Attitudes Toward Fanfiction

Fans of fanfic have produced a lot of meta and discussion about outsiders' attitudes toward fanfic. Negative attitudes have appeared in all demographics: showrunners and TPTB, professional novelists, the media, academia, non-fannish friends and relatives, and other fans. Of course, condemnation is not universal, and in the age of social media and the breaking of the fourth wall, acceptance appears to be growing; more canon creators make supportive statements, media reporting on fanfic is more likely to be accurate and not derisive, and public libraries include fanfic writing in their teen activity programs.Examples: Teen Read Week Fanfiction Contest at the Harris County Public Library (Texas) in 2009, Fanfiction Fiesta for Teens at the New Albany-Floyd County Library (Indiana) in 2014. But even some of the positive outsider attitudes seem weird or off-base to fanfic fans.
==Fic Writing as a Hobby==
Although many fans consider fandom to be a way of life, it is essentially a hobby for those who haven't made a career of it. Like other fanac, the same holds true for fanfiction. Yet, nonfans often fail to understand this.
At a 2011 Muskrat Jamboree panel run by wneleh on mainstream media perceptions of fanfic, fans discussed this strange inability to identify fanfic as a hobby. Fan writers reported that they had been asked why don't they write real novels and make money? Why don't they use all that free time to cure cancer? etc. Yet, there are lots of other hobbies people don't make any money on and no one says they should be curing cancer instead. There was some speculation that this attitude tied in with American cultural norms (monetize everything).user:aethel's con report: Muskrat Jamboree: I took notes, posted to Dreamwidth 12 April 2011. See also Fandom and Profit.
On Tumblr in 2015 a fan reported,
In a 2016 interview, Speranza commented,
Proving that there is nothing new under the sun, in a 1983 letterzine, a Star Wars fan wrote:
A discussion followed in the next issue, with other fans weighing in:
See also FANDOM IS A LEGITIMATE HOBBY by juliusschmidt (2015)
==Fic Writing as Practice==
Fic writers who become published authors have said that writing fic in a fandom community helped enormously to improve their writing. Statements like these are also used as justifications for fic writing.
As far back as 1969, Nimoyan-Spock's Scribes founder Sam Cole was describing the club as providing training in the elements of art and writing for pre-teen and teenage members. The polished and highly influential Kraith series by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, based on Star Trek The Original Series, began as exercises for the Famous Writers School. Lichtenberg and others talk extensively about fanfiction as practice for the complexities of the writer's craft—plot, theme, characterization, etc. -- in the 1975 book Star Trek Lives!: "This is something like trying to learn to nod your head, clap your hands, do a hula, and tap dance, all in different rhythms at the same time."
A fan pushed back on another fan's comment that "It is obvious that Ms. Alexander has talent; but since she can't make any money writing Star Trek stories, wouldn't it make sense to put that talent to work for her?", and said: {{Quotation|
I think these writers find writing Star Trek fiction, or whatever kind of derivative fiction, good practice in putting one word after the other. Not every piece of fiction I write is going to be something I'll put in the mail to the professional editor. A writer should be able to write things just for themselves, or just for fun, or just for practice, and in fan fiction writers can write and publish things wherein they can deal with subjects that the professional markets have no interest in. from Tracey Alexander in a response to a letter of comment in Enterprise Incidents (US #7 }}
In the 1985 essay To a Mundane, Sharon Monroe wrote,
By 2005, this argument may have been too successful, creating an impression that "practice" was the main function of fic writing. cesperanza pushed back a little:
The attitude that fic writing is practice crops up in science fiction fandom and elsewhere. For example, at a Arisia panel in 2013, one member of the audience brought up the lack of fanfic programming, and it was suggested that existing writers' workshops at the con might fill the gap.user:aethel's personal recollection as of 8 August 2015. See also my 2013 dreamwidth post. Well-meaning suggestions like this from within fandom likely stem from a lack of awareness of fanfic as a community that includes readers, who gleefully devour the output of fic writers, comment on fic, discuss fic, and recommend fic, but may never write any of their own.
==Fic Writing and Visibility to Outsiders==
From a fan in 1979: 
==See also==
* Robert Smedley, Fan-Fiction: Worth A Writer's Time? In Fuel Your Writing, November 30, 2010.
* Emilie Medland-Marchen, Fanfiction: A Practice in the Art of Storytelling. The Artifice, August 12, 2015.
==Slash and Porn==
A reporting bias in media and academic treatment of fanfic has arguably led to some confusion; reports and analysis often focus exclusively on slash fanfic or porn because it's more shocking, more titillating, a better career-booster, or just more fun for the journalist or academic to write about than gen."... one of the reasons we tend to think of M/M content as 'dominating' fandom is that that is the practice that is often considered most DISTINCTIVE of (and therefore representative of) transformative fan communities, even if it is not the most common. Slash has often been treated as the most interesting/‘exotic’ aspect of transformative fan activity, by academics, by journalists, even by fans themselves. It’s not necessarily that fans do it more; that’s just what people tend to fixate on when talking about it because its seems novel and curious and ~weird~, in a way that people shipping Ross and Rachel simply does not." Fandom is NOT mostly slash The end result is that many non-fans have the impression that all fanfic is slash or all fanfic is porn (or all slash is porn). Thus, the pushback against fanfic in some quarters tends to resemble a moral panic over the perceived deviant content of fanfic.
Press examples:
* Going Boldly with Kirk and Spock (1994)
* Please Captain, Not in Front of the Klingons (1996)
* Luke Skywalker Is Gay? (2000)
* Hobbits Gone Wrong (2004)
* Five Reasons Pop Culture Is Run By Fan Fiction (2011) "As you might anticipate from fans who suddenly realize they have the capacity to mold and shape the universe of their favorite stories, most fanfiction revolves around characters boning one another."
* Zachary Pincus-Roth, Slash Fiction: A Fantasy World in Which Male TV Characters Find Romance -- With Each Other LA Weekly, October 31, 2013.
Academic examples:
* Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992)
* Pass the Crisco, Spock (1996)
==Negative Attitudes: Rooted in Misogyny==
Former fanfic writer and published novelist Sarah Rees Brennan described being harassed by other fans as a result of going pro and deleting her fanfic. She discussed the misogyny (often internalized) behind some of the negative attitudes toward her and her published novels:
==References==
Category:Discussion
Category:Fiction Writing