Fictional Fans

I think the thing that's unique and that feels so necessary about fanfiction is that it's an incredible efficient way to translate your thoughts and emotions as a person into a format that's understandable and enjoyable by other people.

That's not unique to fanfiction, of course-- that's basically what writing fiction is. I think of a line from this interview with Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, where she says "Maybe books are the record of everything I’ve been fascinated with for several years," and I think-- if that's what a novel is, a record of where the author has been in their life for several years, fanfiction is that but on an incredibly granular scale.

Novels take years to write and then years to publish; they have to go through layers of editing and reviewing and filtering through the eyes of other people before they reach a reader. The publishing industry is slow-moving, so trends in writing that reflect how humans tend to be thinking about their world also move slowly.

By contrast, fanfiction moves fast. The cycle of "I was thinking about this topic, so here's a fic where x character has y thing happen to them!" takes place on a time scale of weeks or even days. The efficient translation of feelings or events to fiction is, I think, what keeps me writing fanfic; I've written fic while working at a fancy gala about characters working at a fancy gala, I've sat down to write death fic that I couldn't write at any other time while waiting to hear that a family member had died, I've written a few stories about different sets of characters during coronavirus lockdown (and added them to the fic journal of the plague year collection), etc.

Even the stories that you don't sit down to write consciously as an extension of things that are on your mind, I think usually come out that way in retrospect somehow. Even a PWP-- maybe especially a PWP-- has the fingerprints of your mind all over it in the way that you justify a character wanting this, in how you decide they react to it. (I think this kink bingo essay does the best job I've read of describing why that is; why zooming in to focus on just the sex or kink aspect of a relationship feels like it so often has so much to say about the world and the shape of our human minds.)

I've thought a lot about how this smooth translation of life to fiction is so easy (for given value of "easy", which is to say "writing is incredibly hard") with fanfiction, but I don't know of an equivalent community doing the same thing with original fiction, and why that might be. I don't think it would be impossible to do with original fiction, but like I said, if you want your origific to be read by people, it often takes a long time between writing it and making that happen. But more significantly, I think the fact that we all carry around in our minds a kind of binder of characters and we already know who might end up in what situation, and why, and what their reaction might be, means that it's possible to skip a lot of the setup that would need to happen to express a point through original characters. You can drop fanfic characters straight into the situation that you actually care about, instead of spending time on the stuff that's less interesting to you at the moment but necessary to make the story work.

Which is a real advantage, if you're someone who writes in their spare moments as a hobby. It enables those of us who probably wouldn't have the time or inclination to express ourselves through writing any other way to create a record of how we were thinking or feeling at a particular time, and then-- best of all-- have it preserved for posterity, read by other people, and discussed with friends.

I've thought a lot, in both a joking/macabre way but also with the awareness that this is literally true, about how of all the things I've done, if I died tomorrow, my fanfiction would be the most obvious, locateable, durable thing that I left on Earth. It's not like a huge number of people read my fic, but based on the fact that I do get kudos or comments on old fic every so often, it's reasonable to assume that that would continue, if I weren't here. The fact that if I were dead, complete strangers would still come across and allow some remnant of my mind to enter into their minds is... astounding, to me.