Passionate word of mouth fueled the early readership, but blog features exposed TO to an even wider audience. Banners, GIFs, and badges had been a part of fic promotion for a while at that point, but we wanted to take it to the next level. It seemed clear that TO ought to be branded in a way that unmistakably represented Christina and her work.
Iconic, classy, and a little bit sassy were the touchpoints we agreed on, and a bold theme of black and white with a pop of red worked well on a visceral level. The first banner was a black-and-white composite manipulation of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. The next two were character banners, featuring a shot of Pattinson from a GQ article, and then one of Stewart from an ELLE pictorial—both solid representations of TO. American Typewriter was a perfect font for the title and author names, with Zapfino providing a calligraphic flourish for the personalized banners.
Once a TO board was created in the Twilighted forums, a community of readers quickly began to form. I created an “Office Intern” badge that anyone could grab, then titled versions for top members, like, “VP/Sales” or “Quality Control.” Announcements were made via company memorandum. The GIFs were simple, with an ever-present thread of insider humor, and easy to spot in busy forum-signature blocks.
These various graphics served not only as an inclusive connection to TO, but also as a solid promotional item. Whether large or small they were instantly recognizable, and readers wanted to use them. You love the fic, the banners and GIFs are cool, the author’s a doll, the forum’s fun . . . you’re part of all that! Readers wanted everyone to know that they loved TO, and we gave them a lot of tools to make that happen easily.
It wasn’t just individual authors and readers who did the marketing. What else got your story noticed?
tby789: There were the rec sites, they did a lot. When the Perv Pack Smut Shack featured “The Office” after the second chapter, that was a big deal. They had a lot of influence. But—you can guess their interests from their name, probably. It was more of a surprise when The Lazy Yet Discerning Ficster mentioned it, because they liked “smart fics,” and mine would have fallen into the category of “smut fic.” But ManyAFandom liked it; she mentioned a sex scene in the parking garage and she liked how it advanced the plot. She said basically, if you want to put smut in your fic, this is how to do it, and that rec helped draw in a different set of readers, I think. It made my smut seem smarter.
The Look of Fic: 2009–2010
Much of Twilight fanfiction appeared on FanFiction.Net and the archive Twilighted, where signatures and icons displayed reader tastes and story support. Some authors had elaborate websites with character interviews, playlists for chapters, and even character outfits and other consumer goods featured in the stories (most of these sites from the 2009–2010 heyday have been scrubbed or are missing too many images to reproduce). A variety of other websites supported the massive fic fandom: rec and review sites, podcasts, and award sites.I
A banner from tby789’s Twilight fanfiction “The Office,” 2009
tby789’s “The Office CEO” button, 2009
Twificnews was an elaborate online newspaper complete with fic recs, news, glossaries, guides, and columns. Pictured here is the “Dear D0t” advice column.J
algonquinrt/d0tpark3r was a beloved figure in the Twilight fandom, and she was also kind of a ranter. For a while she had a “Dear Dot” column in a fandom newspaper, where she’d answer questions on fic and editing and professional publishing. Unlike many Twilight writers, she had experiences with other fandoms and often found herself irked at the “feral” ways of Twilight. d0tpark3r also broke a cardinal rule of self-respecting fic writers everywhere: she wrote a Mary Sue. It was epic.
On Writing—and Being—a Mary Sue
Cyndy Aleo (algonquinrt/d0tpark3r)
My story starts with a drag queen and various versions of the Christian Messiah on carbohydrate-based foods.
I was mid-divorce, experiencing about the most hellish two years of my life, and addicted to writing Twilight fanfiction that no one ever read. On a dare from another author in the fandom, I sat down one night, cranked out 5,000 words of the most crass comedy I could—the opposite of the dark, angsty things I was writing—and sent it out into the world.
Unbelievably, it was a hit.
Fanfiction, for me, is inextricably tied to my divorce. While I began reading it in other fandoms before and have continued to read in other fandoms since, my time in the Twilight fandom can be traced on a timeline to dovetail neatly with the end of my marriage and its inexorable drag through the divorce courts.
Christ on a crudité, indeed.
With the trend of popular Twilight fanfictions being turned into bestselling novels, I’ve been asked more than once why I never shopped mine, why I never tried to get it published, why I pulled my fic and vanished into obscurity.
The answer is both simple and complicated.
Publishing it was never an option, from the beginning. While most people viewed my fanfiction as what’s called “all human, alternate universe” and felt it deviated so far from the original text as to be original fiction, they’d be dead wrong. The writing itself was often slapdash and not something I’d be particularly proud to publish, but the content was tied so closely to the original work and to fandom dynamics that to separate them would render the text unreadable.
If you want a cultural snapshot of the Twilight fandom circa 2009, look no further than “Mr. Horrible.”
The first general rule of writing fanfiction is to not make your main character a Mary Sue, but what do you do when the original text’s heroine is a Mary Sue? You make her bigger and badder. I invested in my Bella all my own insecurities: about working (she was a temp, a job I loved and wish I could return to, because it requires no commitment), about writing (she wrote fanfiction herself, and was afraid to send her work out into the world), about relationships (Hello? I was in the middle of an ugly divorce). Bella was the Mary Sue to end all Mary Sues, complete with my trucker mouth and penchant for taking the Lord’s name in vain, left to me after sixteen years of Catholic School Rebellion.
In other words, take the most hyperbolic caricature of me, merge it with the biggest Mary Sue in YA literature history, and you have comedy.
Giving Bella a fanfiction hobby allowed me to poke at the fandom at my leisure. While I was never sure if readers would laugh along or take offense, there were many references to the tropes of fanfiction. Perfect example? The tendency of fanfiction authors (and a lot of romance and erotica authors as well) to compare the tastes experienced during oral sex to sweet-tasting foods. A few months of this, and you’re rolling your eyes. Now put a Mary Sue character—a virgin, naturally—into a position where this is all she’s ever read, and have her experience the reality of semen in her mouth: “But . . . but . . . everything I read says that the spunkcipient just swallows it like it’s no big deal. That was like nasty rancid tapioca that never set up right . . .” When everyone else was comparing it to candy or milk or god only knows what, my Bella was telling it like it was. Bluntly.
I was also all about taking the stereotypes of fanfiction and annihilating them wherever I could. Edward was always a filthy rich CEO/doctor/lawyer. Sure, mine was still the rich CEO, but he was a socially stilted Mark Zuckerberg clone running an online site. He was unable to communicate, vomited in desk drawers, and let everyone else run his life.
The minor characters, however, were where I had the most fun.
Even a nascent fandom will begin to develop its own tropes. You could see it, for instance, in the popular Sterek pairing in the Teen Wolf fandom as it took off. Language is often repeated from one fic to another. Occupations become accepted as fanon. In Teen Wolf fic, shirts are often “rucked”; incorrect usage, such as “chock” for “choke,” appears in one fic after another, and Sheriff Stilinski, who so far has no canon first name, has been unofficially baptized “John” by the fandom. After a while, it becomes difficult to separate what came from the orig
inal canon material and what has developed as part of the community growth.
Which is where the drag queens came into play.
That doesn’t sound like a logical jump, but it really is. In Twilight fanfiction, the character of James is usually some type of criminal. A rapist, a murderer, a rapist/murderer . . . but again, I was in the middle of a divorce. Thinking of all the things I’d ever done wrong in my life. And naturally, thinking about The One Who Got Away.
Like my Bella, back then I had a gay best friend I spent a (probably unhealthy) amount of time with. And when I got dumped, that was one of the reasons cited in the dumping.
Now, whether that was reason number one or not, I’ll obviously never know, but again, I was going for shock value and a complete reversal of fanon. So James became Bella’s gay best friend and a drag queen: Jamie/Victoria Secret. It let me combine two minor characters into one, and mine a bit of a blighted NaNoWriMo novel that had been sitting on my hard drive.
The character was based on no one person, but rather an amalgam of friends I’d had at the clubs back in the early nineties. I took a little bit of this and a little bit of that until I had the most outrageous bitch I could come up with: a selfish slut queen who was possessive, distrustful, but underneath loved his bestie to death.
Next, into this entire hot mess of a poke at the fandom in general, add some audience participation.
Early on in the fic, I’d started adding cultural allusions to nerd things: classic horror literature, cult movies, and so on. It didn’t take long for fans of the story to begin sending things to me as either a challenge or a request to include. “Christ on a bicycle,” quotes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a reference to Frank Herbert’s Dune series: all came from reader suggestions or challenges. I’d estimate that at least two-thirds of the chapters had one or more of these offerings from fans.
Now tell me, after all this, how this fanfiction would qualify as original fiction.
Sure, there are some authors who have done similar things. Piers Anthony, for one, with his Xanth series, took countless reader suggestions, poked fun at traditional mythology, and included even more puerile humor than I think I managed, coinage of the term spunkcipient to the contrary. Michael R. Underwood, in his 2012 book Geekomancy—as well as similar books of this genre—uses countless pop culture allusions with an urban fantasy twist.
The difference, however, is that for me to consider “Mr. Horrible” original fiction, I would have to overlook its ties to source material as well as to the fandom. If it were merely parody of Twilight and the Twilight fandom? That’s one issue. If I were to strip all the user suggestions, which were offered under the assumption that they were being used for a fanfiction that was written to be freely available for fans? That’s a second.
Beyond the slapdash writing and the ties to the original text and the fandom and the user contributions, I have such a strong mental association between “Mr. Horrible” and my divorce that I’m not sure I’d like to see it on bookshelves in perpetuity.
Approximately halfway through writing this fan fiction, I received a counterfiling from my now ex-husband. On the very first page of the filing, entered into the New York State Family Court records, was a link to where my fanfiction resided and a description of what I wrote.
The argument was twofold. First, what I was writing was inappropriate as the mother of four; the fanfiction did contain several sex scenes, as did other fics I wrote. Second, I was writing it for no pay, when—according to my now-ex—I should have been job searching, which I was certainly doing at the time after losing my nearly full-time freelance client that March.
First reaction: general tears and hysteria.
Second reaction: Fuck. Him.
I talked to my attorney. Explained terms like fanfiction and slash and smut, and after she pointed out that his attorney very likely billed him his usual hourly rate to read my fic, we left it alone.
I changed usernames, got a new Twitter account, and kept going.
The judge, as it turned out, didn’t much care what all I was doing with my spare time.
The second time the now-ex found my account and quoted things back to me, however, was when I gave up. I quit writing, quit posting on Twitter, and exited the Twilight fandom about as quietly as I’d arrived approximately two years prior.
I had accomplished what I wanted to by writing fanfiction: honed my writing, learned that I often lean too far into angst, and discovered I may have a flair for comedy writing. While I knew there were fans who were disappointed—I still get occasional emails when I check my old accounts from people wondering if the fics will ever reappear or, in some cases, be finished—it was no longer worth the constant struggle of staying anonymous.
Do I miss it on occasion? Certainly. Writers write in solitude. Fanfiction writers write with an entire cheer squad behind them. Each chapter is met with immediate response. You know where to take the story based on reactions. It’s an entirely different writing process when you are relying on a couple of betas and then hoping an agent will love it, instead of posting a single chapter and having hundreds of reviews telling you how much they loved what you wrote.
For me, though, it was also like when you have a child on a bicycle with training wheels. At some point, you take those off and it’s harder to balance, and you may fall more, but you can go a lot farther with them off.
I removed my fanfiction from FanFiction.Net the day that I spoke to the website Dear Author about the issue of pulling fanfiction for publication and officially tied my real name to my fanfiction names.
Non, je ne regrette rien: No, I do not regret anything.
I spent two years with instant access to an online support system that probably had no idea it was supporting me.
I practiced my writing.
I made friends who chipped in and got me a secondhand laptop when mine died, which enabled me to apply for (and get) a new job.
I sold my first story—under a pen name, of course—and I could never have done that without what I learned in the fandom, and without three of the four pre-readers I met there.
I can’t rule out anything at this point: ever writing comedy again, or ever writing a character who does drag again. But like a lot of people I met during my two years in the Twilight fandom, it stays compartmentalized in a little “Remember when?” box.
Like d0tpark3r, BellaFlan messed with the notion of the taboo self-insert, and like d0tpark3r, BellaFlan—whose real-world alter ego holds a degree in creative writing and works in a publishing context—was a fantastic teach. Assigned as our representative postmodern or experimental Twific, “Becoming Bella Swan” and its author were very popular with my English major students. BellaFlan’s biggest fans saw her writing as a kind of innovative literary criticism, a brash brand of postmodern reader-response erotica. By breaking most of the rules of traditional narrative fiction and fanfiction, BellaFlan fractured character and relationship—the driving forces of so much fic—and left the most important relationships to rage within rather than between characters. Mary Sue took on Mary Sue Prime. The result is filthy, funny, serious, and broken.
Becoming Bella Swan
An Experiment in Subversion and Perversion
Randi Flanagan (BellaFlan)
Hey, you created me. I didn’t create some loser alter ego to make myself feel better. Take some responsibility!
—Tyler Durden, Fight Club
Part One—Lost in Meyer
No story is an island. That is to say, the act of reading a novel affects it—every reader is a participant in the story, whether she imagines herself in place of the protagonist or she’s taking a voyeuristic approach. When a story stays with you, when you think about it and dream of what happens after the final page, you are writing a fanfiction. When you apply critical thought to a text, you are participating in the novel.
In fanfiction, a Mary Sue is a self-insertion into the world of your source material. Example: the BBC miniseries Lost in A
usten drops an OC, or other character, into the universe of Pride and Prejudice. Amanda is dissatisfied with her life and uses Austen’s world as a form of escapism. She wreaks havoc in the world, but does her best to set things straight, having an obsession with the canon text.
But what if we insert an OC or Mary Sue who doesn’t want things to stay true to canon?
In 2008, Bella Swan stared at me—all dishwater brown—through the pages of Twilight, and I wanted to grab her by her lackluster hair and smack her several times. “You’re a coward!” I screamed at her. “A selfish bitch thrown into a world of magic and terror and . . . really hot men! Do something other than brood and trip over your own feet.” There was nothing about this weak, selfish girl that interested me, yet I couldn’t put the book down. In fact, I read the entire series several times.
Clearly, Bella Swan needed to be replaced.
For all of its faults, I was drawn into the fantasy world that is Twilight. I wanted to live in that world, to play in it, and to imagine what I would do if I were Bella. Yes, I wanted to become Bella Swan. And this is how I discovered fanfiction, because as it turns out, an active community of at least 50,000 readers and writers also wants to be her to some degree.
Fanfiction in the Twilight fandom is often reactive rather than written as tribute to canon. We tear apart Meyer’s universe and rebuild it at our whim. As a reader of fanfiction, I want to experience what is missing from canon: genitalia. As a writer of fanfiction, I wanted to have a very stern conversation with our heroine, Bella Swan, and by extension, her creator.
Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World Page 24