Geekitude: Fan fiction writers of the world unite!

Too many times, in the company of employers, teachers or professors, I have dodged the question, “What is your previous writing experience?” By all means, I dredged up as many original works as I could, but the list was tragically incomplete, for I composed some of my favorite stories in someone else’s world. Could I mention my speculative back-story for Shepherd Book from Joss Whedon’s “Firefly?” Of course not. I needed to seem like a ‘serious’ writer. And according to most professional judgments, serious writers do not write fan fiction. Several of you other geek writers out there can no doubt sympathize with this situation. For those of you who don’t know, fan fiction is fiction based on another author/screenwriter/playwright’s settings and characters.

Many believe that fan fiction is a lazy writer’s substitute for true creativity. Fan fiction has become synonymous with poor quality, clichéd, unoriginal “rip-off” stories, where inexperienced “wannabe” writers steal and pervert the copyright-protected material of their betters. Author Ann Rice tells her fans: “It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters.” Because of these negative views, fan fiction is all-too-often the subject of concealment for its writers. We tuck it back into our hidden file cabinets of shameful secrets, in the folder next to gambling and reality television.

The large quantity of terribly written fan fiction does not help matters at all. We have mental images of the socially-awkward mama’s-basement Trekkie who, in his escapist madness, dreams up ridiculous second-rate adventures for the crew of the Enterprise. The infamous Web site Fanfiction.net carries multitudes of stories similar to one I found called “NeverEndingStory” (drawn from Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series), which is summarized by the author as: “its about a girl named cynthia and a guy named edward, edwards not the most popular person around and cynthia’s well strange. she finally got the courage to go talk to edward cullen and the rest you gotta find out...” No wonder fan fiction gets a bad reputation. Any quality writing published in these sorts of venues will get buried.

And there is quality writing out there. Trust me. If you know where to look, you can find it. Think of all of the thousands of garage bands there are in the country. Most of them seem to be trying to extract your melted brain out of your ears, but there are a few bands here and there who perform with musical merit and who have achieved – if I may be so bold to say so – art. The same holds true for fan fiction. The most surprising people write fan fiction – teachers, librarians, editors, professionals – and almost all of them admit to hiding this passion from most of their acquaintances as something embarrassing.

Of course, from a literary point of view, very little differentiates the structure and format of fan fiction from any number of official literary works. Tom Stoppard borrows Shakespeare for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” Ursula K. le Guin borrows the “Aeneid” for “Lavinia,” and Jean Rhys borrows “Jane Eyre” for “Wide Sargasso Sea.” In all three of these works, the story is retold from the viewpoint of alternative characters – a narrative choice that is often praised by literary critics. But the same narrative technique has become a staple for modern web-based fan fiction, such as telling the story through the eyes of one of the minor X-Men, or of a lowly stormtrooper in the Galactic Empire’s army. The fact that the three authors listed above are professional and paid, while the average fanfic author is recreational and unpaid, should not affect the classification of the literary format through which they work. Poetry is poetry, whether composed by Tennyson or a depressed adolescent who was just dumped by his girlfriend.

Writers have borrowed threads and gems from each other as long as the human mind has had imagination and enjoyed spinning and re-spinning tales. Throughout our cultural history, stories have always been shared and retold in new ways. The concept of copyright and intellectual property, where a story can belong to one person alone, is relatively modern. Even taking credit for a translation was not considered an infringement in the United States until the latter half of the 19th century.

Fan fiction authors are not plagiarizers, copiers or lazy writers. Creativity involves not only old ideas and not only new ideas, but an innovative fusion of both. Fan fiction participates in an imaginative exchange – and imagination does not and cannot exist in a vacuum.