The Credibility of Fan Fiction

Posted by Charli Renken in Creative Writing

Chantelle Mitchell writes in her dorm. Photo by Kyleigh Carter

Fan fiction is defined as fiction written by fans of TV series, movies or books that includes the characters of the original stories. Widely popular online, fan fiction is an area in which it seems like just about every fan has dabbled at least once or twice. Fan fiction also is a integral part of fandom communities (world wide groups of fans), and has been around since the popularization of it in 1960’s in Star Trek fanzines such as Spockanalia (1967.)

Fan fiction certainly has its fans and practitioners in the Creative Writing and Literature Department, as was demonstrated recently when Amaya Garza, sophomore Creative Writing major, lead a Student Writer’s Association workshop on fan fiction.

“It’s been my sort of weird dream to teach a fan fiction class,” she says with a laugh. Garza strongly believes that every writer should write or at least take a serious look at fan fiction. “Fan fiction is a useful tool to train a writer in characterization and consistency. I have always been very passionate about characters and…you have to really care about the characters you write about…So when you write fan fiction and you have to take someone else’s character and treat it as your own little thought baby and cradle it and take care of it, it kind of helps you form that bond and you can later transfer that bond to your own characters,” Garza explains.

One aspect of writing fan fiction writers struggle with is keeping their versions of the characters in line with the canonical personalities. Garza believes that writing fan fiction and forcing oneself to keep truthful to a character’s essence is good practice for one’s own writing.

Creative Writing freshman Chantelle Mitchell agrees with Garza. She believes fan fiction is especially helpful for screenwriting and collaborative work. “…Taking a character that’s not your own and being able to do it justice and stay true to the character while writing is an important skill to have just because in the professional world you won’t always be writing your own characters. If you’re working on a collaborative project or a screenplay or a TV show, somebody else created those characters and you have to be able to write them true to who they are as people. I think fan fiction is a good way to practice that.”

Writing fan fiction. Photo by Kyleigh Carter.

Novelist and Creative Writing faculty member James Reich, however, cautions students about writing fan fiction. “If the world you write into isn’t public domain—broadly, pre-1923—you may be wasting your time,” he says. “You could call it a learning environment, but I don’t think it’s a sufficiently challenging one for a serious writer.”

Fan fiction fans are aware of its critics. At her seminar, in fact, Garza asked attendees to list the things they didn’t like about fan fiction. What she found was that very few of the characteristics mentioned were exclusive to fan fiction but were rather simply elements of bad writing.

“Whenever fan fiction gets a bad reputation it’s because use of cliché, bad diction and bad syntax, poor characterizing…these are all the things that people complain about but when you take a look at it in a list you realize that it’s just the elements of bad writing,” she says. It’s not that fan fiction writers aren’t good at what they do, but rather that a lot of people write fan fiction and a lot of people don’t know how to write well in general. Not everyone has a gift for literature or have the opportunity to study writing at a university. “It’s easier to blame an online community that you don’t know than to say that publishers will publish bad writing.”

Reich, however, points out his concerns about the medium itself. “My anxiety about fan fiction… is that, apart from the impossibility of publishing it offline without risking a legal suit, it exists in a vacuum of wish-fulfillment and weak writing that the Internet preserves.”

For Creative Writing freshman Jessica Cline, however, part of what makes fan fiction enticing to fans is that it exists in a vacuum. “These [writers] are taking time out of their lives to write something that they’re not ever really going to get more than just credit in the fandom for but they are so dedicated to that fandom… and to the story that they’re writing about that they are taking time that they could be spending actually doing something that might get them money… They’re using that time to write a story that’s going to make somebody else that loves that fandom happy…” Cline makes the argument that because there is no ulterior publishing motive to writing fan fiction, it’s a greater labor of love that traditional fiction.

Fan fiction also often gets a bad reputation because much of it is either erotic or puts characters together who are not canonically in a relationship. This “shipping” (derivative from the word relationship) causes a lot of unrest in fandoms, with people arguing about who belongs with whom. Critics of fan fiction feel that writing such perverse stories about established characters does them a injustice. People also don’t like thinking about their favorite characters—especially characters in children’s works such as Harry Potter—in a sexual way.

However, as slam poet Brenna Twohy explains in her poem “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” fan fiction is a more ethical version of porn. “I am an unapologetic consumer of / all things Potter-orica, / and the sexiest part / is not the way / Cho Change rides that broomstick / … the sexiest part / is knowing they are part of a bigger story, / that they exist beyond eight minutes in / ‘Titty Titty Gang Bang,’ that their kegels / are not the strongest thing about them, / and still, / I am told that my porn is unrealistic.” Twohy believes that there is nothing wrong with erotic fan fiction and in comparison to traditional porn, it sends a better message about sex. It doesn’t belittle the characters down to sexual objects like usual porn does. She finishes up her piece with “My sex cannot be packaged, / my sex is magic, / it is part of bigger story; / I am whole. / I exist when you are not fucking me.”

Jessica Cline poses with Draco Malfoy cut out. Photo by Kyleigh Carter

For many, fan fiction can also arise from desperation to keep the story they adore from ending. After the conclusion of the Harry Potter series, for example, fans lapsed into what is commonly known as “Post Potter Depression.” Fan fiction was way of coping during the end of the Potter era.

”For people who are true fans of [the story] and who just can’t imagine living life without it, fan fiction is their way to still live in that world and live in the magic of how that story affected them,” says Cline. She has always been passionate about fan fiction and fandom in general. She is widely known as the unofficial Harry Potter fanatic on campus. Her dedication to the stories she loves isn’t something about which she keeps quiet; she is proud of it.

Many Creative Writing majors on campus say they got their start in writing fan fiction and continue to write it as they study traditional craft.

“It’s an ultimate way to show your appreciation for something,” says Mitchell. “I would be so happy if somebody wrote fan fiction about my own characters; that they cared enough about my characters to write more about them.” Regardless of one’s opinion on fan fiction—whether it’s a credible genre of writing or not—it can’t be denied that it is a large part of pop culture.