Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  I so did not get it. Conceptual writing has nothing to do with Kant. Conceptual writing has everything to do with appropriating other people’s material and reframing it—which sounds like a description of fanfiction that a lot of people would agree with. These communities (by and large) have nothing to do with each other, however. They appropriate different material to different ends, produce very different kinds of texts, share few if any of the same concerns or goals, and would likely be insulted—on either side—by the insinuation of any association whatsoever.

  Well, I say “would likely be.” So I asked someone else to write that essay, and Darren has teased out some much more thought-provoking questions and parallels than I have in the course of picking arguments with my avant-garde partner (as one does).

  To continue.

  As I say, I live with “conceptual writing” on a daily basis. I embrace it (and one of its pioneers). I also like doing philosophical (possibly conceptual) readings of literary texts. So when, in the course of looking at yet another writing culture, commercial publishing, I saw so much discussion of and desire for something called “high concept” novels, I was surprised, but pleased. I wondered if they meant conceptual writing like well-known psychology test questions presented as poetry, or conceptual writing like maybe Wallace Stevens when he goes all phenomenological about a jar.

  Guess again. By “high concept,” commercial publishing means, essentially, books that can be pitched in four words or less. The literary equivalent of Snakes on a Plane. See, I wouldn’t have thought that.

  “Can be pitched in four words or less” is not an airtight definition. “Retyped the Times” could pitch a well-known work of conceptual writing in three words (Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, which consists of a single issue of the Sunday New York Times retyped and reformatted as a book), but it’s not going to get agents into a bidding war. As it happens, a lot of these short pitches for high-concept novels sound like fanfiction crossovers. Buffy meets Brideshead. Edward Cullen, Squire of Downton. When I started talking to people in the mainstream publishing world a few years back, however, I found that most of this world had no idea what fanfiction was. Those who had heard of such a thing did not embrace the idea that what they did (publishing and promoting stories they hoped would be popular) had anything in common with what fanfiction communities did (posting and promoting stories they hoped would be popular). I’m basing these generalizations on personal conversations and informal exchanges. I’ve since spoken to several agents who were also well-known fan writers, but I stand by my claim. Until Fifty Shades of Grey, fanfiction was on the margins of the New York–based publishing world’s hive mind. At best.

  I tried to interview a writer of literary fiction about basing a character on a well-known political figure. I didn’t ask her questions about fanfiction, but I did explain the context of this book. I wanted to identify different motivations and processes for writing about real people who are alive and might not consent. Writers can make use of apparently analogous processes, but conceive of their projects very differently, to very different ends, and I want this book to make that clear. This writer wasn’t familiar with fanfiction, but she still wanted very much to distinguish what she did as a literary writer from it. She wanted to make clear that she didn’t write about just famous people, but only about people she felt had a kind of mythic or philosophical resonance and importance. I agree with that assessment of her work, and I understand not wanting to discuss something you don’t know about. However, the exchange still hovered at the edge of some perplexing prejudices that adhere to notions of celebrity and to the word fan, and which seem to operate even in the absence of any direct knowledge or experience of fanfiction.

  What if a fanfiction writer had shared more than an interest in writing about characters based on mythic or particularly resonant real people? I’m thinking of a very talented fic writer who has written characters based on political figures; her work is deeply psychological as well as political. I could imagine the writer describing these characters as working through archetypal American and British myths. Now, she may be a “fan” of some of the inspirations of her work—but does that make it less serious? Is the work automatically less serious because of the way she shares it? Or is it less serious because in addition to being kind of mythic and archetypal and political, her characters are also having all kinds of explicit sex and end up together rather than in tragedy? I think literary critics and writers sometimes make that kind of judgment automatically. I wonder if it can be traced back to an ancient genre distinction from classical drama: comedy ends in marriage and lacks the weight of tragedy. But Middlemarch ends in marriage and mixes politics with a romance plot, and I can’t think of anyone who has ever thought George Eliot wasn’t serious. Ever.

  I’ve been thinking about fanfiction for a long time now, but I’ve been thinking about literature and writing for longer. I believe distinctions matter. The dramatic conventions that separate tragedy and comedy do lead to important differences, and I don’t actually think that A Midsummer Night’s Dream, say, has all the political and psychological resonance of Hamlet or King Lear. But then we also get something like The Tempest, which incorporates elements of tragedy and comedy but is probably best described as a kind of proto-sci-fi/fantasy. I don’t like lines in the sand that divide literary from genre fiction, but I also don’t like to erase all lines—genre fiction has some distinctive elements I don’t think it should be ashamed of. What I do like is comparing literatures. I have a PhD in that. I like crossing lines without erasing them.

  I like, for example, that Jonathan Safran Foer “wrote” a book that cut out pieces of The Street of Crocodiles, one of our favorite books (we talked about it when we were students), to make my favorite book of his, Tree of Codes. It’s a stunning book and a stunning object—and to my mind, more original than the novels he’s most known for. I don’t think this project makes him a different, more elevated species than a girlfriend of mine who makes stunning fanvids or any of the people in this book who write fic. But that’s how the culture has been treating them—like different species.

  It isn’t, of course, all about genre prejudice. Because there’s also gender prejudice to contend with. When Vogue did a photoshoot in honor of Edith Wharton, they dressed up Foer, his teacher, Jeffrey Eugenides, and the writer Junot Díaz as Wharton’s intellectual and writer friends. They dressed up a model to play Wharton.

  In this volume, Wharton is played by fanfiction.

  The high echelons of the literary are dominated by men. It’s less true in genre fiction, and I think it’s no accident that the professional writers in this volume who have come out of fanfiction are genre writers and are women.

  I like to think of this final section of the book as a (nonfiction) crossover fic between postmodernism and a particular panel at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. This panel, “The Power of Myth,” featured a range of professional writers whose work revisits and retells mythology—among them Amber Benson and Lev Grossman, whose names are now on the cover of this book. At the time, I was live-tweeting Comic-Con to my pop culture theory class, who were “meeting” that day on Twitter. As I’d been doing throughout the day, I asked a student’s question and relayed the answer back to the class. The question: “What, besides copyright, was the difference between what these writers were doing and fanfiction?”

  Not all the panelists were entirely pleased. One bluntly answered, “Quality”—which I don’t think was meant to be self-deprecating. Seanan McGuire, author of the October Daye and InCryptid series, had the most complete answer—unsurprisingly, as she is or at least has been a fan writer and fan singer-songwriter (or filk) artist, herself (for Buffy. Firefly. Veronica Mars and Shakespeare. Veronica Mars and Josie and the Pussycats. My kind of fangirl). It makes sense that she would have given a great deal of thought to the question of how professionally published work related to fic.

  McGuire felt the difference essentially came down to specific character and
characterization. If she were to (hypothetically) write a Cinderella story, she explained, she wouldn’t use Andrew Lang’s exact characterization—or if she did, it would be fanfiction for his Blue Fairy Book. But if she wrote one in which Cinderella goes to Comic-Con dressed as, say, Batman, that’s a different story entirely. She explained that she’d read books and said to herself, “Hey, this totally started as Battlestar Galactica fanfiction,” to which her response was essentially—good for you!

  In this section, then, I wanted to juxtapose a range of writers who celebrate and actively pursue techniques associated with fanfiction. They represent the avant-garde, the literary, and the popular. They write poetry, criticism, literary novels, genre fiction, drama, musicals, movies, and comic books. There’s not that many of them, and they all mix it up a bit—one of them has even written and acted the same character. I don’t want to efface all these distinctions of genre, because again, I like comparing things. And it’s much more fun and interesting to compare apples to oranges than it is to compare a big vat of applesauce to itself.

  But it’s perfectly fine—and possibly more productive—to compare a Granny Smith to a Golden Delicious to a particular kind of Macoun that grows only in Upstate New York. Acknowledging basic similarities doesn’t mean effacing the fact that we might cultivate and prefer different flavors. Or that we might truly believe that spending years honing a rare varietal in our backyard is better than just stocking up on popular supermarket varieties. Or that we might consider that heirloom apple elitist and a waste of time, and just want something we can buy in bulk that will hold up in a pie . . .

  You get my meaning. There’s plenty to argue about, even if we’re all apples, eating each other . . . and we exhaust our metaphor in both tenor and vehicle, which has apparently driven us to a fruit orgy and left us there.

  That is not what I meant, at all.

  Let’s try it this way. Let us go then, you and I . . . back to the Harry Potter fandom, for a minute. Or visit The X-Files. Fandoms carve up their output and their writing cultures—and sometimes their friendships—along their works’ portrayal of relationships: whether romantic or sexual, and with whom. Entire archives are often divided that way, and fandoms bicker and worse about why people should or should not represent certain relationships, and in what ways. It seems natural in the context of fandom that Mystrade and Wincest are important generic categories, or that Kirk and Spock is an entirely different fictional animal from Kirk/Spock. And in fact, these are important descriptive terms that people will not only defend but advocate for above all others. But when outsiders see a fan community so polarized by its feelings about, say, writing Hermione with Harry or Ginny with Harry that these groups can’t even talk to each other, and don’t even want to share the same (digital) shelf space—well, frankly, to the people who aren’t caught up in that conflict, it looks a little absurd.

  So maybe this is what the rest of us look like:

  The people who ship writing/difficulty and writing/revolution don’t talk to the people who ship writing/entertainment or writing/romance. The writing/money shippers have an uneasy détente with the writing/literature folks in the prose fandom, but almost none of them talk to the poetry people because how could you even? The writing/YA folks have a strong community or are cliquish, depending on who you ask, and everyone knows not to invite the writing/genre people to the same party as writing/literary folks because it just ends up in a shouting match.

  Fandom would explain that this is why we can’t have nice things.

  There are some important legal distinctions between what (some) of the writers in this section do and what (some) of the writers in other sections do—there are permissions negotiated, works transformed, criticisms made. But by and large it’s a lot blurrier than you might think. Fanfiction doesn’t designate a legal status or a specific kind of work. Lots of it is parody, lots of it is critical and transformative, and most of it (still) isn’t for sale. I’d probably be fine to publish parts of a Buffy fic I wrote as a work of gender criticism—it’s pretty explicit(ly critical). Reusing portions of my own scholarly work without very explicit citation, on the other hand, would constitute fraud. Yet fiction writers rework their own short stories into novels and there’s no problem at all. Citation is everything—but in terms of the creative process, how does citation change anything?

  And what if a work is illegal? I can tell you: nothing in literary history suggests we can reliably discount a work’s cultural or literary value on the basis of its legal status. Quite the opposite. Works that break laws or otherwise offend the ethics and morals of their day often end up having tremendous literary, cultural, intellectual, and political significance. On the other hand, being illegal and ethically horrifying hardly guarantees value or significance. There’s plenty of cheesy, dodgy rip-offs. There’s no easy line we can draw. We seem as a species to operate under some kind of imperative to categorize, but there’s no categorical imperative—a judgment that would always be right in all circumstances—about any kind of writing from sources.

  And as Amber Benson will explain, even the lines we used to be able to draw are only getting blurrier. Fanfiction and its media have already changed the way people are writing, reading, finding, and thinking about stories. It won’t change back. Fanfiction will be coming to the party and probably saying all kinds of awkward things polite company would leave unsaid.

  You can imagine the Christmas dinners.

  And if you can’t, it’s probably time to start trying.

  Darren Wershler is an experimental poet, essayist, and cultural critic. Best known for The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, he is also Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature at Concordia University. 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 fanfiction 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 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 example 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, captions, and all—reset in nine-point type, reproduced line by line, and bound as a massive paperback book, with Goldsmith listed as the author.147 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 “trajectories”: 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 pleasing toward the conveyance of that odd modern invention we call information; 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.148 Conceptual writing follows 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, Usenet 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 modern invention we call “information,” we have to pretend that they have no rhetorical value of their own that might taint it.149 By repackaging great swaths of information in media and formats other than the ones in 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.