ANNE JAMISON Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World An Imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. Dallas, TX All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any man- ner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Copyright © 2013 by Anne Jamison Smart Pop is an imprint of BenBella Books, Inc. 10300 N. Central Expressway, Suite 530 Dallas, TX 75231 www.benbellabooks.com www.smartpopbooks.com Send feedback to [email protected] Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title. 978-1-937856-83-0 Copyediting by James Fraleigh Proofreading by Chris Gage and Brittany Dowdle Text design and composition by John Reinhardt Book Design Printed by Bang Printing Distributed by Perseus Distribution www.perseusdistribution.com To place orders through Perseus Distribution: Tel: 800-343-4499 Fax: 800-351-5073 E-mail: [email protected] Significant discounts for bulk sales are available. Please contact Glenn Yeffeth at [email protected] or 214-750-3628. ii iii Introduction © 2013 by Lev Grossman “Mad as a Box of Frogs” © 2013 by Wendy C. Fries “Fables of Irish Fandom” © 2013 by Andy Sawyer “Recollections of a Collating Party” © 2013 by Jacqueline Lichtenberg “Literary Playtime” © 2013 by Ron Hogan “Mulder/Scully versus the G-Woman and the Fowl One” © 2013 by Bethan Jones “Fic U” © 2013 by Jen Zern “An Excerpt from Percy Weasley’s University Thesis” © 2013 by Chris Rankin “How Harry Potter Fanfic Changed the World (Or at Least the Internet)” © 2013 by Heidi Tandy “Twilight’s True Believers” © 2013 by Jolie Fontenot “A Million Words” © 2013 by Lauren Billings “On Writing—and Being—a Mary Sue” © 2013 by Cyndy Aleo “Becoming Bella Swan” © 2013 by Randi Flannagan “The Fandom Gives Back” © 2013 by Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings “Bittersweet” © 2013 by Tish Beaty “Fifty Shades of Gold” © 2013 by Andrew Shaffer “Just Change the Names” © 2013 by Tiffany Reisz “Preying for More” © 2013 by Rachel Caine “An Archive of Our Own” © 2013 by Francesca Coppa “The Epic Love Story of Supernatural and Fanfic” © 2013 by Jules Wilkinson “Pon Farr, Mpreg, Bonds, and the Rise of the Omegaverse” © 2013 by Kristina Busse “Real Person(a) Fiction” © 2013 by V. Arrow “#BradamForever” © 2013 by Brad Bell “Hobbyhorsing” © 2013 by Peter Berg “From a Land Where ‘Other’ People Live” © 2013 by Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni “Conceptual Writing and Fanfiction” © 2013 by Darren Wershler “Blurring the Lines” © 2013 by Amber Benson Contents Foreword • Lev Grossman Introduction The Theory of Narrative Causality Why Fic? PART ONE Writing from Sources A Prehistory of Fanfiction The Sherlock Holmes Material: A Study in Fanfic The Early Adventures of the Apocryphal Sherlock Holmes Mad as a Box of Frogs • Wendy C. Fries (Atlin Merrick) “Love Is a Much More Vicious Motivator” The Slasher Who Is Not One (An Interview with Katie Forsythe and wordstrings) PART TWO A Selective History of Media Fandom Science Fiction, Star Trek, and the Birth of Media Fandom Fables of Irish Fandom • Andy Sawyer I Am Woman, Read My Fic Recollections of a Collating Party • Jacqueline Lichtenberg Interlude: Growing Up Fic Literary Playtime • Ron Hogan The X-Files, Buffy, and the Rise of the Internet Fic Fandoms The X-Philes v vi fic Mulder/Scully versus the G-Woman and the Fowl One • Bethan Jones The Bronze Age Fic U • Jen Zern (NautiBitz) Megafandoms: Harry Potter and Twilight An Excerpt from Percy Weasley’s University Thesis • Chris Rankin How Harry Potter Fanfic Changed the World (Or at Least the Internet) • Heidi Tandy (Heidi8) The Twilight Fandom Twilight’s True Believers • Jolie Fontenot A Million Words • Lauren Billings (LolaShoes) An Interview with tby789 (Christina Hobbs) On Writing—and Being—a Mary Sue • Cyndy Aleo (algonquinrt/ d0tpark3r) Becoming Bella Swan • Randi Flannagan (BellaFlan) The Fandom Gives Back • Christina Lauren (Christina Hobbs/tby789 and Lauren Billings/Lolashoes) Snowqueens Icedragon (E. L. James) and Sebastien Robichaud (Sylvain Reynard): A 2010 Fandom Exchange Anatomy of a Flame War Bittersweet • Tish Beaty (his_tweet) PART THREE Fic and Publishing An Interview with Eurydice Fifty Shades of Gold • Andrew Shaffer The Briar Patch Just Change the Names • Tiffany Reisz Preying for More • Rachel Caine PART FOUR Fanwriting Today An Archive of Our Own • Francesca Coppa The Epic Love Story of Supernatural and Fanfic • Jules Wilkinson (missyjack) CONTENTS vii Pon Farr, Mpreg, Bonds, and the Rise of the Omegaverse • Kristina Busse Real Person(a) Fiction • V. Arrow (aimmyarrowshigh) #BradamForever • Brad Bell Hobbyhorsing • Peter Berg (Homfrog) From a Land Where “Other” People Live • Rukmini Pande and Samira Nadkarni PART FIVE Fanfiction and Writers Who Don’t Write Fanfiction Conceptual Writing and Fanfiction • Darren Wershler An Interview with Douglas Wright An Interview with Jonathan Lethem Blurring the Lines • Amber Benson Acknowledgements About the Author About the Contributors Endnotes Index Darren Wershler is an experimental poet, essayist, and cultural critic. Best known for The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewrit- ing, he is also Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature at Concordia University, where he is currently developing and curating an online archive of publicly licensed Canadian art. Darren has been active on the forefront of what’s come to be known as conceptual writing—a contemporary movement in avant-garde literature that involves copying, manipulating, reformatting, and otherwise appropriating found text. Aside from using material in ways that often occupy a legal gray area, what can fanfic have in common with the avant-garde? Are there ways in which this avant-garde is fannish? This essay considers how these very different writing and interpretive communities have evolved in relation to digital media, the mainstream literary establishment, and their own marginal status. Conceptual Writing as Fanfiction Darren Wershler Conceptual Writing and Fanfiction are the Bearded Spocks of their respective universes. If you’re reading this book, you probably already know more about fan- fiction than I do. What I know about is a thing called conceptual writing. And I think that one useful way to think about conceptual writing is as fanfiction about conceptual art. Another might be to say that, in neighboring universes that overlap slightly, both fanfiction and conceptual writing play the role of bearded Spock. What I want to consider in this brief essay is the value of a kind of forced cultural exchange. In the event of an unexpected ion storm and a transporter accident, or its prose equivalent, is there anything useful that writers of fanfiction and conceptual writing might learn from each 333 334 fic other? It’ll take me a few hundred words to get to the point where we can find out. Conceptual writing is a term that has come to describe the work that my friends and I have produced over the last dozen years. One major exam- ple is Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, which consists of the entire text from the September 1, 2000 issue of the New York Times—stock quotes, ads, cap- tions, and all—reset in 9-point type, reproduced line by line, and bound as a massive paperback book, with Goldsmith listed as the author.131 In more general terms, conceptual writing is a catchall description for a mixed bag of writing techniques used by people who are interested in the impact of networked digital media on the creative process, the social function of authorship, and the economy of publishing. This sort of writing is fannish in the sense that it draws much of its inspiration from things that were happening in the art world from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Conceptual art is a big, complex category, but Alexander Alberro usefully describes it in terms of four major “tra- jectories”: a deemphasizing of the importance of the artist’s technical skill and the cohesiveness of the final product; an increasing emphasis on the importance of text over images; a shift away from the aesthetically pleas- ing toward the conveyance of that odd modern invention we call informa- tion; and a questioning of how art is “supposed” to be framed, and the notion that there is a “correct” context (like a gallery) in which people are supposed to encounter it (pp. xvi, xvii ).132 Conceptual writing fol- lows these trajectories because, with a few exceptions, they had been largely ignored by literary writers. Before there was a clear consensus about what it was or what it was going to be called, what conceptual writing did was to draw attention to the rhetorical aspects of writing that canonical literature usually neglects: weather reports, legal transcripts, social media feeds, stock quotes, Use- net posts, and so on. These texts are the “dark matter” of literature; they make up the bulk of everything that’s written, but we habitually pretend that they don’t matter in any capacity other than the moment. John Guillory describes such texts as belonging to what he calls “information genres.” In order to use them to convey that peculiar mod- ern invention we call “information,” we have to pretend that they have no rhetorical value of their own that might taint it.133 By repackaging great swaths of information in media and formats other than the ones in FANFICTION AND Writers Who Don’t Write FANFICTION 335 which it initially appeared— again, think about Goldsmith reformatting the New York Times as a book—conceptual writing drew attention to the fact that all writing is poetic. It is poetic in that it always says more than we intend, and we assign value to it in keeping with large sets of external factors that sometimes have little to do with the ostensible content.