Authorizing authorship: Fan writers and resistance to public reading

Portrait of Deborah Delano reading by James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1858). Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1962-287.

Authorizing Authorship:

Fan fiction, popularly known as fanfic, has been increasingly thrust into the spotlight of mainstream publishing culture. With the rise of the Internet, both access to and the production of fan fiction have exploded, and what was previously a private activity has been normalized and even co-opted into six-figure book deals with major publishing houses. Historically, communities of fan writers and readers have not depended on outside authorization; they resist such attempts, preferring to authorize themselves.

This tradition has often created conflicts between fan writers and outside interests, both in academia and in the broader realm of ‘official’ publishers, content creators and other disseminators. Further, fan writing is unusual in that it is presented in both the private and public spheres: In most cases it is available to all readers at the click of a search engine, but fan authors operate in communities that are often literally, if not figuratively, locked to outsiders.

Historians of book and textual history have largely ignored fan writing as an area of literary critique and history. This intellectual lacuna exists primarily because of the dual problems of genre and gender; much of what we will consider as fan writing and fan fiction in this essay originates from science fiction and fantasy media properties from the 1960s onwards, and much of it is written by women, especially young women. Early studies of fan writing centred on ethnographic approaches that were deeply ahistorical and more concerned

with the fans themselves as objects of study rather than with fan writing as a point of interest on its own. Concurrently, recent revisionist histories of women’s writing have looked at the various methods by which women have either participated in or circumvented traditional modes of publication, whether through manuscript publication, literary translations, or setting up their own private presses. What we hope to show here is how the body of fan writing has evolved over time, how those writers have disseminated their works, and what this means within the broader context of literary history and authorship theory.

Authorship theory as a body of work has evolved to reconsider hierarchical relationships among texts, but so far it has avoided examining fan writing too closely.

This avoidance increasingly appears to be an issue of literary judgement and dismissal (even of literary prejudice) rather than a lack of awareness of fan writing as a medium or a significant body of work.

Indeed, mainstream acknowledgement of fan fiction has increased in recent years to the extent that we must begin to examine its significance both as a form and as a phenomenon. As such, we hope to shed some additional light on fan writing from the perspective of bibliographical studies.

Fan authorship in theory and practice It is important to note that the fan writer cannot be categorized into a monolithic model. Exact demographic information on

Fan Writers and Resistance to Public Reading

Cait Coker is a former librarian, returning grad student, and currently an Associate Editor for Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction. Her research focuses on the history of women in publishing.

Candace R. Benefiel is an Associate Professor, Humanities Reference Librarian and English Subject Specialist at Texas A&M University Libraries. Her primary research interests are the vampire in literature and fan studies.

Cait Coker & Candace H. Benefiel

fan authorship is difficult to determine, as many write behind the curtain of anonymity afforded by the Internet where the use of (in some cases multiple) screen names obscure identities, and self-created personae may further confuse the issue. It is commonly accepted that the majority of fan fiction writers are women, but unlike the unkind popular notion of the fan fiction writer as a starstruck teenaged girl, fan writers range from young teenagers to middle-aged and older writers, who also gravitate to fan writing from their interest in a particular text.

The history of fans and fan writing itself is equally complex, but varies widely by source. Genre histories such as Sam Moskowitz’s The Immortal Storm (1959) or Harry Warner Jr.’s All Our Yesterdays (1969) and A Wealth of Fable (1976-7) are primarily concerned with documenting individuals and communities, while Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms (2009) is primarily concerned with the act of recovering women writers in science fiction. In each of these cases the very terminology of ‘fan writer’ implies a member of the extended community of science fiction and fantasy aficionados, but not necessarily someone who writes fan fiction in the sense of transformative or derivative works. Indeed, the very term ‘fan fiction’ has undergone a profound shift in usage. As catalogued by the Oxford English Dictionary, the early meaning of the term as cited by the 1944 Fancyclopedia implies

‘ordinary fantasy published in a fan magazine’, whereas by 1975 Jacqueline Lichtenberg and others use the word to describe amateur Star Trek stories and similar material in the anthology Star Trek Lives!

As mentioned earlier, academic works discussing the writing of fan fiction, such as Camille Bacon-Smith’s Enterprising Women (1992) or Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992), speak about such things as the divide between media and science fiction fandom, rather than forms of literary endeavour. Media fans, Bacon-Smith observes, ‘write to comment upon or add to the canon of materials they already know’, and not with the intention of selling their productions for profit.

She stresses, in fact, that fan writers of this type are strongly aware that the copyright to the characters and worlds they use lies with others, and that profiting from their work is not to be expected. Similarly, Jenkins theorizes that media fans have appropriated popular texts for their own usage, and in

so doing, have become active consumers.

Rather than passively receiving texts from an exalted class of creators, the fans use such productions as a launching point to explore their own concerns and desires.

While much of the early research on fan writing dwelt on the characteristics and motivations of the writers, eventually scholars began to focus on this vast and ever-expanding body of amateur writing as literary production, recognizing that the mere existence of such a widespread phenomenon meant that it should be given academic credibility. By the early 2000s, the focus had shifted from the study of authors of fan fiction to the study of the writings themselves. In The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (2005), Sheenagh Pugh expands upon Bacon-Smith’s work to discuss fan fiction as a means of commenting extensively on media and literary texts, frequently with the aim of subverting the reinforcement of gender norms found in most mass-distributed works, and also of simply adding new material to the existing canon.

Abigail Derecho also took up this point of analysis through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, reconfiguring fan texts within intertextual relationships, calling the genre ‘archontic’

because the word ‘is not laden with references to property rights or judgments about the relative merits of the antecedent and descendant works […] Archontic texts are not delimited properties with definite borders that can be transgressed’.

While many professional (and corporate) authors might disagree with this statement, it is nonetheless clear that the body of fan fiction and the number of fan authors are ever-expanding and ever-present.

Between public and private spheres Fan writings occupy a liminal space in terms of both textual production and access. Early (and later) zine culture, from the 1930s onwards, was very much a private press enterprise. All publications had a limited run of issues, some of only a dozen or so, while even the most popular zines had low runs in only the hundreds. Zines were, and are, generally unobtainable from standard retailers, and rarely found even among specialty dealers. As such, one very much had to be a member of the fan community to obtain access, either through a mailing list or through a seller at a convention or

‘con’. By no means was fan writing generally

accessible until the advent of the Internet.

Further, print production of fan writing consisted of a great deal of physical labour that is generally not considered when looking at fannish production. At this point in time, all too often books are not seen: Readers usually do not consider the sourcing of paper, bindings, ink, and other production materials because they are so distanced from it. Looking at physical materials means a great deal in considering how they came to be. Fan work in print required significant labour and expense, despite it being what we might consider an amateur enterprise.

Contemporary fanzine publishing is even more expensive because of declining mechanisms of production (amateur print publishing having higher production costs than digital), and a reason for much of fandom’s online migration. As Joan Marie Verba articulates in her history of Star Trek fanzines, ‘a growing number of fans have never read a paper fanzine, and express no desire to, prefer-

ring the instant access and instant feedback of online publishing’.

This instant a c c e s s a n d feedback is, for many, one of the great attractions of fan writing.

Many fan writers publish serially online, with daily or weekly updates

that readers can subscribe to through a variety of platforms. This instant text is often raw and uncorrected, with typos and misspellings that do not detract from the pleasures of consumption. The shift from print to digital media creates an alternative of textual production and consumption that is not just theoretical, but very real, at least to those who inhabit it. As Michel de Certeau states, ‘space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function’.

We might ‘read’ space as we read a page (be it handwritten, printed, or digital): Constructions of people and equipment as analogues to words and images that present not just the text but also the paratexts, gesturing at the story of material creation and reading. Or, as Lisa Maruca puts it, ‘production values’ that are:

The social standards or community agreements as to what is worthy of notice and is best to uphold, and likewise what must be repressed in order to maintain these standards – that are promulgated both through the act of textual production and about textual production.

Maruca’s words also hint at the possibilities of ‘negative space’, that territory in which readers often have to ‘read between the lines’

to understand both literary and historical evidence. While considering women’s history in publishing – whether as writers, typesetters, binders, or other labourers – these problems of invisibility stand out.

Invisibility becomes a point of erasure: What is not seen becomes non-existent. A major point of departure in fan publishing in recent years is the migration from print fanzines to online archives, with a seemingly age and gender-based segre- gation taking place in access points.

Current science fiction zines, in print and online, tend to be created by men for male audiences, while female fans adopt closed online communities that replicate a form of private space. This shift is perhaps best encompassed through a frustrated screed by Gavia Baker-Whitlaw at The Daily Dot regarding the 2014 WorldCon meeting:

[D]uring discussions about how to attract a new generation to the convention, I’d hear people talking about how the Internet is isolating and incomprehensible – or how it lacked the personal touch of fanzine mailing lists. One audience member asked what had happened to slash fanfic. Why didn’t he see it in fanzines any more? What made it die out?

Apparently he was unaware of the vast quantity of slashfic constantly being posted online, including older fandoms like Star Trek, which long ago made the jump from print to Internet.

This discussion taps into a variety of assumptions about both fan readers and writers, not just in material, but also in the

“ A major point of departure in fan publishing in recent years is the migration from print

fanzines to online archives,

with a seemingly age and

gender-based segregation

taking place in access points”

public/private dichotomy. If print is public, as we have always assumed it to be, then is the digital pro forma private? Surely not.

And yet, the ‘FicGate’ controversy exposed how assumed invisibility is changing and problematized: An undergraduate seminar at UC-Berkeley upset numerous fan authors by directing students to read and comment on their stories online – without their permission or knowledge, until suddenly authors were getting hundreds of comments that many found insulting or just upsetting. Baker- Whitelaw summed up the incident by saying,

As is often the case in this kind of conflict, the basic problem was a misunderstanding of the difference – and overlap – between private and public Internet spheres. While most fanfic is published on easily accessi- ble platforms, it’s often posted with the tacit understanding that it will only be read by its target audience – and for the most part, it is. Fanfic authors are definitely not expecting their writing to be scrutinized by people who aren’t familiar with the source material or with fandom in general.

The resulting conversations and debates drew participants ranging from Archive of Our Own (AO3) staffers to acafans. Most interestingly for our purposes here, scholar Anne Jamison commented that ‘I advocate private communities, locked accounts, mailing lists and paper zines for people who value privacy but want to share. It’s not just other fans reading here. Maybe it once was, but it just isn’t true now’.

The notion of print zines and print

culture as being the locked, private form of communication of a privileged few, represents a fasci- nating shift. What we must therefore take away from this discussion is not just the assumption

of authorship, but also the assumption of authorial control of content, format, and readership.

Resisting readings, resisting authors In an almost paradoxical sense, fan writers want to be read, and read only by people of their choosing. While for most writers the idea of a wider readership (provided those

readers are equally informed) is intoxicating, the drawbacks to such public readings can be intimidating. Fan communities often tend to be fulsome in their praise, and sparing of harsh criticism. Most constructive criticism (called ‘concrit’) takes place via private message, and not for all the world to see. Readers who can find nothing nice to say about a story tend to follow the old adage, and say nothing at all, while possibly making a note not to sample future stories from that particular author. Another aspect that makes fan writing appealing is that format, length, and content are entirely unregulated. Fan fiction typically ranges from 100-word drabbles to massive novels, and from G-rated content to very adult themes.

While some archival sites have content guidelines, and most require a rating, usually based on the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rating scale of General (G), Parental Guidance (PG), and Restricted Audiences (R), there are always places to share even the most extreme content. The idea of a restriction by length or a sharply enforced content rule is therefore foreign to the fan fiction mindset. It is difficult to be transgressive when perceived authorities police boundaries. Such attempts have been made, with less than striking success.

A case in point, Kindle Worlds, announced by Amazon in May 2013, offered a new online platform for fan fiction writers to sell their stories.

They could host them on the Kindle service, and in return would receive 35% of the sales for novels and 20%

for short stories. However, fan authors were restricted to specific media properties, and within those properties, further boundaries applied. For example, stories set in the world of Veronica Mars are required to fall within the timeline of the original series, which covered, in more or less real time, 2005-2007, and depicted Veroni- ca’s last two years of high school and her first year of college. Speculation regarding the characters following the time of the series, including Veronica’s once-planned internship with the FBI and subsequent career, is not allowed. Other strictures applied to all Kindle Worlds stories relate to adult material, copyright-infringing content, and crossovers from other franchises. The concept was supposed to provide a legal, licensed outlet for fan-created stories, but

“ The very nature of fan fiction,

which transforms original

texts into something new and

different, is self-authorizing.”

the many limitations on it meant that most readers were happy to continue searching the Internet for stories that operated outside such confines, and were furthermore avail- able at no cost.

A recent search of the Kindle Worlds site reveals links to approximately fifty licensed franchises. The current top franchise is The Vampire Diaries, which has just shy of 200 available works. In striking contrast, one of the major fan fiction archive sites, FanFiction.

net, hosts over 36,000 fanworks based on The Vampire Diaries. A further set of over 6,000 stories related to The Vampire Diaries can be found on AO3. This begs the question of why any fan looking for stories about their favourite text would bother with the paltry offerings of Kindle Worlds. Fan writers have also largely eschewed Kindle Worlds because of the lack of a strong supporting community which many had developed on fan sites or fan fiction archives, and the general feeling that the purpose of writing fan fiction was not to make money, but to share their love for a text with others of similar mind. In fact, following the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey, perhaps the most famous published fan work, some Twilight fans decried the motivations of the author, and questioned her devotion to the Twilight franchise, which she had ‘betrayed’ by turning what had been assumed to be a labour of love into a profitable commodity.

Furthermore, in the eyes of fan writers, Kindle Worlds was a disempowering exercise: It imposed on fan fiction a burden of received authorization that is absent on the larger Internet. Although it is customary to begin works with a standard disclaimer that acknowledges that the ownership of the original text does not lie with the fan writer, and that no infringement is intended, this is largely a formality. The very nature of fan fiction, which transforms original texts into something new and different, is self- authorizing. Fans do not seek permission, which they assume would be denied in most cases, before writing their stories; they write and post for other fans to see, regardless of whether anyone in power says they can.

At the same time, there are authors who are publicly opposed to the production of fan fiction, and while this opinion has been used to restrict fiction from some fandoms on the general archival sites, it does not in any way mean that such content does not exist, nor that it is not discoverable with a simple Google search. The fanlore.org wiki includes a page on ‘Professional Author Fanfic

Policies’, which contains lists of authors who support fanfic about their work and those who oppose it, with notations explaining their stances.

Interestingly, the list of supportive authors is now much longer than the list of the opposing authors, and many of those opposed to fan fiction appear to be basing their opposition on outdated ideas of the legal status of transformative works.

Another aspect of this opposition seems to be rooted in a fear that somehow their revenue streams will be disrupted, or that unauthorized writers will make money from created worlds and characters not their own.

In most cases, however, this is a misplaced fear. Very few fanworks have produced a monetary benefit for their authors, and those few have generally ‘filed off the serial numbers’ (per early online slang) that identify them as derivative or transformative works.

Even Fifty Shades of Grey is not instantly recognizable as deriving from Twilight, and at the height of its notoriety, many people who were reading the trilogy had no inkling about its origins as online fan fiction. And while there have been other published fan fiction works since, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of fan works online will never be offered for sale. They were not produced for monetary gain, and their authors are content to have it so. In fact, some professional authors have taken the stance that fan fiction actually serves as good advertising for their works. It is not uncommon for fan fiction readers to seek out a new media property, whether published or screened, after discovering a text via the works of fans. While it is impossible to see into the heart of every fan writer, from observation it is clear that the overwhelming majority write because they want to extend the lives and adventures of the characters and worlds they love, and they want to share this with others who appreciate both the source narrative, and the fan-constructed additions to it. They write not for the general (and perhaps uninformed) public, or for some imagined profit, but for their peer communities.

The death of the author has been greatly exaggerated

As we hope to have demonstrated, the concept of ‘authorship’ has never been so powerful, nor so complex. Questions that began decades ago as rhetorical and theoretical exercises – What is an author?

What does authorship mean? Is the author

dead? – now seem both deeply prescient

and deeply relevant. Recent landmark court cases and trade agreements are closely read not just with an eye towards copyright dealings in general, but with fan works in mind. Fan writing is regularly discussed in mainstream media and taken seriously by the academy. It would seem, then, that not just the author, but all authors, are alive and well. The point of contention therefore is authorial control, and as a wealth of theoretical and critical scholarship has aptly demonstrated, such control is often imaginary at best. ‘Authorizing the author’

occurs from within, not without, and not just in fan writing.

Fan authorship is not a topic of debate so much as the contemporary locus of ever- shifting power roles in publishing. Decades ago, fan authors primarily existed within small, distinct, and in some ways underground communities with specific ties to low-cost amateur publishing methods. Today, fan authors are omnipresent on the Internet and even in print bookshops, amongst other places – including mainstream media. This increasingly public recognition signals not only a shift in the professionalization of the writer and the easy dissemination of texts, but imposes a new model on our harried old structures of textual production. Robert Darnton’s classic ‘Communication Circuit’,

meant to impose order on historical practices of print book production and distribution, including the operations of supply and demand, was never meant to grapple with either the modern small press world or digital publication. By reconsidering fan authorship and publication models in the mode of ‘new’ book history, we can disrupt the classic readings of both textual theory and textual histories. In short, looking at new texts and new authors allows us to open new chapters in the history of the book, ones that have been in little circulation until now and which promise to be of great interest – and import – in the future.

Acafans – Academics who self-identify as fans. The term was first used in the 1980s by the first wave of Fan Studies academics such as Patricia Lamb and Joanna Russ, and the term was popularized by Matt Hills.

Archive Of Our Own (AO3) – A massive online archives of fan works, supported by the Organization for Transformative Works.

Fan Fiction / ‘fanfic’ – A transformative work of fiction deriving from another work, often but not always based in popular media. While the earliest uses of the term denoted original fiction by genre authors, today’s usage dates from the 1970s and implies an unpublished, not-for-profit work disseminated online.

Fandom – A community of fans who interact in some way, publicly or privately.

Slash Fiction – A subgenre of fan fiction popular since the 1970s, featuring a (usually) queer romance between characters who are not romantically involved in the source text.

Perhaps the most famous slash pairing is K/S, or Kirk/Spock.

Zine culture – Derived from ‘magazine’, a zine is a periodical, often fannish and almost always a nonprofit effort. Zine culture describes a production model that involves unpaid labour and low-cost materials;

zines could be purchased for the cost of production and postage (when necessary) or exchanged at cons.

Fan fiction terms

Notes.

1 ‘fan, n.2.’ OED Online. September 2004. Web. 29 December 2015.

2 Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth.

Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Print. 45.

3 Pugh, Sheenagh. The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context. Bridgend: Seren, 2005. Print.

4 Derecho, Abigail. ‘Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction’. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Print. 64.

5 Verba, Joan Marie. Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967-1987. 2nd ed. Minnetonka, MN:

FTL Publications, 2003. Print. 79.

6 de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print. 93.

7 Maruca, Lisa. The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660-1760. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Print. 7.

8 Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia. ‘How the Growing Generation Gap is Changing the Face of Fandom’. The Daily Dot. 25 August 2014. Web. 5 April 2016.

9 Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia. ‘What Not To Do When Teaching Class About Fanfiction’. The Daily Dot. 25 February 2015. Web. 5 April 2016.

10 Jamison, Anne. ‘Comment on Delilah’. Archive of Our Own. 23 February 2015. Web. 5 April 2016.

11 Pepitone, Julianne. ‘Amazon’s ‘Kindle Worlds’ lets fan fiction writers sell their stories’. CNN Money. 23 May 2013. Web. 29 December 2015.

12 Fanlore.org. ‘Professional Author Fanfic Policies’. Fanlore.org. 7 December 2015. Web. 29 December 2015.

13 Darnton, Robert. ‘What is the History of Books?’. Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 63-85. Reprinted in The Book History Reader. Eds. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. 9-26.