Why Women Write Fan Fiction
Below is an expansion of a post I wrote on a news and discussion site, Ricochet, back in 2012. I thought of it again as longtime female fans have gone to the new Star Wars movie only to leave the theater to find ourselves going though a breakup. Many of us have been fans for almost 40 years. But now that Abrams and crew have turned character arcs into character loops — we are always what we are apparently; we cannot escape our destiny and trying makes no difference — fan girls are reteating into fan fiction. Again.
July 21, 2012
The do-it-yourself revolution in the publishing industry and the shocking success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a piece of Twilight fan fiction, has provoked some curiosity about fan fiction. Whether some publishing house wants to replicate the commercial success of 50SOG or culture critics want to know how that book became successful, well, they need to know a bit about fan fiction (not the least of which is how 50SOG has not prompted a copyright claim).
From minstrels of old to book series like Flashman to this weekend’s Batman, fan fiction — stories using established characters or plots — has been around for a long time. Modern fan fiction, however, is an outlier in creative arts. It is written by women. By written, I do not mean ‘mostly written’ or ‘usually written,’ but closer to ‘almost exclusively’ written by women. No one has done a formal survey, but it is common knowledge and experience on ff.net. Curious as to why, I asked.
It’s not a time issue, as in these are wandering or lost women with time on their hands. Many of these women have successful and/or demanding careers and/or families. (Which means beware: if you find a story in progress that you like, you might wait for months between chapters).
Fan fiction as writing practice is a draw. Fan fiction provides both a cheat and a challenge to aspiring writers, in which the author does not have to create a compelling world or provocative characters and can jump right to writing. Authors are bound, however, by the existing work, challenging them to keep characters and plot consistent. But that draw is not unique to men or women.
Every author I questioned mentioned a sense of conversation.
The internet has exploded the volume and accessibility of fan fiction. Established fandoms provide instant and informed critics. From Blank101, longtime writer of Star Wars fiction:
I love the sense of community which the fanfiction environment embodies. I love the opportunity to interact with like-minded people. I love the immediate response that one can get from writing and then posting; it’s presumably the equivalent of an actor choosing to do a stage performance rather than film work, because of that immediate, very broad reaction from all types and ages, and it’s totally addictive.
Writing fan fiction has become social. Writers are looking for community.
The easy assumption, at this point, is that they are lonely. Some are. Icewyche had me sympathetically chuckling over a few examples. (She had me heartily chuckling over her fanfic commandments.) KathMD told me she started writing when she was an awkward and lonely teen. She sought the companionship of the characters, but that was 15 years ago. Now, she is typical, using the stories to find people to discuss weighty issues illustrated with shared knowledge. I’ve merely read the stories over the past few months, but in short order, found willing partners for probing discussions on whether duty negates love—younger writers seem to think so—or the psychological implications of rape.
But socializing and community still doesn’t explain the overwhelming proportion of women writers. There is another draw for women, I think, a bigger one: anonymity.
Writing about what we aren’t supposed to talk about
In today’s policed environment of women’s issues discussions — witness the aghast feminists when 50SOG broke out—anonymity provides freedom of thought. Behind their handles, women can:
create our own Knights in Shining Armor, adventures we don’t get in the real world, the relationships we dream of having. We write a little piece of our wants and needs into the worlds we wouldn’t mind living in if we had the chance.-WadeWells
These women aren’t lonely for companionship, they are starved for discussion about things that modern women aren’t supposed to discuss. So they tell stories and then discuss those in chat rooms or list servs. (Update: or lately on Twitter or Facebook. I’ve not seen a fandom group in Slack yet, but I assume that is my time constraints and the fact that I hang with Gen X fangirls.)
I keep reading fan fiction because one can glean a bounty of cultural information from such raw and unguarded writings. It is overwhelming, and sadly, often heartbreaking. The not-complete but relative lack of ‘it is our choices that make us what we are’ themes surprised me. Characters were often cast at the mercy of fate or society or, as increasingly common within many attempts at modern myths, were looking for power somewhere outside of themselves. As a Christian I find this last particularly painful since redemption can be gained merely by calling upon what is already in all of us. I fear we Christians are failing them.
My heart aches too for some of the understandings of friendship, love, passion, marriage, and loyalty, although I should not have been surprised to see the consistency. The relationship between friends, parent and child, husband and wife, people and government, Church and the body of Christ, these are reflections of the relationship between God and Man. If you get that one wrong, the others become difficult. (True, getting any one of these relationships right can guide you in the others, but the God and Man route has the best track record. But I digress, as usual.)
Note, not all of the fan fiction was bad. Hardly. I liked a fair few. I could not have spent 10 days getting double vision from an iPad if otherwise. But of late I’ve been thinking about archetypes and timeless tales. Therefore, during this romp in the rabbit hole, I paid attention to the mechanics of the stories.
Fanfiction.net is littered with promising nuggets that crack when the author tries to dictate the tale. I would read with rapt attention, then in the passage of a paragraph, the story would fall because the author obviously intended to make a specific point, often by attempting relevance for a modern audience (a problem particularly acute in the Star Wars extended universe.) For instance, instead of an epic tale of heroism and triumph in which Lotor rapes Allura (yes, I was reading Voltron fan fiction), the author wrote a story on how a modern woman copes with rape. That’s not nothing, but it is not much. The Princess Alluras and Princess Leias are not modern American women transplanted into other worlds from a long time ago. But again, I digress.
Last note, most of the articles on fan fiction that I’ve seen provide examples — strange ones — that support the anti-social writers with no-life assumptions of the culturati. Plenty of fan fiction is normal. Try Number One!, a short story about Luke, Han, and Leia finding out Luke jumped to #1 on the Empire’s Most Wanted list. Blank101 does a better job on the characters than most of the EU books–and Lucas.
Related from Kathleen Smith
The picture is the London Bus ad campaign for Fifty Shades. I snapped that one as the bus rounded Sloane Square, straight into the heart of it’s target audience, affluent moms. Written by a 40something, shy housewife/TV producer, EL James is a rather typical fanfic author.
