Why Write Fanfic?

By Katherine Dunn

Why write fic? What’s the point in rewriting someone else’s characters and narratives? According to the popular media, and your parents, and that friend who saw you looking at gifs of Jensen Ackles face and judged you, there is no point. To them fanfiction, and fan works in general are a cultural black hole, into which all creativity, originality and the future of culture is sinking.

Ok, sure. That’s a nice, cosy way for them to think. Rewriting other people’s stories is stupid, I mean it’s not like Wide Sargasso Sea is any good, andRosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is pretty rubbish. And Shakespeare’s crap, he didn’t think of anything new. Yeah, really convincing argument.

So, let’s gently put the hysterical media to one side, ignore shouts about the death of literature and the failure of the next generation, and think about the question - why write fic? What do we learn from it? What’s it worth? Aside from personal enjoyment, fanfiction is a powerful tool of literary and analytical education. While in schools we learn about alteration and register, online we engage in epic discourses on the politics of representation and subtext. Fic, and fandom, teaches us a hell of a lot more than the mainstream media will allow.

Critics and theorists sit in their high churches, handing down nuggets of incomprehensible ego-fluffing nonsense. Their racket is so well established that in much of the higher education system to try and engage with a text or visual narrative without reference to their thoughts, which are generated in insular ivory towers of academia, is completely unacceptable. The establishment speaks, and we are taught to sit down and accept that they know better. How is this supposed to foster the health of the future of literature and culture?

When the needs of medical science in the 19th century for corpses for dissection outpaced the supply of bodies, the anatomists turned to the seedier side of the city: the body snatchers. The trade was dark, dirty, illegal, and in some cases down right immoral. But the anatomists used the stolen bodies to learn, bringing our knowledge of the human body into the modern age of medicine, and causing the law to be changed to allow the medical profession the resources and spaces it needed to thrive. Burke and Hare may have been opportunistic murderers, but they paved the way for the life saving medicine we have today.

We don’t have mainstream channels to express ourselves, mainstream teachers to expand our thoughts. So we turn elsewhere. LJ, tumblr, ff.net, AO3. We, the fic writers, readers, fans, we go and dig up the bodies. We dissect its parts, learn its idiosyncrasies, its tendencies and its illnesses. We diagnose, prescribe and invent. We built prosthetics, pioneer new techniques - but we do it hidden, at night, in dank back rooms with shifty looks.

Okay, it’s not a perfect metaphor. Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t the dark and dirty practice it’s thought to be (though we’ve all clicked on the wrong link that once, and scrambled to the back button, weeping, ‘cannot unsee’). But we’re forced underground, looked at askance and relegated to the freakish for something that is hugely empowering and enlightening.

Fanfiction means we understand tropes, recognise diverse issues in representation, analyse subtext, question motivations, dismantle structures and techniques. Most of all we learn. We challenge ourselves as writers, grow and develop as readers. Why hide in the dark? Stand up and be proud. Fic shouldn’t be a dirty little secret. Ghettoising fic disconnects and alienates a world of talented writers and passionate readers.

So pick up your shovel and pick your body. Burke & Hare are back.