FAN / FICTION (of Wattpad)

Be it FAN or FICTION?

So, it's Full Disclosure time. Here it is, my confession, for all the world to see:

I once turned my nose up at the idea of Fan Fiction.

I painted the expansive genre with broad strokes that I thought sufficient to cover it. I dismissed it as Slash Fiction or 'Shipping or PWP narratives, and I was convinced that I was above it. I was a Writer, someday to be a proper Author, and not some fanboy with a typewriter.

But, of course, not only was that pretentious and snobby of me, it was also categorically incorrect: particularly the bit where I tried to claim intellectual distance from Fan Fiction.

It is an absolute fact that the first thing I ever wrote was a work of Fan Fiction.

I had finished my first-ever J-RPG, The Secret of Mana, on the good 'ol SNES, but when the game ended, my love for it didn't. I was whatever-age-you-are-in-grade-6, and as far as I was concerned this Mana Thing still had legs. So I grabbed a pencil and a spiral-bound notebook, and I began to write page after cramped page, continuing the story in a slightly-altered, yet still loyal universe of my own creation. 

It was those 30-or-so pages that got me into writing, those 30-or-so pages that lead me to the Writer's Anonymous group at my school, where volunteer creative writing teachers scratched their heads and tried to understand why my story kept making all these biblical references to "mana."

I still have that notebook, in a large suitcase, crammed in with other mostly-filled notebooks and most everything else I've ever written. I also have another story, inspired by another game, which I am determined to finish writing one day--determined to see made into a game of its own.

These works of mine are clearly Fan Fiction, and their existence lends lie to my former draconian stance on Fan Fiction hardly being Proper Art. 

It was in standing before a wall of words at Wattpad HQ that the scales properly fell from my eyes. They were the words of many: each sentence from a different member of the Wattpad community. They were wedged in so tightly on that white wall, in their varying fonts, so as to be imposing--so as to be completely undeniable.

They were the voice of the crowd, or the cloud, or the global community: all expressing through Wattpad, all sharing their words with countless others.

It was before that wall that I realized that we are writing the future. It was there that I was able to assemble disparate thoughts that had been percolating for weeks and see them coalesce into a whole as unignorable as that wall:

All is Fan Fiction.

When writers self-identify as Fan Fiction artists, they are just being completely honest about something that authors in ivory towers try to keep under their hats: that every single word they write is Fan Fiction, too. They may not make use of established characters, or already-painted settings, or stock plots, but they are recycling and repurposing other stories and words and experiences, and they are using them to build their narratives.

They call these things "inspiration," but the difference is academic. To insert The Doctor into your narrative or to insert Your Friend Sarfaraz, it is the same thing. Both come with a set of mannerisms that you can draw on: an established personality that makes it easier to understand how that character will react when he encounters others. We brand one "FAN" and the other "FICTION".

But the divisions between FAN and FICTION are not so very robust as those writers in those ivory towers might hope you to believe.

All that anyone ever writes is Fan Fiction on some level: it is in some small way influenced by the books we've read and the films we've watched, and that conversation that we just had--whether we choose to cast those characters in it or not. When we take the stuff of our lives, pour it into the blender, mix it up, and paint it back on the walls with alternate versions of ourselves as titans, that is Fan Fiction.

Everything that we consume or experience is our inspiration; everything that we put to paper or pixel, drawn from those experiences, is our Fan Fiction. To write--anything--is to remix: to take from experience and to rework into story.

To write anything is to create a Fan Fiction of our daily lives. The words I write tonight, as I put my pen to paper, are in some way going to be part the words you gave me earlier, when you smiled at me over that meal. When we are not writing Capital-F Fan Fiction across the backs of established authors, we are scrawling it into the empty corners of our actual lives.

Just like I did, we all take our starts in Fan Fiction. We find the stories that move us so greatly that they shouldn't be allowed to end, and we continue them on. We take the wonderful words that our authors introduce us to, and we try them out in our own narratives. We experience things so wondrous that you couldn't have dreamt them in fiction, and we make sure that they live on in prose.

So hold Fan Fiction high in your esteem. They might be others' characters, or others' places, or others' ideas, but they are your words--honestly laid.

No one else will ever write them your way.