Creative writing, like other forms of art, provides a sort of irreplaceable pleasure to those who practice it. It is hard to compare the exhilaration one feels at the completion of a good story to other momentary pleasures. Yet, for all its benefits, writing is viewed by many with a trepidation that often seems out of place with an activity as simple as writing a story. The reality of the situation is that every good story has hundreds of hours worth of effort behind it even though creativity comes easily to humans. Creating a story is hard, but people keep telling stories and writing them because stories, which literature is composed of, is a mirror of human history, but in terms of our emotional reactions to the events that occur around us.
Fanfiction And Technology: A Directly Proportional Relationship
Technology has made story writing much easier than ever before. One of the genres of creative writing that has boomed with technology is fanfiction. Before smartphones and unlimited internet, fanfiction was an obscure genre, constrained to remain within a close circle of fans, or in the occasional case gain fame. Either way, the canon established by the writer was central to any narrative created about the story. With technology, the reach of fanfiction increased on an unprecedented level. The status quo between writer and reader as producer and consumer changed drastically. Today readers are producers along with writers. Scholars like Clay Shirky refer to such reader-creators as 'prosumers'. Fanfiction today is an essential part of the franchises produced around a story.
How Popular Can Fanfiction Be?
Fanfiction is so popular today that some of the last decade's best sellers began as fanfiction. The ubiquitous example is Fifty Shades, a novel that began as a Twilight fanfiction. However, many other popular books including City Of Bones and Gabriel's Inferno have their beginnings in fanfiction. What makes fanfiction so delectable? People see in fanfiction what they wished would happen in canon. Favorite dead characters are miraculously brought back, love interests that went astray are united, a different character pov is applied and story arcs are mended to bring in more depth to one dimensional characters. It would not be a stretch to say that sometimes fanfiction does a better job at resolving the plotline and providing a more coherent conclusion than the canonical conclusion.
Fanfics: Guilty Pleasure Or No?
Despite the huge popularity of fanfiction, many regard it to be a guilty pleasure. Perhaps this is due to the lack of exclusivity on fanfiction platforms. Wattpad, Archive Of Our Own and Fanfiction.net are among the most popular platforms for fanfiction on the internet. Anybody who can string words together can use these platforms to express their creativity and push their peculiar narrative. This has led to a lot of non-serious content on such platforms. A majority of such stories suffer from the lack of a proper plot, inconsistent characterization and obsession with one particular character. There is also the concern that fanfiction indulges overly passionate themes like erotica and excessive violence. Another problem with fanfiction is its unreliability. There are fanfictions that engross its readers with plots better than canonical versions, that promise a more satisfying conclusion to a disappointing story, which eventually end abruptly without any explanation. As fanfictions involve thankless, unpaid work, writers may not feel obliged to complete a story.
Fanfiction And Originality: The Million Dollar Question
One of the biggest problems associated with fanfiction is the question of originality. Since all fanfiction is derived from a mainstream text, much cannot be said about its authenticity. Many regard this to be the primary reason to dismiss fanfiction as a genre. They do not realize that disregarding fanfiction would lead to the dismissal of well written books that may not get through the publishing world. As for originality, almost all fiction is derived from pre-existing works to various degrees. Take Shakespeare, one of the bastions of English literature, for example. It is a known fact that most, if not all, of Shakespeare's celebrated plays are composed of characters and events taken from historical records and other classical texts. What made Shakespeare so unique was his style of retelling and the manner in which he made existing stories so palatable to large crowds. Today's fanfiction writers endeavor to achieve the same, to tell a story in a way that makes it unique and satisfactory. Truly it is a stretch to compare fanfiction as a whole to some of literature's classics, but its role in the modern world cannot be disregarded.
A New Way Of Reading (And Writing)
While fanfiction might be disparaged for several reasons including the ones above, it is undeniable that fanfiction adds value to a story by proliferating narratives about it. Literature, as explained above, is a record of humanity's feelings. Today fanfiction is an integral part of how people perceive fiction. Most popular stories have fandoms within which different narratives are created. Perhaps in the future literary studies might acknowledge the sheer influence of fanfiction and may even count it as literature. Fanfiction is indeed a repository of human emotion. It is more than that too, as fanfictions allow people to do much more than just feel. Fanfiction is dynamic, it involves actions as well as thoughts. It always invites the audience to actively engage with the content, and the story becomes a focal point for the author and readers to interact. This is a new, in fact, revolutionary way of reading books that must be encouraged.
Setting Standards
The next question that arises is, what sort of fanfiction must be encouraged? As mentioned earlier, most platforms online lack something that writers desire and readers look for- exclusivity. Exclusivity allows readers to make easy choices. The commitment required to read fiction comes easily to most readers, and the outcome of a book greatly affects them. Ideally, it can be compared to metal work, wherein reading provides the heat to make the mind malleable and the content eventually shapes it into something sharper. Since it is an activity that influences a person's mind this much, it must not be taken lightly. All readers must have a set standard to measure fiction against. An example of a standard people can adhere to is Matthew Arnold's 'touchstone' method. However, it need not be as critically specific or complicated. Some readers might prioritize writing style over story, and vice versa, so standards must be adjusted accordingly. Once a standard has been set, all fanfiction must be measured against it.
Fanfiction: An Ocean Of Possibility
Fanfiction is a great exercise of the mind. One can use fanfiction to build up their writing skills before moving on to something original. It also helps writers to gather an audience for their works. Sites like Wattpad even offer monetary benefits for consistent writers. As for writers whose works spawn fanfiction, they should be glad for the inspired creativity of their fans as long as the latter remains respectful and gives credit where it is due. For readers, fanfiction allows them to enjoy more of their favorite stories. It helps them compare perspectives, explore new possibilities and experiment in the mind palace of the fiction they have just read or seen. Thus, it reinforces a work with a different perspective in the minds of readers. This is reason enough for people to accept fanfiction is a valid genre.