#2: Why Write Fanfiction?

Invariably throughout your writing life, someone sneers and says you shouldn't waste your time with something made up. (I think my life is scheduled to run into someone new with this opinion roughly every two years.) If you're not very good at shrugging these comments off, and when you're depressed over the state of your writing it can be nigh impossible, I find it helpful to examine why you do what you do when you can think clearly about the situation. One of my creative writing teachers said these thoughts should be put down in a credo and updated frequently. Here's a glimpse of mine.

My job is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable. -- anonymous bumper sticker

The above quote I saw on a car as I was driving to work one morning, and latched onto it. It sums up what a story and by extension what a writer does. It is getting a story out of your head, and reaching out to touch someone else regardless of the medium. What was the first story to make you laugh? Mine was the novel 101 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith upon which the Disney movies are based. What was the first story to make you cry? Edward Scissorshands, I tear up every time I watch it. What was the first story to make you go "what if that was true?" What was the first story to make you go "I can write something like that?" Mine was Christine's Ghost by Betty Ren Wright.

So how does a story "comfort and disturb?" With its theme--the lesson, the moral of the story. The earliest stories have always striven to explain how the universe works in relation to us. Myths, Aesop's fables, Jesus' parables are all true. Modern stories are no different; the lesson is just more subliminal. Not that all writers have such a lofty motivation, but when you chose to write an adventure story in which good triumphs over evil because that is the genre requires, you are choosing to support that morality. People hate to be told what to do. It comes from leftover childhood rebellion, I think. But if you give them a hero they can emulate, the lesson is learned. The more believable the hero and other characters are, the more the readers think it is just entertainment without realizing they are being educated. They go away happy and satisfied.

The market for literary journalism holds true to this as well. Schindler's List, Seabiscuit, Titanic each have a moral at the heart of the story, and have been tweaked to be entertaining. The truth (i.e. something that happened in real life) has been the basis of many a story. There really was a Sam Shepard, and his wife was murdered before the invention of a one-armed man for the Fugitive. The primary mission is still the same as fiction.

Having covered the benefits of fiction, I had to ask myself why bother writing fanfiction. You can't sell it, some owners of the rights get snarly about it, and it seems on the surface such a waste of fiction writing time.

Something created is never a waste of time. And the readers who enjoy it are getting the same benefits that we found for original fiction.

If nothing else, fanfictions make good practice. Many writers have gone from fanfiction writing to original fiction publishing (and I can't wait until my name is on that list). Peter David has made a lucrative career out of book publishing fanfictions. (Paramount does not consider any Star Trek books canon.) Looking at my writings, I started by rewriting books I had enjoyed reading. Fanfictions are hardly any different. For many people, it's their first foray into writing; they could make things more difficult without using the established characters, settings, and situations; but don't they have enough just learning to put together a coherent story?

At this point, fanfiction writing for me is practice and a source of pride. I love the stuff I chose to write about (I have to get the stories out of my head regardless) and I have readers to make happy. And really, that is what it boils down to, making your readers happy. Even if you totally upset them with what happens in the story, they'll respect you for doing it. And that somehow transfers to readers' happiness. I don't really understand it either. But I do know I absolutely hated what happened in Mostly Harmless, but I'm going to get and read the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series someday.

Fiction and fanfiction is a way to get to the truth of human existence. It allows you to escape (and there is nothing wrong with that) and empathize with others. It teaches you to become better than you are.