Atrophy of the Author: In Fanfiction, Writers and Readers Are on More Equal Ground

There is an equivalence between fanfiction writers and readers: we’re in this together, united by our mutual passion for media.

My worst nightmare came true in my sophomore year of college: I was drunk at a party and a man started talking to me about Thomas Pynchon. “Have you read Gravity’s Rainbow?” he asked. He had two love-worn copies on his bookshelf, tucked between Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace.

“I’ve read parts of it,” I replied, which was the barest scrap of truth. “‘They are in love. Fuck the war.’”

His serious expression shifted into the grin of a person who believed he had found genuine kinship with someone over a shared object of affection, and I immediately felt sorry. “Actually, I shouldn’t say I’ve read it,” I amended. “I only know that quote from an epigraph in . . . something else.”

“Oh?” He raised his eyebrows. “Where was it quoted?”

“I don’t remember,” I lied again, then excused myself to the bathroom, embarrassed. Even in my state of intoxication I couldn’t bring myself to tell this man that I was familiar with the quote from an epigraph in a Harry Potter fanfiction I had read earlier that month. To equate a titan of postmodernist literature with such a colloquially cringe-worthy genre as fanfiction would suggest a collapse of canon that I did not feel prepared to navigate with this man. At the same time, I was struck by my own shame in response to a medium that I have secretly loved for many years.

I hesitate to call myself a writer because my work has the tiniest fraction of institutional legitimacy, though it’s an activity I’ve been dedicated to since childhood. The validity of a writer’s career is frequently contingent upon her audience and the social recognition she receives for her work, in addition to any financial compensation. The difficulty of writing is often mitigated by the practice itself, the satisfaction of putting the right words in the right order, while the vulnerability and subsequent mortification of publishing work is soothed by the hope that one’s finished piece will be read to acclaim or at least acknowledgement. The writing of mine that has reached the widest audience does not serve to advance my professional career nor does it provide me with any sort of income, and it is certainly not the sort of thing I would discuss among strangers despite my sincere love for it. I cannot help but feel apologetic for the enthusiasm that informs my practice as both a reader and a writer, because it feels shameful to love anything so fervently. To outsiders, fanfiction embodies that shame to the fullest extent. Indifference is easy, but love—the kind of love that runs so deep and so clear that it threatens to burst the dam of your heart—is difficult. There will always be people who expect you to explain that love, and that is perhaps the biggest challenge of all, even for those whose careers are dedicated to explaining and describing ideas.

It feels shameful to love anything so fervently. To outsiders, fanfiction embodies that shame to the fullest extent.

Fanfiction is motivated by a desire to read in between the lines, to fill in the blank spots between chapters, to own a little piece of something you love by turning it in your hands. The term “canon” generally refers to a body of literature considered foundational to today’s culture; in fandom, “canon” also refers to the official aspects of a fictional franchise as dictated by the creator. In both contexts, canon is imbued with a sense of outside authority that demands some level of acknowledgement if not complete devotion. Fanfiction is literary hedonism because it is freed from traditional institutional obligations associated with “classical” literature and publishing, as well as the singular narrative put forth by a fictional world’s originator. One does not write fanfiction for the money or the professional recognition; one writes fanfiction for the simple pleasure of it. Fanfiction is propelled by that dam-bursting love rather than put under pressure by it. Let the floodgates open.

The fruits of fan labor come from a simultaneous fascination and frustration with the chosen piece of media. These frustrations vary: Often, fanfiction serves to fill in the gaps that fans feel were left by the original author, whether these are offscreen romances or backstories for minor characters. On websites dedicated to the publication and organization of fanfiction, such as Archive of Our Own, stories are tagged as “Alternate Universe” to denote that a significant structural element (setting or time period, for example) has been changed for the purpose of the story. A subsection of the AU genre is called “fix-it fic,” its name a kind of implied DIY: Fans lessen the hurts of a canon gone awry by resurrecting the deceased, rewriting finales, making things right. “Fanon” refers to interpretations or AUs that become widely accepted within fandom regardless of the amount of canonical evidence. There is also fanfiction written by those who are truly ambivalent towards the source material, who are intrigued by the mere bones of a story and the potential they may hold.

The border between fiction and reality was tenuous for me when I was younger: At nine years old, I cried when I realized that the boy on the cover of my favorite book was just a model who had no real connection to the character he was meant to portray. I had never considered the possibility that the book was just a book even though I knew it was “made-up”—it was real to me. This acknowledgment of subjectivity coupled with my realization about the book’s cover art led me to a new conclusion: I was no longer beholden to what was presented to me literally via the text and physical presence of the novel. The protagonist didn’t have to look like the model on the front cover. That the characters didn’t truly exist at all left them in a psychic limbo, one that I controlled by virtue of being the reader. I didn’t invent the characters, but by reading the novel, I had a hand in conjuring them in my own mind where they were then free to roam, untethered by plot lines or visual representations. I loved them as I loved anything as a child, recklessly and without shame, proud for having owned a tiny interpretive fraction of their story.

That is what drew me into the world of fanfiction at the age of twelve: I wanted more of the media I loved, and there were only so many books in any given series. I was running out of content and fanfiction served as a supplement. I was also in awe of the vast community of people who spent their free time crafting complex narratives about book series and movies and mediocre TV shows. My own obsessive tendencies were reflected back to me in a creative form that combined my latent love of writing with my relentless relationship to media. It was thrilling.

Most of fanfiction’s illegitimacy and assumed “cringeyness” comes from this very same place in which I had initially found empowerment: the wellspring of a teenage girl’s mind, from which all great and terrible things flow. Or, more specifically, the coalescence of the minds of many teenage girls, the unabashed passion of adoration repeated ad nauseam among countless anonymous internet users. The young female fan has always been cause for anxiety among enthusiasts of any subject because the love she feels for her favored celebrity or piece of media is all-consuming, self-propelling—and everybody knows it. Fanfiction as a genre skews heavily female and thus the practice is given less credence both within fandom and in the mainstream. I began reading fanfiction when I was twelve and constantly embarrassed, but I was particularly ashamed of this new hobby because I had already internalized the collective distaste for both female communion and female passion. Yet I continued to read it because it brought me an intense private joy to connect with other fans even as it embarrassed me to do so.

However, I didn’t write fanfiction until the summer I turned twenty. My reluctance, even now, to admit my active participation in this world is still due mostly to the sense that I should have aged out of it by then. By now. That summer, I wrote over twenty thousand words of a single story, the most I had written in years. I stayed up late to look at maps of the South of England out of a genuine enjoyment of the minute geographical accuracies. The challenges that had led me to abandon traditional fiction years earlier—coming up with my own characters, developing my own worlds—were alleviated by the preexisting structure of the canonical text. Freed from the chore of original creation by the canonical text’s structure, I was able to focus on the writing itself and the joy of being totally immersed in a story. I could maintain my control of the narrative because the only person holding me accountable for certain accuracies was myself. Because I knew that no one would fact-check me on which dates the full moon rose in 1976, the exactitude was pleasurable rather than tedious.

The entire experience was much more enjoyable than the unfamiliar and demoralizing process of submitting my work for outside publication. After years of writing in private with childishly lofty dreams of instant book deals, I was hit hard by the realities of the publishing world. I began to doubt the possibility that my work would ever reach anyone beyond my immediate social circle. More than anything, I was anxious for people to actually read the words I committed to the page. Finding a receptive audience is much easier within the economy of fanfiction where there is a significant lack of hierarchy between the publisher, the author, and the reader. When I was nine years old, I drafted an email to the author of my favorite book and played with the formatting in Word for hours until the phrase PLEASE WRITE BACK!!! took up three pages in bright green American Typewriter. She did not write back; I managed to extinguish my grudge within a year. In fanfiction, however, this earnest attempt at conversation is par for the course, and the difference is that you can often expect a response from the original author in the comments section of individual stories, even years later. There is an equivalence between fanfiction writers and readers: We’re in this together, united by our mutual passion for media.

I’m frequently moved by the amount of thought people put into their comments, some of the feedback more cogent than what I have received from professors and editors. One of the sentiments most frequently expressed is that of gratitude: thank you so much for writing this! It speaks to the reciprocity of the practice, how we provide for one another. We are grateful to the writers for creating more content; we are grateful to the readers for commending our labor. By sharing our work with the community, the fanfiction writer is in conversation with both the source text and the fandom itself. And because fanfiction’s online spaces can rarely be monetized due to copyright issues, they remain outside of the structures of late-stage capitalism as it now exists on the internet. The social currency is in connection and communication alone—“likes” on Archive of Our Own are quantified with “kudos,” a ghost of a verbal exclamation.

With fanfiction, the distinction between canon, fanon, and headcanons (personal fan interpretations) gets increasingly blurry: erosion occurs, a flood that carves out new geographies. I left a comment on someone’s story to have her excitedly tell me that my story—the one from the summer I turned twenty—was a huge influence on her work. I was flattered that my somewhat arbitrary creative decisions consequently showed up in her writing, unbeknownst to me. In turn, I have borrowed excessively from other writers, repeating details that didn’t show up in the original source but that I nonetheless felt were so apt that I absorbed them into my understanding of the characters. The result is a collective imaginary constantly in flux, differing for individuals but ultimately based on the same concepts. When I post my fanfiction online, I know I am sending it off into the ether, without my name or copyright—it may be easier to let go of because it was never really mine to claim.

In some cases, popular fanon eclipses canon: Stories have been retold so many times that the source text is almost superfluous, like a piece of art copied over and over until it is unrecognizable from the original—but in being so rigorously copied manages to adopt its own form. Thus, fanon collects its own fandom and stories get spun out into new myths, distant progeny of whatever piece of media had drawn the fan in initially. This is where I find myself now because I am no longer invested in the original texts that once moved me; instead, I love the versions of the texts that I’ve created under the influence of other fans, the same “real to me” possessiveness that informed my reading habits as a child. It’s not so much the death of the author as it is the atrophy: As fanon develops, the original creator is rendered nearly obsolete. Passion for the source shifts towards an ambivalence compounded by frustration that then circles back to passion for something anew.

The source text is almost superfluous, like a piece of art copied over and over until it is unrecognizable from the original.

If it seems like I’ve provided a utopian view of the fanfiction community thus far, it’s because I have done so consciously. After over a decade of engagement with fan work, a person has to learn to be discerning. While fan work does operate largely outside the capitalist structure of financial reward for labor, its radicalism as a medium is not inherent. It is a mistake to assume that everyone engaging with fandom is doing so with the intent to subvert capitalistic notions of authorship. The pleasure and hedonism that is fanfiction’s strength is also its weakness because no one is necessarily compelled to a “better” or more ethical understanding of the canon if it does not suit their own specific interests. Structural problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia undergird nearly all of fandom the way they undergird nearly all of media, though they may manifest in different ways. All the trans headcanons in the world will not undo the reality of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia and the gender essentialism in Harry Potter’s world-building, though fanfiction can function as a reclamation of the series for both writers and readers on an individual level: This is its own kind of healing. The issues that beset canonical texts and their respective fandoms are often amplified by one another rather than canceled out. Additionally, the liberating aspects of online fandom space that allow for creative work to flourish also contribute to a lawlessness that can leave actual people vulnerable behind their computer screens. I was a child myself when I first discovered this ever-evolving ecosystem of content; in my navigation of fandom’s digital terrain, I was sometimes exposed to ideas and situations inappropriate for my age. Because I had no control over what other people wrote, I quickly learned to articulate my personal limits in regards to what I was willing to read. Teenage desire will always be one of fandom’s most ferocious undercurrents, but it remains adult creators’ responsibility to maintain their own boundaries with younger fans.

With all of that in mind, one’s obligation to an online fan community is almost always self-imposed. Life gets in the way, and there is rarely any money on the line to compel a person back into writing fanfiction. And yet, the timeline of fandom can be very long. Writers—myself included—come back years later to update a story and readers return to comment on it. The familiarity consoles just as the malleability excites, endless in its possibilities. Sometimes it’s hard to let things go. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been circling the same stories forever, and sometimes that doesn’t feel as much like an imaginative stagnancy as it does a commitment to a creative pleasure that exists outside of traditional economies of value.

In most fanfiction communities, it is acceptable to approach canon with the intent to undermine its status quo, whereas the traditional literary canon is perhaps not so easy to manipulate. Hierarchies of value, invariably constructed along lines of whiteness and maleness, have long informed what writing is worth taking seriously, worth paying for, and what writing deserves nothing more than a quick glance or an outright scoff. However, there are efforts being made across all genres to reexamine the so-called greats and question the absolute authority afforded to certain thinkers. In this way, fanfiction does align itself with other scholarly practices beyond its direct relationship with a specific text; I think that in the future, fanfiction will become more ingratiated into the general literary discourse. But for now, fanfiction just doesn’t have the same conversational clout as a treatise on Pynchon or a critique thereof. So I don’t tend to mention my hobby to fellow writers or even to fellow fans, as much I continue to grapple with the giddy obsessiveness of it all. Fanfiction is something I have learned to love and create in solitude, with only myself and the millions of other people online clamoring for a tiny stake in the media that continues to shape all of us no matter how we choose to engage with it.