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I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me. To properly establish how long it’s been since my last blog post, I have to confess that I have in my drafts a rant about Game of Thrones and story payoff, and that even starts with “I know I’m late to the party in writing this, but…”
Twitter is currently blowing up over an author who had the audacity to tweet a long thread about how terrible fan fiction is, going so far as to say it’s somehow unethical capitalism (????) to produce and consume. This author has remained quiet on how, precisely, producing and consuming fan fiction for free on a nonprofit website is unethical capitalism but the publishing industry is okie dokie.
Artistic creation and consumption has always been frought with this core battle: highbrow vs lowbrow. In general, if a thing is popular, understood, and appreciated by the masses, it will inevitably be criticized by the social and intellectual elites. There exists this strange division that says in order for a thing to be truly good, it must remain out of reach. It must be difficult to understand, to obtain, to appreciate.
I don’t buy into that. When we create art, are we not attempting to communicate something to an audience? I personally couldn’t stomach finishing the Twilight series and 50 Shades was a nonstarter for me, but I cannot deny the fact that both series successfully touched their (super big) target audiences. Is there not artistic merit in creating something that successfully speaks to your audience? They communicated exactly what they wanted to communicate to exactly the people they hoped to reach.
Art is so fundamentally subjective that I’m not sure there can ever be a metric of a thing’s artistic merit beyond its ability to reach its audience.
This is a lot of words to say that there is nothing inherently inferior about fanfiction. eBooks have flooded the market with works that feature little to no copy editing, little to no oversight, turning the publishing industry itself into the same wild west of writing that fanfiction has almost always been. Of course some works will be objectively better than others, but that doesn’t mean self published eBooks have torpedoed the publishing industry and turned the entire thing into an anti-artistic cesspool. For that same reason, the existence of “bad” fanfiction, works generated by brand new, often very young writers who haven’t had the chance to polish their skills, does not mean that fanfiction itself is a well where bad writing goes to die. It doesn’t mean that experienced writers who cut their teeth on fanfiction are somehow inferior.
It begs the question: where, exactly, are aspiring authors supposed to go to hone their craft? Higher education is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Not every aspiring author has the time or the money to dedicate to a BFA/MFA program. Higher education is also subjective and colored by the biases of instructors and professors. Not every community has a local writers group, and those that do don’t necessarily have anything of value to add for the aspiring author. What would this author who so proudly proclaimed her hatred of all things fan fiction approve of for an aspiring author?
Fan fiction communities are outstanding for the people out there with a story to tell and nowhere to tell it. They’re great for learning to take and interpret feedback. They build confidence. The more you read and write, the better you get. For those who do harbor dreams of professional publication, I’m hard-pressed to think of a better place to hone writing skills than the world of fan fiction.
Now, God forbid someone want nothing more than to write fan fiction for fun.