forefront in a way they never had been before. I was in love, and after randomly watching Titanic and spending way too much time on Benjamin Guggenheim’s Wikipedia page, a 20,000 word historically accurate and canon compliant fanfiction was born. I was possessed. Couldn’t stop myself from making the story bigger and bringing it all to its obvious conclusion with the sinking of the ship (sorry for spoilers).

Just a few weeks after my Good Omens fanfic was published, riding the high of kudos and comments, I started plotting out the book that I’m on submission with. I wrote the first draft during 2019’s NaNoWriMo, and something really clicked for me: I’m good at this.

My confidence has always been… middling. I know I’m not the worst at something, but am I good, or are people lying to protect my feelings? It’s complicated. But strangers commenting on AO3 don’t pull punches. Some of the comments pointed out stuff I did well with my writing. They noted the pining! The voice! I was elated, and if I could do that with someone else’s characters, why not with my own?

Fanfiction really did bring me back to writing when I thought I might have lost the lust for it. In college, I’d convinced myself, after a very failed NaNoWriMo, that I didn’t want to be a writer. I was more suited to be an editor. But while I’m glad I got my degree specializing in Linguistics (because I love it and it’s fascinating), I’m also glad I didn’t go into publishing on the other side of it. Telling my stories how I need to is important. Even the stories that weren’t originally mine belong to me when I write fanfic for them. I get to leave my mark on the canon, even if it’s only a small one, or only one that I know is there.

I think fanfiction often comes from a really base human urge to fill in the blanks, both inside and outside of a story. Some of the best fic I ever read was either about side characters that had never been named in canon, or that moved the characters to a new world and tried to find their place within it. My favorite fic to write is moments you never got to see, that went unspoken in the text, but that I get to fill in myself. It’s a finite space in a larger tapestry that I get full control over, but I want it to stitch in seamlessly with the rest of the story.

So many arguments have been made for fanfiction before this, but one of the most poignant I’ve seen is this: the published authors you love? Especially newer authors, ones hitting the list on debuts (although there is something to be said for publishers choosing who to throw that weight behind, that’s another topic), and the ones with three books coming out in their first couple years? Where do you think they learned how to make your heart ache and make you fumble to turn the pages faster to know what happens, and make you stay up late into the night, muttering just one more chapter until the book is over? Fanfiction. And chances are, they’re still writing it. Maybe for fandoms you’d expect and maybe for ones you wouldn’t. The next generation of writers grew up on fic, we learned from it and experienced feedback from strangers, we know how important community can be. But most importantly, we know how to write for fun and for ourselves.