General Resources for Fan Fiction

Graphic: Fan fiction in the Making,
by Kalexanderson via Flickr

A community member at Meryton.com's A Happy Assembly asked about general resources for fan fiction writers. By general they meant fandom agnostic — resources of use to writers of any fan community.

This is a pretty big topic; what makes it so large is the number of possible fandoms, and the highly individual nature of each fandom. A writer driven to create fan fiction must be motivated enough to seek out content related to the focus of their personal fanaticism, as well as other fellow fans. There's not much one can do to supplement this drive apart from telling them to use a search engine.

However, there are some pretty obvious places to look for other fan fiction authors and their content — the major fandom-agnostic fan fiction platforms:

• FanFiction.Net — The mac daddy of fan fiction sites, in terms of both size and age
• ArchiveOfOurOwn.org (AO3) — The fan fiction site of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), differentiated by its status as a nonprofit dedicated to supporting all fan fiction work; OTW also publishes regular fandom-agnostic fannews posts related to the topic of fan fiction.
• Wattpad — A site dedicated to self-published fiction online, including both original and fan fiction
• Amazon Kindle Worlds — A highly-focused commercialized platform for specific fandoms through which some works can be published for profit
• FictionPad — A relatively new site still in beta

I have personal concerns about the last platform, about which I wrote a post a few months ago; the same post also includes an overview of the major sites listed above. Keep in mind that functionality and business models of any of these sites might change at any time with little advance notice.

To learn more about fan fiction as a genre, see

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, by Prof. Anne Jamison (follow her on Twitter: @prof_anne)

Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (this book is pre-Twilight/end of Harry Potter movie releases; fandom information may have changed substantially with age)

To learn the craft of writing fan fiction, see

How to Write Fan Fiction that People Want to Read, by Daphne Dangerlove and the related site, http://howtowritefanfiction.com/ (also on Twitter: @how2writefanfic)

There are other books about fan fiction, and how to write it; the above are among the best known and most recent.

And of course, new fan fiction readers and writers alike will want to acquaint themselves with appropriate terms like canon, fanon, AU, so on. The Wikipedia page on fan fiction is actually a decent place to start. It's also critically important that new and experienced fan fiction authors inform themselves about the legal issues surrounding fan fiction (see also OTW's website, linked above).

Finally at Home: My Flash Fiction Collection

I've been dabbling in flash fiction at several sites over the last few months. They provide a brief change of pace from the big multi-chapter works of original fiction I've writing for months.

The restrictions vary by site, but are generally:

1) write to a specified prompt;
2) employ a theme if specified;
3) compose within word count limits generally of 100 to 300 words; and
4) submit by the deadline.

My biggest personal challenge is writing to prompts. Some prompts simply do not move me to write. Other times the prompt is so juicy I have difficulty shutting down the muse. After years of writing to mandatory prompts — write this nonfiction report to satisfy this business requirement — I'm frustrated by the whimsical nature of my fiction muse. As with so many things in life, practice helps; I'm getting better at this.

I hope in the big picture it helps me write better larger works of fiction.

I'm republishing some of the flash fiction I've written under my Fiction page (link in navigation bar at right); it's all tagged as flash fiction to ease the search.

Finally, all my little works are coming home. There's a handful of pieces left in the archives that I'll post over the next week. As I write and submit new ones, I'll cross-post them here.

Do you write or read flash fiction? What do you think of it in comparison to longer formats?

[Shout out here to NANO Fiction, a lovely journal advocating and promoting flash fiction. Follow them at http://twitter.com/NANOFiction]

The inevitable question: Why hang out here?

Any time now somebody is going to ask me the question.

Why the hell are you here in fan fiction?

Or a variant on the question, delivered with a smirk and/or a snort:

Why the hell are you here in Twilight fan fiction, of all places?

Yeah, I know. They won't ask me to my face why an intelligent woman of my age, education, background, and status is hanging out in what looks like a pop cult centered on unrequited teen desires.

But I'll answer their questions, both the open ones and the unspoken ones.

First, fan fiction is a great way to take a plunge into creative writing. One can take short cuts on character development and concentrate on construction of a story arc, development of themes, tone and language usage while extending pre-developed characters. (It's a win-win for published authors whose characters are used as springboards since fan fiction sustains interest in their works.)

For someone like me whose body of writing has been nonfiction for more than eight years, this is a real treat -- a cheat of sorts to help me get the bugs worked out of writing fiction before I concentrate on an actual non-fan fiction novel.

Secondly, fan fiction as a whole is very, VERY open and diverse, extremely liberal. For example, authors and readers alike are willing to explore a spectrum of expression in human sexuality and through a virtually unlimited range of scenarios. Topics from poverty to infertility to global politics are plumbed by authors whose backgrounds are as varied and in many cases highly knowledgeable about the topics they use in their work. This openness is a strong fit with my personal values; it feels like home. I don't have to compromise while exploring creative writing.

Thirdly, with specific regard to Twilight fan fiction -- there is an enormous concentration of creative feminine energy. It boggles the mind how many well-read and creative women offer up their hobby writing for free. There aren't many places where women can congregate in these numbers and work so freely in tandem or collaboratively on creative projects.

Fourthly, the Twilight fan fiction community is extremely supportive in a way that the next largest fan fiction community is not. It's not absolutely clear that this is a result of the overwhelmingly female percentage of participants, but it's hard not to think that this is a factor when the most active proponents of other women's work are women themselves. They've developed networks and social media tools to flack their fiction works, and in some cases the promotional efforts have led directly to print publishing for profit.

Lastly, fan fiction is a really tremendous place to learn not only about writing but getting one's works published. The social networks entwined around fan fiction are linked to book agents, published authors and publishers, so many of whom are willing to share information about getting published.

So that's it, in a nutshell, the reasons why I allow myself to pigeonholed with those folks. Yeah, we know outsiders look askance at us and point fingers, snigger and refer to us as if we have a third eye in our foreheads. But they don't get it and likely won't; when they cough up money for a published work written by someone who once dabbled in fan fiction, maybe they will clue in.

Brewing: the sisters are doing it for themselves

I'm still meditating and cogitating over a thesis regarding a quiet revolution in women's emergence. I still can't quite wrap myself around what I want to say and quite possibly have now gathered too much research to make a coherent point.

That said, my thesis' summary could boil down to this:

The sisters are doing it for themselves.

Women are no longer waiting for some prince, either as an individual or as a collective or as some other entity, to address their needs. They are taking matters into their own hands.

No enough romance in your life? Sister, write your own and share it with others.

No enough hot sex in your life? Sister, write about your deepest desires no matter how kinky and share it because you know you are not alone in wanting this. Sex with the men or women who aren't ordinarily in your reach, sex with strangers, sex with multiple partners -- have it all, and safely here in the world of fiction.

Finally, is the man in your life an uncooperative ass? Sister, write about a figurative paper doll of a man you can bend and twist into all the things you want -- and while you're at it, bend him over the couch so another gorgeous well-hung paper doll of a man gives it to him up the backside. Take that, asshole, figuratively speaking.

We are taking care of ourselves and building what we want and need for each other, here in the online world of self-published fiction.

Watch out when we take the next step and fully realize what it is we want.

Analysis: Fan fiction, declarations of love, happily ever afters and the ultimate zipless fuck

@einfach_mich asked Wednesday morning:

(For the morning crowd) Twitter Poll: Do you have to have declarations of love and HEA in your smut fic? Think hard about what you read.

A little translation here for readers who may find that tweet cryptic: HEA is "Happily Ever After," the happy ending one might find at the end of a work of fiction. "Fic" is short for "fiction" and in this particular case likely refers to fan fiction based on characters based substantively on another popular fictional work.

If I have to explain "smut," I suggest exiting this post.

As a relative newbie to the world of fan fiction, I've had my eyes opened by some of the writing published online. There's an overwhelming demand for fan fiction which is not only well-written, but includes a dose of content focused on sexuality. The most popular content bends and twists characters' emotions and responses to all manner of situations, including relationships of all depths and the sex generated in the course of these relationships. This has been a feature of online fan fiction since it began; the relative anonymity of authors allows writers to submit content that is far more diverse including depth of sexuality than fiction published in print.

Twilight fan fiction is relatively unique in the genre, in terms of interest and demand, and in terms of authors'/readers' gender. The numbers of works posted at FanFiction.net (FFn), the largest and oldest fan fiction publishing platform, under the Twilight saga show an interest level rivaling that of the Harry Potter saga. As of today, FFn shows total Twilight works published to date now number 186,943 while the Harry Potter category -- representing a franchise with more than twice the number of books, manifold number of characters and more than twice the number of released movies compared to the Twilight saga -- now contains 542,689 works published since 1999. That's a rough ratio of 35,000 Twilight fanfics per year to 45,000 Harry Potter fanfics per year.

And the last two movies of the Twilight franchise have yet to be released; one can only wonder at the growth potential for Twilight-based fanfics over the next two years.

According to content posted at FFn, Twilight fan fiction appears to be overwhelmingly female in terms of authors and readers; the Harry Potter constituency, in contrast, appears to be more evenly distributed between males and females. This is based on anecdotal evidence. The exact numbers are not readily available as FFn's site structure does not allow for much in the way of data mining. Other fan fiction publishing sites like Twilighted.net and ADifferentForest.com also appear to support the gender bias weighting toward females in Twilight fan fiction.

These numbers make the prevalence of M-rated mature content under the Twilight category at FFn rather exceptional among fan fiction communities. And yet the numbers confirm the observations made by Asst. Prof. Sharon Cumberland in her paper, Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture (MIT Communications Forum, 1999). Her thesis:

...the paradox of public access and private/anonymous identity has made it possible for women who have access to the internet to create permissive and transgressive spaces which have been, in the past, the traditional reserve of men's magazines and men's clubs.

Cumberland used fan fiction about the 1998 movie Zorro and the actor playing the lead role, Antonio Banderas, to explore this theory. She concluded,

...This pretty much sums up the slash and het genres, and acts as a metaphor for the phenomenon of women's erotica on fansites: high adventure, far-flung or historical settings, improbable sex, all within the safety of a non-judging, sympathetic, indeed, enthusiastic community. While the significance of this paradox of public access and private/anonymous identity will require much more analysis over time, it is clear that women who have access to the internet have created permissive and transgressive spaces which have been, in the past, the traditional reserve of men's magazines and men's clubs. Fan websites have, in effect, become women's clubs, where erotica can be safely explored without damage to the reputation, the career, or the domestic life. 

Which brings us to my first proposition: online smut written by women would be the ultimate in "zipless fucks." By "zipless fuck" I refer to the phrase coined by author Erica Jong in her 1973 work, Fear of Flying, referring to "a sexual encounter with an anonymous stranger that one will never meet again, and nobody one knows will ever know that it happened." (Wikipedia). In Jong's words,

The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game . The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.

While Jong's main character, Isadora Wing, appears to vacillate about her expectations from life and her desires, Wing really wants it all. She doesn't want to be denied any of the choices her male counterparts have -- alone/involved, risk-taking/secure, single/married -- when it comes to relationships or to sex. Some may say character Wing feels guilty about the concept of the "zipless fuck," but choosing one means excluding another choice, cutting off her options and leaving her exposed to a notional loss.

In 1973 it would have been very easy even as a feminist of the time to feel some guilt, some loss through the exercise of choice. Choice then was being newly and quite literally shaped by the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court that year, establishing abortion's legality in the U.S. Choosing a "zipless fuck" was easier than ever in terms of dealing with unwanted pregnancy, but exercising a woman's choice of a "zipless fuck" like choosing abortion at that time would mean going against the body of American culture.

During the twenty-five year span after Fear of Flying's publication and before the emergence of fan fiction, casual sex became even more casual during the remainder of the 1970s and early 1980s. The pendulum swung back and hard as herpes and then HIV/AIDS became prevalent, causing sexually active adults to change their sexual behavior with a greater preference for monogamy and increased condom use to reduce exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. The resurgence of conservatism during the late 1990s also increased the public's sensitivity to abortion while promoting a return to more traditional roles for women. A "zipless fuck" seemed less possible and probable at the turn of the millenium.

Now nearly forty years later, choosing a "zipless fuck" is different phenomenon. While women no longer feel the same kinds of societal pressures they felt in 1973 about random sexual encounters, they also have newer and different avenues to explore their sexuality in privacy previously denied them. This brings me to my second proposition: women can now choose a "zipless fuck" either as a writer or a reader in the form of fan fiction, and a safe, STD-free experience at that. No one will know that you had a little dash of slash (homosexual fan fiction)  this morning before you went to work, rode on the train or before bed, and there will be no repercussions in the form of unwanted pregnancy, clumsy contraception or STD tests. Nor will it interfere with your climb up the corporate or social ladder. Women can even order sex toys for masturbation online, delivered anonymously, to increase our enjoyment of this "zipless fuck" -- no obligations save for the credit card bill.

But this is ultimately about choice; that's the real question about the nature of smut. It's about having options, just as it was in 1973. Women no longer need a declaration of love, commitment and happily ever after to make smut enjoyable. Having the option of a completely uninhibited no-strings-attached sexual encounter or the happily ever after is the real point. It's important that women have the choice. With online fiction women co-create, women ensure that choice.