The Weird World of Fan Fiction
By ALEXANDRA ALTER
What if Edward Cullen, the moody vampire heartthrob in Stephenie Meyer's best-selling "Twilight" series, was an undercover cop? Or a baker who specializes in bachelor-party cakes? Or a kidnapper who takes Bella hostage?
Photos: Fan Fiction Phenomenon
Illustrations by Kagan McLeod
From a pregnant Harry Potter to gleek Edward, fan fiction writers are pushing the boundaries of the fictional world one imagination at a time.
It may sound like heresy to some "Twilight" fans. But those stories, published online, have thousands of dedicated readers. They were written by Randi Flanagan, a 35-year-old sales manager for a trade publishing company in Toronto.
Ms. Flanagan writes fan fiction—amateur works based on the characters and settings from novels, movies, television shows, plays, videogames or pop songs. Such stories, which take place in fictional worlds created by professional writers, are flourishing online and attracting millions of readers.
Ms. Flanagan started writing her own takes on "Twilight" three years ago, after devouring Ms. Meyer's vampire books. She has since written 15 stories, including some that are as long as novels. In the process, she has gained groupies of her own. Some 1,500 readers subscribe to her account on fanfiction.net.
"A lot of people don't understand why I would devote time to this," says Ms. Flanagan, who writes at night after her young son goes to bed. "It's just fun."
Fan fiction has long existed under the radar in a sort of shadowy digital parallel universe. But the form has been bubbling up to the surface lately, as a growing number of fan writers break into the mainstream.
The publishing industry's current overnight sensation, erotica author E.L. James, began writing her best-selling book "Fifty Shades of Grey" as "Twilight" fan fiction. She began posting her X-rated take on Ms. Meyer's tame paranormal romance online three years ago. Her "Twilight" homage, titled "Master of the Universe," evolved into a series starring a powerful CEO and a young woman in a sadomasochistic sexual relationship. The books were acquired by Vintage, a Random House imprint, this spring and have sold 15 million copies in less than three months. Now, in a sort of literary infinite feedback loop, fans of the trilogy have begun writing their own takes on "Fifty Shades," including an inevitable parody that mashes up "Fifty Shades" with "Twilight."
Fan-Fic Authors Who Turned Pro
Several other publishing stars got their start in the genre. Meg Cabot, the best-selling author of the "Princess Diaries" series, started writing "Star Wars" fan fiction when she was 11 years old. Young-adult fantasy author Cassandra Clare, whose books about teenage demon hunters have sold 12 million copies, wrote Harry Potter and "Lord of the Rings" fan fiction before she broke into professional publishing.
Novelist Naomi Novik, who writes a best-selling fantasy series about dragons that's set during the Napoleonic Wars, started writing "Star Trek" fan fiction when she was a college student at Brown in the 1990s.
Ms. Novik has continued to write fan fiction, even after her "Temeraire" series hit the best-seller list and was optioned for film by "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson. "There are many things I've written as fanfic that I'm as proud of as the Temeraire books," Ms. Novik says. Lately, she has been writing fan fiction based on Sherlock Holmes and the superhero team-up "The Avengers." "Don't tell my editors, because I'm supposed to be working on my book," she says.
Fan fiction can still be a touchy and controversial subject for writers and publishers. While some see it as free marketing, others regard it as derivative dreck at best and copyright infringement at worst. Some authors, including J.K. Rowling and Ms. Meyer, have heartily endorsed fan fiction. Others, such fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, novelist Anne Rice and Diana Gabaldon, author of the best-selling "Outlander" series, resent and discourage it. "They're stealing an audience they're not entitled to," Ms. Gabaldon says of fan-fiction writers. Ms. Rice warns on her website: "I do not allow fan fiction."
Such warnings have done little to deter avid fans. The Web brims with fan work and parodies based on Ms. Rice's "Interview With the Vampire," including a story in which Ms. Rice's narrator, the vampire Louis, tries to persuade fellow vampire Lestat to get his teeth cleaned.
The Web has fueled an explosion of fan fiction as communities of fans have formed digital enclaves to share and critique each other's work. Sites devoted to particular fandoms have sprung up, including harrypotterfanfiction.com and Twilighted.net, a repository of "Twilight" fan fiction. The Web's largest fan-fiction site, Fanfiction.net, hosts several million works, including pieces based on the Bible, Shakespeare, TV shows like "Lost," cartoons like "My Little Pony," and videogames like "Halo" and "Final Fantasy X." The site hosts close to 600,000 pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction, and nearly 200,000 based on "Twilight."
Fan fiction is the fastest-growing genre on Wattpad, a popular site with eight million monthly visitors where writers can post their fiction free. The site now hosts 500,000 pieces of fan fiction, up 144% from last year. One piece based on "The Hunger Games" has been read close to two million times, reaching a wider audience than books by many professional best-selling authors.
Fan fiction is often baffling to outsiders. For the casual reader, it can be hard to see the literary merit of a story in which Harry Potter falls in love with Voldemort, then kills off rival suitor Darth Vader in a duel. Others would argue that it has been around for centuries, tracing back to classical authors like Virgil and Sophocles who spun new stories out of old legends. In the late 1800s, devoted fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes began writing their own stories. William Thackeray wrote a parodic sequel to Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe."
In the pre-Internet era, fans of science fiction and fantasy franchises such as "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" often photocopied and circulated their work through "fanzines." In recent years, some established authors have won accolades for works based on iconic literary characters. Geraldine Brooks's "March," which centered on the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Wicked," Gregory Maguire's novel based on L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," became a blockbuster Broadway musical.
Like any booming literary subculture, fan fiction has its own rules, lingo, cliques and tropes. Common subgenres include "denialfic," or stories that offer alternate endings or ignore major plot points like the death of a character, and "futurefic," which transplants the characters to the future.
A huge body of fan writing is devoted to "crossovers," where characters from different fictional worlds collide, bringing, for example, characters from the TV show "Glee" to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Another popular trope is "slash," which imagines two male characters—think Holmes/Watson—in a romantic relationship. The term stems from a strain of "Star Trek" fan fiction that matched up Kirk and Spock and came to be called "Kirk/Spock" or just slash. Male pregnancy has emerged as a surprisingly robust fan fiction theme and has its own shorthand: "MPreg."
"Crackfic" refers to off-the-wall fan writing that pushes the boundaries of fictional worlds to their logical limits and beyond, reimagining "Jane Eyre" with cat protagonists, for example. Even stranger, some fan writers like to take their favorite fantasy worlds and scrub out all the supernatural elements—"Twilight" without vampires, Harry Potter minus the magic. Fan-fiction afficionados call this "mundane AU," a subcategory of "alternate universe" fan fiction in which the magical elements vanish and the characters work at restaurants or go to college instead of casting spells and slaying dragons. There's even a sub-subgenre called "barista AU" or "coffee-shop AU," in which beloved characters work at a coffee shop.
In fan fiction, as in pornography, there are subcultures that cater to all manner of tastes. A vibrant subgenre of Harry Potter fan fiction imagines Harry and his schoolboy nemesis Draco Malfoy in a romantic relationship. You can find stories based on the cartoon "The Care Bears," in which the cuddly characters engage in sadomasochistic sex. One popular fan work called "The Submissive," by a "Twilight" fan who writes under the pen name tara sue me, casts the vampire Edward as a multimillionaire CEO who enlists Bella Swan as his sex slave. The story has more than two million views on fanfiction.net.
The legal boundaries protecting copyrighted literary works can be fuzzy. Very little legal precedent exists because the vast majority of fan fiction is posted free, posing no clear commercial threat to the creators. Most experts agree that fan fiction qualifies as fair use under copyright law, provided that it differs substantially from the original and its creators don't attempt to profit from it. Publishers and media companies for the most part have come to tolerate the practice, seeing it as a form of free advertising. Why bar a "Twilight" fan from writing Edward the vampire's Twitter feed when it could help sell more books and movie tickets?
"It's clear that it's not good business to sue your customers," says Rebecca Tushnet, a copyright-law expert at Georgetown Law and a legal adviser to the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit group that supports fan fiction.
When lawsuits are filed, they typically target writers who actually seek to publish their homages or parodies based on copyrighted works. In 2001, the literary estate of "Gone With the Wind" author Margaret Mitchell sued novelist Alice Randall over her satirical book "The Wind Done Gone," which retold the Civil War epic from a slave's perspective. An Atlanta court blocked publication of the novel, but an appeals court overturned the injunction. The case was settled in 2002.
In 2009, lawyers for J.D. Salinger filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit against a Swedish author who published a novel starring a geriatric version of Mr. Salinger's iconic protagonist Holden Caulfield. The writer later reached a confidential settlement with the Salinger estate.
Some mainstream media companies, once quick to cry foul over intellectual-property violations, have come to embrace fan works as free marketing. Sony Music recently paid a fan-fiction writer to create fiction featuring musicians from the British boy band One Direction; the story, which was posted on Wattpad.com, has been read close to one million times. Other writers soon piled on with their own stories about the band, generating 12,000 more One Direction fan stories.
Creators of the CW show "Supernatural," which has inspired more than 60,000 stories on fanfiction.net, wrote an episode that cheekily referenced "slash" fan fiction when it showed a "fangirl" writing a steamy story about the show's two ghost-busting brothers, Sam and Dean. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" creator Joss Whedon has encouraged Buffy fans to stay connected to the series and characters by reading and writing fan fiction.
For passionate fans of a book or TV series, this seems to be a major part of the appeal of fan fiction—the ability to live with a group of favorite characters forever, crafting new story lines when the original ones run out. "You could decide that you are just going to read stories in which ["Twilight" characters] Rosalie and Alice have a dominatrix love affair, and you could read hundreds of those stories," says Anne Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah who studies fan fiction. "You find the book that you love or the world that you love, and you read all these iterations of it."
That's how Christina Lanning, a 23-year-old homemaker in Glennville, Ga., found herself spending three hours each night writing stories about Johanna Mason, a minor character from the dystopian teen trilogy "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. After tearing through the books—twice—Ms. Lanning started searching fan-fiction sites for stories about Johanna, a cunning, axe-throwing killer in Ms. Collins's version. "There weren't any Johanna stories out there, so I wanted to do it," she says. "I absolutely adore her."
Last summer, she started writing her own version of "The Hunger Games," in which Johanna, rather than Katniss Everdeen, is the star. She now works on her Johanna stories every night from 9 to midnight, and updates her account on fanfiction.net three times a week. Her most popular work, "The Phoenix: Burning Day," is as long as a novel. Her "Hunger Games" stories on fanfiction.net get 25,000 to 30,000 views each month.
Some authors' attitudes toward fan fiction are evolving. After spending years fending off fan fiction, and occasionally sending out "cease and desist" letters through his lawyer to block potential copyright violations, science-fiction novelist Orson Scott Card has started courting fan writers. Mr. Card, author of the best-selling "Ender's Game" series, is planning to host a contest for "Ender's Game" fan fiction this fall. Fans will be able to submit their work to his Web site. The winning stories will be published as an anthology that will become part of the official "canon" of the "Ender's Game" series.
"Every piece of fan fiction is an ad for my book," Mr. Card says. "What kind of idiot would I be to want that to disappear?"
Source: Wall Street Journal, Friday Journal, June 15, 2012
online.wsj.com/itp/20120615/us/fridayjournalWrite to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared June 15, 2012, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Weird World of Fan Fiction.
