Fan fiction demystified

‘He stopped in his tracks and looked at me seriously, before pulling me to him. “You never need to question whether I’ll be there for you, Jess. I’ll always look after you. You need to know that.”’

One Direction have spawned a million teenage fantasies, but not many of them have translated into a publishing contract with Penguin. Actually, fantasy is a misnomer. What Emily Baker, the writer in question, has parlayed into a book deal is actually fan fiction, the same compulsively readable user-generated raw material that produced Fifty Shades of Grey (where E.L. James drew on the Twilight series, Baker’s Loving the Band is a story about a teenage girl who meets the boy band of her dreams, and has two of the members fall in love with her). 

Fiction written by fans

Fan fiction, for the uninitiated, is work written by fans that takes a source text or famous person and derives something new from it. There are fan works for anime, literature, music, gaming and even reality; James Franco, in another scene from his increasingly surreal life, recently submitted a work of fan fiction featuring a character called Lindsay Lohan to Vice magazine’s fiction issue. 

Some sections of the literary establishment might well regard fan fiction as the preserve of non-professional writers – a sub-sub-genre, if you like, even less deserving of attention than other forms, among them science fiction and fantasy, which have recently begun to be taken seriously.  

Yet, not only is ‘fanfic’ gaining traction in mainstream culture, it also comes from a long and illustrious literary tradition. In fact, many scholars consider Virgil's Aeneid a fan fiction sequel to The Illiad and Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King an amplification of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d'Arthur. 

It is also increasingly regarded as worthy of serious academic study. Henry Jenkins is Provost Professor at the University of Southern California and studies fandom. In his essay, ‘Fan Fiction as Critical Commentary’, Jenkins argues that fan fiction ‘emerges from a balance between fascination and frustration. If the original work did not fascinate fans, they would not continue to engage with it. If it did not frustrate them in some level, they would feel no need to write new stories – even if the frustration comes from an inadequate amount of material. In most cases, the frustration takes the form of something they would change in the original – a secondary character who needs more development, a plot element that is underexplored, an ideological contradiction that needs to be debated.’

Kirk/Spock and literature’s most transgressive genre

Fanfic’s capacity to subvert cultural norms has been joyfully exploited since the genre’s earliest days. Slash fiction, for example, is fan work where the characters are of the same gender and are linked romantically and/or sexually. The term comes from the 1960s, referring to the slash in the reference ‘Kirk/Spock’ from the Star Trek television series. The Enterprise’s captain and wingman were some of the first characters to be re-imagined by the writers of fan fiction in today's media landscape – and half the fun was confounding the straight world’s view of these oh so securely masculine fictional heroes.

Often stereotyped as merely pornographic, the stories actually range from romantic fluff where the highlight is the first kiss to stories that involve every kink imaginable. Many authors write slash fiction to counter the lack of well-written LGBTQ representation in mainstream media. Others, like myself, write it to play with the heteronormative stereotypes that thrive in our culture and which assume that heterosexuality is the only acceptable model for human relations.

Another response is the AU, or alternative universe, where you put the characters in different situations. For example, a story that takes the characters in Cabin Pressure and makes them vampires. There are crossovers, too: what if the Doctor ran across Sherlock? In fact, there's a lot of crossover between fans of Doctor Who, Sherlock, and Supernatural, and so the trio is known as SuperWhoLock.

Why do it?

The reasons people write fan fiction are as varied as the motivation for writing of any kind. A fan fiction author going by the name Cerberusia says, ‘I can't imagine not writing fic. In the years before I discovered it, I would pause in reading a novel and turn to gaze into the middle distance, making up my own story about how what I just read might have gone differently. Putting these stories down on e-paper and graduating to more sophisticated ways of looking at the characters and constructing narratives seemed only the natural thing to do.’

Wendy C. Fries attends college in London. She's one of the better-known authors of Sherlock slash, writing under the name Atlin Merrick. She says, ‘My ultimate job on this planet is to love and be loved, enjoy and give enjoyment, and one way I do that is writing. A very specific way I do that is writing things that provide pleasure both to myself and other people. If there are giggles, dropped jaws, or kinks birthed in the process, oh-so-much the better!’

Where to find it

Before the Internet, fan works were often put in ‘zines sold and circulated at fan events. While that is still a part of fandom, most fan works are now distributed online. Fan fiction's biggest homes are Fanfiction.net and Archive of Our Own. Many fan works are also distributed on blogging platforms such as LiveJournal and the micro-blogging site Tumblr. The social media site DeviantART is mainly devoted to fan art, but has a fan fiction section as well. Literary readings of fan fiction also exist; they may not show up much in event listings, but they're there.

As social media becomes more vital to creator's marketing plans, fan fiction is becoming more accepted. After all, if Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss can admit that BBC's Sherlock is fan fiction, anything is possible.