005. Excuse Me, What’s the Call Number for “Fanfiction”?

Watching David Gauntlett’s presentation (above) reminded me of my introduction to Clay Shirky back in January, and the idea of an “entertainment” paradigm shift … going from passive absorbers of television shows to active, hands-on creators and participators (even if it takes us a few decades to stop confusedly crawling around with our hands full of PlayDoh and actually put our creativity to use). The shift from soaking up entertainment to altering it, changing it, being involved with it … the whole shift reminds me of nothing so strongly as fanfiction.

Now according to the Wikipedia article I just posted, fanfiction is nothing too new, dating back to the days of Homer, the Knights of the Round Table, or the Ramayana. And the 1960’s apparently saw their fair share of Star Trek fanfiction, being produced, we might assume, by the milk-white bespectacled basement-dwellers that Don Draper and his cronies wouldn’t have looked at twice. Or, more accurately, by the mild-mannered secretaries typing out letters all day-long: even back in the repressed 60’s, the days of housewives and garter belts, a good 73-90% of fanfiction producers were — you guessed it — women. Personally, I find the idea of 1960’s ladies producing Star Trek fanfiction almost too adorable and poignant to bear. And already, perhaps, the germs of what makes fanfiction so potent are creeping into this blog-post, the advanced escapism and even empowerment offered by taking other lives into your own hands, by changing the course of what happens inside that glowing box in your living room.

Any writer, any artist, will share with you the strange, almost embarrassing, almost mystical process of creation. At its best, it really is one of the most powerful and exciting experiences an individual will ever know. Whether or not the finished product is “good” matters very little during the actual head-rush of creating. The problem is right after the product is finished (or the first draft, at least). In 1959 Marcel Duchamp said these fateful words in Texas, of all places: “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”  Although I’m sure there are exceptions to this, for most creative types, I’d argue that our work can’t exist successfully in a vacuum. Why capture it in a tangible form AT ALL if not to transmit it to other minds? This is a drawback to creating our own work: the difficulty and sheer luck of being published and, once published, becoming popular enough to draw a large audience … the act of creating original work is daunting, a pursuit for the brave and solitary and dogged.

This is where fanfiction comes in. Fanfiction draws on a preexisting audience, a collective excitement and understanding of the characters, a desire to see them re-interpreted and moving past the necessarily limited boundaries of their complicated production in the “real world” (i.e., the limits on lone authors, TV and movie production, etc.). Shirky and Gauntlett more or less cast television as the ultimate generator of passivity, and in some cases this may well be true. But in other cases — those women in the 1960’s plucking Spock and Kirk from the flat borders of their television screens and breathing life into them — television is only the barest beginning, the framework within which individual creativity can burgeon and thrive.

The internet  has obviously turned fanfiction from a cult oddity into an activity so widespread that even published authors still engage in it. I’m a member of a community that merges PostSecret anonymous confessions with the world of fandom, and every week there’s sure to be at least a few secrets from successful people, even authors, who admit to using fanfiction as a creative release they enjoy above any other form of creativity. Fanfiction is the “grey literature” of the entertainment industry and the fictional world … and the reactions from authors have ranged from positive and encouraging to downright dismissive or lawsuit-happy. I find the negative reactions slightly outdated; at least for now, fanfiction is not publishable or mass-produced, and doesn’t exactly earn money for the creators (it’s more a labor of love, although undoubtedly some “big name fans” have managed to turn their fanfiction into a lucrative calling). The authors still retain legal rights over their creations — it’s ludicrous to think that J.K. Rowling is suffering in any way from the mind-boggling mountain of Harry Potter fanfiction that exists on the web — but in the fluid grey free-for-all world of the internet, fanfiction runs rampant, proving that we are a creator culture when it comes to fictional narratives … proving, really, the sheer joy of breaking our favorite characters out of their untouchable boxes.