I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.
Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.
I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?
THREE.
For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.
This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?
I have formed a few theories.
1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.
2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.
3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.
4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.
5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.
a lot of young people say that fanfic made them think abuse was okay, and I think it’s disingenuous to say they’re all lying. but why is this suddenly a problem? this is my theory as to why it’s no longer an understood thing that fandom is about fiction & fantasy.
really good stuff
I’ve said it before– if young people are getting their primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom they have already been failed.
And I say this as someone who got my primary education on consent and sexual relationships from fandom, and for whom it worked out pretty well. I mined a ton of good stuff out of fandom and discussions around fandom. But the fact that there was a void of education in my life that I had to fill on my own is not on fandom. That’s on society and rape culture and our puritanical education system.
[First post is screenshots of a twitter thread; here’s the text of it.]
something I think about a lot is how fandom talks to each other.
i suppose that’s obvious, but not just the antagonistic vitriol. the hyper-ramps of joy feedback can produce similarly hyperbolic language.
almost a year ago I got a multi-comment ask from an anti who told me that ‘bad ships’ almost led them into some real life abusive situations in her dating life. I didn’t respond because I wanted to think about it. and while the framework of my feelings was formed 1 month later–
–I’ve been fleshing that out ever since. because she’s not alone in saying this happened – she read smutfic and later felt her impressions were screwed up by them – but why? why is this suddenly a complaint?
and i think it has a lot to do with evolving internet culture interacting poorly with fandom culture and young people looking for easy answers to complicated questions. for instance:
-young women&/or afab people grow up with specific toxic messages targeted at them about sex/purity
a lot of shit mixes together & it’s not weird for afab people to be disgusted by their body &/or come away with dark sex/violence mishmashes brewing in the hindbrain. may or may not be kinks later, but like. USians, think about how sex & violence (towards afab/women) is tied together.
(transphobia adding a WHOLE NEW FUN LEVEL to this, too. trans (&nb) people 10,000% included in this, in case it’s not clear to anyone.) -all the taboo around expressing sexual ideas, esp if you’re not a cis man, makes it hard to express yourself. -then fandom: mostly afab, full of kink
-majority afab and/or women, kink-friendly fandom functions like a release valve for a lot of people. & though it was never explicitly said by anyone I remember, there was always a kind of understanding this was the case: a safe place for women/afab people to be crass and sexual–
–objectifying fictional characters instead of being objectified, exploring sexual fantasies in safe spaces, etc etc. people in fandom would express filthy ideas & wants! it was afab people &/or women being as frank & open about their fantasy lives as cis men could be everywhere else.
but it was also understood that everything in fandom was fictional. like: of course rape is bad, nobody wants rape to happen, but fantasies are fantasies. live it out on a fictional character who can’t be hurt! good way to blow off some steam.
& because this was understood, people talked about kinks – some really taboo, some things that would be very harmful or abusive or illegal irl – without restraint or qualifications. they weren’t needed! fandom was for fiction. say the gross thing, nobody’s judging!
and that was all well and good as long as we were all working off the same context: fandom is for fiction. this is where we put stuff that’s not safe irl. but.
but.
tumblr.
tumblr is a viral sharing platform. every post you make can be boosted independent of its original context. & when you remove all this frank, salacious, unqualified talk about fictional characters from the context of ‘it’s fiction’ and ‘it’s not for rl for good reason’: well.
fandom got visible on tumblr in a new way. tumblr dropped the barriers to entering fandom. and starting in 2012/2013, tumblr entrants had grown up in a world where the internet had been around *their whole lives*. 9/11 happened when they were a /fetus/.
and 2011-2013 fandom tumblr is an unholy, indistinct mix of real life activism, awareness, and …. posts about how sexy Dave Strider is. in exactly the same kinds of tones we used on lj, in fandom-only – fiction-only – spaces.
I can see how baby fans got the wrong idea.
without necessarily knowing it was happening, fandom – in moving to tumblr – went from a delineated safe space for non-cis-male sexual fantasy indulgence to being – for newcomers at least – indistinguishable from the sexual noise they grew up with, except probably more appealing.
losing shared context by being diluted on tumblr means young people could encounter fandom fantasy content independent of the ‘we let it hang out here b/c we’re not allowed to otherwise’ subtext. Mixed well with the much nastier toxic messages of rl & mass media & get a nasty mess.
i don’t want to spoil the punchline, but the reason non-cis-men are more in need of a safe space retreat than cis men is b/c of misogyny. so you’ll never guess what happened when fandom’s version of that space got diluted into pop culture!
(radfems! also misogyny.)
2012/13 tumblr gets a 1-2 punch: structural patriarchy: women who openly like sex are dirty sluts! they raise & teach kids how to be good adults! they’re pure! radfems: women who openly like kinks are feeding into female oppression! women teach women to be good adults! they’re pure!
2012/12 tumblr recognizes the structural punch, kinda, but disguised as Girl Power, they don’t see the second one coming. Bam! fandom – mostly made up of afab people and/or women – is suddenly awful for letting itself be sexually expressive! it abandoned the teaching post!
softened up by structural oppression of non-cis-(straight-white)-male sexuality, young fandom went down like a stone to the idea that women should be teaching other women how to be good women and Good Women Don’t Do Kinks Or Men (add heaping tablespoons of transphobia/racism/etc)
this got out of hand like always, god. but long story short: young fandom didn’t – doesn’t – see how society sets them up for abusive relationships, sexual disasters, and toxic predation. so they look back at fandom – in dialogue with all that grossness – and conclude:
‘the people in fandom failed me.’ – fandom was supposed to teach them how to be safe – society tells them that’s the job of ‘women’. but fandom wasn’t being a mom, and therefore if they weren’t safe it was fandom’s fault.
these people who were abused using fandom as a tool, or feel like they were vulnerable because of fanworks: fanfic didn’t make them that way. it just feels natural to blame it because it’s hard to see the power structure you live in, and it’s hard to admit to being helpless.
the fanworks are easy to point to and blame because they’re fiction. It’s the same reason video games were easy to blame for violence. it feels so clean and straightforward, and it doesn’t require dismantling a whole power system – a whole culture – to get rid of.
but it’s not the fiction.
(here’s the hard part.)
if fandom contributed to the toxic messages about sexuality absorbed by younger members, it’s because of continuing to talk about fictional characters like we were in those old, delineated ‘fantasy only/it’s just fiction’ spaces–
– after the shift to tumblr. and frankly, tumblr is not that kind of delineated space: it’s also an activist space (or was one), and an awareness space.
non-cis-male sexual fantasies about fictional characters & rl social activism/awareness do not mix well, as we’ve seen.
and that contribution was a small, small part, probably: fandom is so queer, so non-cis, so non-straight, so disabled and neurodivergent that our influence on everything but tumblr is really small.
but because we’re not a power structure, we’re easy to point to & tear down.
and we’ve been trained by society to blame our troubles on those we can get at and hurt instead of blaming the very way our cultures are built. hurting other vulnerable people is easy. dismantling the earth under our feet is hard. (why do u think radfems focus on fixing women?)
to wrap up: fandom isn’t perfect by a long shot, and one thing we can do to protect ourselves from harm is assume the best of others and try to put things we see into context.
we can also fuck up white cis male patriarchy instead of each other. (screw the system.) /end
Writing and reading fanfic is a masterclass in characterisation.
Consider: in order to successfully write two different “versions” of the same character – let alone ten, or fifty, or a hundred – you have to make an informed judgement about their core personality traits, distinguishing between the results of nature and nurture, and decide how best to replicate those conditions in a new narrative context. The character you produce has to be recognisably congruent with the canonical version, yet distinct enough to fit within a different – perhaps wildly so – story. And you physically can’t accomplish this if the character in question is poorly understood, or viewed as a stereotype, or one-dimensional. Yes, you can still produce the fic, but chances are, if your interest in or knowledge of the character(s) is that shallow, you’re not going to bother in the first place.
Because ficwriters care about nuance, and they especially care about continuity – not just literal continuity, in the sense of corroborating established facts, but the far more important (and yet more frequently neglected) emotional continuity. Too often in film and TV canons in particular, emotional continuity is mistakenly viewed as a synonym for static characterisation, and therefore held anathema: if the character(s) don’t change, then where’s the story? But emotional continuity isn’t anti-change; it’s pro-context. It means showing how the character gets from Point A to Point B as an actual journey, not just dumping them in a new location and yelling Because Reasons! while moving on to the next development. Emotional continuity requires a close reading, not just of the letter of the canon, but its spirit – the beats between the dialogue; the implications never overtly stated, but which must logically occur off-screen. As such, emotional continuity is often the first casualty of canonical forward momentum: when each new TV season demands the creation of a new challenge for the protagonists, regardless of where and how we left them last, then dealing with the consequences of what’s already happened is automatically put on the backburner.
Fanfic does not do this.
Fanfic embraces the gaps in the narrative, the gracenotes in characterisation that the original story glosses, forgets or simply doesn’t find time for. That’s not all it does, of course, but in the context of learning how to write characters, it’s vital, because it teaches ficwriters – and fic readers – the difference between rich and cardboard characters. A rich character is one whose original incarnation is detailed enough that, in order to put them in fanfic, the writer has to consider which elements of their personality are integral to their existence, which clash irreparably with the new setting, and which can be modified to fit, to say nothing of how this adapted version works with other similarly adapted characters. A cardboard character, by contrast, boasts so few original or distinct attributes that the ficwriter has to invent them almost out of whole cloth. Note, please, that attributes are not necessarily synonymous with details in this context: we might know a character’s favourite song and their number of siblings, but if this information gives us no actual insight into them as a person, then it’s only window-dressing. By the same token, we might know very few concrete facts about a character, but still have an incredibly well-developed sense of their personhood on the basis of their actions.
The fact that ficwriters en masse – or even the same ficwriter in different AUs – can produce multiple contradictory yet still fundamentally believable incarnations of the same person is a testament to their understanding of characterisation, emotional continuity and narrative.
So I was reading this rumination on fanfic and I was thinking about something @involuntaryorange once talked to me about, about fanfic being its own genre, and something about this way of thinking really rocked my world? Because for a long time I have thought like a lawyer, and I have defined fanfiction as “fiction using characters that originated elsewhere,” or something like that. And now I feel like…fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters because then we can really get the impact of the storyteller’s message but I feel like it could also be not using other people’s characters, just a more character-driven story. Like, I feel like my original stuff–the novellas I have up on AO3, the draft I just finished–are probably really fanfiction, even though they’re original, because they’re hitting fanfic beats. And my frustration with getting original stuff published has been, all along, that I’m calling it a genre it really isn’t.
And this is why many people who discover fic stop reading other stuff. Once you find the genre you prefer, you tend to read a lot in that genre. Some people love mysteries, some people love high-fantasy. Saying you love “fic” really means you love this character-driven genre.
So when I hear people be dismissive of fic I used to think, Are they just not reading the good fic? Maybe I need to put the good fic in front of them? But I think it turns out that fanfiction is a genre that is so entirely character-focused that it actually feels weird and different, because most of our fiction is not that character-focused.
It turns out, when I think about it, I am simply a character-based consumer of pop culture. I will read and watch almost anything but the stuff that’s going to stick with me is because I fall for a particular character. This is why once a show falters and disagrees with my view of the character, I can’t just, like, push past it, because the show *was* the character for me.
Right now my big thing is the Juno Steel stories, and I know that they’re doing all this genre stuff and they have mysteries and there’s sci-fi and meanwhile I’m just like, “Okay, whatever, I don’t care about that, JUNO STEEL IS THE BEST AND I WANT TO JUST ROLL AROUND IN HIS SARCASTIC, HILARIOUS, EMOTIONALLY PINING HEAD.” That is the fanfiction-genre fan in me coming out. Someone looking for sci-fi might not care about that, but I’m the type of consumer (and I think most fic-people are) who will spend a week focusing on what one throwaway line might reveal about a character’s state of mind. That’s why so many fics *focus* on those one throwaway lines. That’s what we’re thinking about.
And this is what makes coffee shop AUs so amazing. Like, you take some characters and you stick them in a coffee shop. That’s it. And yet I love every single one of them. Because the focus is entirely on the characters. There is no plot. The plot is they get coffee every day and fall in love. That’s the entire plot. And that’s the perfect fanfic plot. Fanfic plots are almost always like that. Almost always references to other things that clue you in to where the story is going. Think of “friends to lovers” or “enemies to lovers” or “fake relationship,” and you’re like, “Yes. I love those. Give me those,” and you know it’s going to be the same plot, but that’s okay, you’re not reading for the plot. It’s like that Tumblr post that goes around that’s like, “Me starting a fake relationship fic: Ooooh, do you think they’ll fall in love for real????” But you’re not reading for the suspense. Fic frees you up from having to spend effort thinking about the plot. Fic gives your brain space to focus entirely on the characters. And, especially in an age of plot-twist-heavy pop culture, that almost feels like a luxury. “Come in. Spend a little time in this character’s head. SPEND HOURS OF YOUR LIFE READING SO MANY STORIES ABOUT THIS CHARACTER’S HEAD. Until you know them like a friend. Until you know them so well that you miss them when you’re not hanging out with them.”
When that is your story, when the characters become like your friends, it makes sense that you’re freed from plot. It’s like how many people don’t really have a “plot” to hanging out with their friends. There’s this huge obsession with plot, but lives don’t have plots. Lives just happen. We try to shape them into plots later, but that’s just this organizational fiction we’re imposing. Plot doesn’t have to be the raison d’etre of all story-telling, and fic reminds us of that.
Idk, this was a lot of random rambling but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
“fanfiction has nothing to do with using other people’s characters, it’s just a character-driven *genre* that is so character-driven that it can be more effective to use other people’s characters”
yes!!!! I feel like I knew this on some level but I’ve never explicitly thought about it that way. this feels right, yep. Mainstream fiction often seems very dry to me and I think this is why – it tends to skip right over stuff that would be a huge plot arc in a fanfic, if not an entire fanfic in itself. And I’m like, “hey, wait, go back to that. Why are you skipping that? Where’s the story?” But now I think maybe people who don’t like fanfiction are going like, “why is there an entire fanfic about something that could have happened offscreen? Is anything interesting ever going to happen here? Where’s the story?”
Yes! Exactly! This!!!
This crystallized for me when I taught my first class of fanfiction to non-fic-readers and they just kept being like, “But nothing happens. What’s the plot?” and I was so confused, like, “What are you talking about? They fall in love. That’s the plot.” But we were, I think, talking past each other. They kept waiting for some big moment to happen, but for me the point was that the little moments were the big moments.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️💋💋💋
Great post in general but @earlgreytea68 put into words what happened to me I relation to a lot of media – I need more about the characters. I need to know how they recovered from that scene/incident, I need to know what was said. I WANT to know what their routine is like when there is no plot (no mistery to solve, no murderer to escape).
E.g. codas are probably my favourite type of fic for tv series because there’s never enough about the characters just LIVING.
Thank you! I think many fic people just want all that off-screen stuff! And I also adore coda fics, because I really, really need for the story to just go on, and on, and on, and on. Like, there is just never enough of that for me, I feel like I would happily read forever (and then it would be bad, because I would need to eat and sleep and stuff and I would just be reading).
This is a tangent, but I went on a “Sports Night” fic reading binge a few weeks ago and the fic was all lovely and thoughtful and wow, the banter was absolutely spot-on and I was super-impressed but almost all of it ended with them getting together. Just…they got together, and that was the end. And that was great, I was glad they were together, but I just kept thinking, “But no, you’ve ended the story, and this is why my story would start.”
There’s this great fic, Like Sailing and Home Runs, that is great, and intense, and narratively clever and complex, and Dan delivers this speech into the third-to-last section, right after he and Casey get together:
“So far, I’m cruising on the euphoria of a new relationship and really, really good sex. The working together thing… It hasn’t quite hit us. So far it’s just been, you know, trying not to make out at work. Wait until we get a bad interview, a few cancelled games, and a crappy day of writing. That’s when the reality will hit.” Dan breathed in deeply and stretched his arms across the back of the couch. “But right now, it’s Euphoria City.”
And I just found myself thinking: All of that, that Dan’s talking about, that’s the interesting part of the story to me. I want to read about the bad days. Not because I want them to break up, but because I want to see how they handle it. I want to get them past Euphoria City and know they’re still going to be okay. I know it’s not what’s interesting to everyone! I totally get that! But…yeah. That’s what I want to know about.
(A very brief list of other Sports Night recs: A Form in Wax, which was a lovely slow, gradual descent into their relationship, and the in-progress All Eyes Are On You Now, which has delighted me greatly by getting them together and not being over yet. :-))
@earlgreytea68 So when are you writing us a book on the glories of character-driven fiction and why fanfic / original fic-”fanfic” is the superior genre? Because I would read the hell out of that book. ;D
Also please lend me your muses, mine are hopeless…. After the last fanfic/original fic fanfic discussion I started another original fic purposely pretending it was fanfic, and writing it in little ficlets and drabbles and
vignettes like fanfic. …..and now it’s completely gotten away from me too. So now I’m a fandom of one? *sigh*
Awwwww! I like that idea of writing it in little ficlets and drabbles and vignettes! Maybe you can create your own fandom? 🙂
And I would LOVE to write this book, hahahah, it would be my manifesto.
On AO3, putting a link to your ko-fi or paypal is a TOS violation. It constitutes “unsolicited commercial activity” which will get your ass suspended real quick. I’ve seen it happen in other fandoms, and I’m making this post bc the TOS verbiage is vague (by necessity) and I don’t want anything bad to happen to the lovely CR authors out there.
The whole deal with fanworks that keeps them from being copyright violations is you can’t make money off of them. So if you want people to support you, you have to link them to something like tumblr or twitter, and have your ko-fi or paypal posted there.
So a reader left a comment on byw 56 (really, more than one reader, and more than one comment) which I am addressing on Tumblr instead of on the AO3, because, basically, I did not have room to write a five thousand word essay back to them in my comments. I also apologize for my somewhat stilted use of no contractions before the cut; I am trying to get around a Tumblr bug that turns apostrophes and quotation marks and emdashes into display garbage on the dash.
First, let me back up for a second, because, to me, the most important part of my reply is my reasoning for why I am not, in fact, going to reply very directly to the actual specific questions that these specific readers asked. WELP SORRY! I apologize for this if it is frustrating; but, as those of you that have been around here for a while know, while I was in grad school (and before that when I was kind of perpetually underemployed) my primary source of income was tutoring K-12 students. Unsurprisingly, since I was headed for a STEM graduate degree, I taught a lot of math, but my primary tutoring area of focus was actually critical reading for students who were preparing for the SAT (note for non-U.S. readers: the SAT is the main ~college preparatory readiness~ exam in the U.S., your score on which heavily influences university admissions). And a big part of why I often do not like to answer questions about my writing, including some of the questions that these particular readers raised in these particular comments, is because for most of my adult life, I have fed and clothed and housed myself by failing to answer questions about writing by otherpeople. When you are teaching someone to read critically, particularly when you are teaching young people to read critically, the most effective thing you can do is, very frequently, to not answer their questions, but to do so in a considered and deliberate way.
(Note: If talking about the idea of critical reading in a fannish context is going to peel your onions, you should maybe stop reading this essay right now.)
You have no idea how many people lurk on your work. No idea how many times people go back to revisit your work. How big they smile when they simply think about your work. How fast their heart beats, how excited they get when they see that you posted something.
People are shy with their feedback. Sometimes it’s because they’re simply shy. Other times it’s because they assume you already know how great and talented you are. Could be both.
My point is, even if you barely have any likes or reblogs, don’t get discouraged. You have a lot of silent fans, but they are still your fans. Keep on creating. Because there is always someone out there who will love what you have made.
If
you’re still feeling shy about writing fic, if you’re feeling that
that’s now how you’ll grow as a writer or publish, know that some pretty
well-known names wrote fan fiction—and then went on to write original work, work that
generated its own fandoms.
Hugo-award
winner Lois McMaster Bujold, author of stories like The Mountains of Mourning,Paladin
of Souls, and Cryoburn, wrote Star
Trek fan fic as a young girl. Andy Weir, writer of The Martian, the book from which the movie was made, wrote Ready Player One fan fic. Mark Gatiss, co-creator
of Sherlock, has been writing Doctor Who stories for decades.
There’s
more. R. J. Anderson, best-selling author of young adult fiction and writer of
the novels Knife,Arrow, and Swift, started out with fan fiction and says getting online,
sharing her stories with other readers, and meeting other writers, encouraged her
and improved her skills.
Neil
Gaiman, author of Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods, used to write fic, saying he earned a Hugo “for
a story that ripped off Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and H. P.
Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.”
Gaiman
goes on to say that all writing helps
you hone your writing skills. “I think you get better as a writer by
writing, and whether that means that you’re writing a singularly deep and
moving novel about the pain or pleasure of modern existence or you’re writing
Smeagol-Gollum slash you’re still putting one damn word after another and
learning as a writer.”
Then there are fans who took their geek passions and turned
them in to award-winning programming. Irish filmmaker Emer Reynolds devoured
sci-fi growing up, her shelves full of Philip K. Dick, Michael Moorcock and
H.G. Wells. In this last year Reynolds released to world-wide and award-winning
acclaim the feature length science documentary The Farthest.
Writer Chris Charter couldn’t get enough of The Twilight Zone, loving it so much he
kept fiddling with the format—leaving failed TV shows in his wake—until he went
on to create The X-Files, a programme
so popular in the early 90s that people avoided making Friday night plans—me
among them!
These examples are just the tip of the fic and creativity
iceberg and the take home
message is simply this:
Just
damn well write the stories you want to write. Create the art you want to
create. Love the fandom you love.
It’s
that love and passion and practice that can take you so very, very far.
I’ve written more
about Sherlock Holmes than the man who created him.
Books, fan
fiction, articles, essays; more than three quarter of a million words.
The thing is, I
almost stopped so many times. Because I write professionally, people pay me to
write about flu jabs and saving for retirement but they didn’t pay me to write
hundreds of thousands of words of Sherlock fan fiction.
So I tried
quitting. Tried to focus on ‘real’ writing. Yet every time I turned in an
article on feral cats or baby colic, I’d start another chapter on another fic,
muttering I shouldn’t be doing this, this
isn’t paying the bills. I was always promising myself I’d quit.
I didn’t though,
and there was a reason for that: Writing fic about men in love and lust made me
happy. Giddy happy. Excited happy. Run round the room fist-bumping myself
happy.
Yet, because I’m
duller than the average deducing bear, I still tried to stop. Each time I did,
I’d grouse and grumble, and each time my friend Tony would encourage me to keep
going.
And yet, like
some sort of over-dramatic consulting detective, I’d lament: “But fan
fiction doesn’t earn me a living!”
Finally, Tony
responded with the two best words in the history of best words.
“So
what?”
*Blink* *Blink* So…………what?
Oh my. Oh my yes.
So the hell what?
Sure, maybe being
part of a fandom like Star Wars or Sherlock or Supernatural, maybe having a passion for writing fan fiction or
drawing fan art isn’t bringing a pay check. Well generally neither does petting
a kitten, going to the cinema, or having sex, and yet we manage to do and
delight in all of these things, finding fulfillment and joy.
That’s what
Tony’s so what taught me. Joy is
enough. Finding joy in a fandom is enough. Yet beyond that, being part of a fandom, drawing, writing, meeting people,
well these things give so. many. other. things.
A community. A
place to share ideas. A place to find new ones. A place to fan the flames of
your passion.
And that passion,
oh it’s powerful. With passion you write more, draw more, edit more fan vids.
And when that happens, something beautiful happens.
You get better.
Then better still.
If you’re me you
write even more stories and then you finally, finally, finally pitch a Sherlock Holmes book to a publisher.
And get accepted.
Without fic and
the Sherlock fandom, without years of encouragement from readers and fellow
writers, I might not have bestirred my damn butt from its metaphorical chair
and approached that publisher. I’d already pitched books to publishers you see
and like every writer I had a stack of rejections.
Then Jayantika
Ganguly, a Sherlockian friend, one day said to me, “I’d like to introduce
you to someone. You should pitch something to him. He publishes Sherlock Holmes
books.”
So, because
people loved my AO3 fic Well Met,
I pitched the publisher a book based on that concept. The Day They Met came out in 2015, The Night They Met was published a year later,both books inspired by that fan fiction.
Writing and
reading fic changes things. It changes you. It has power.
Let it power you.
This is an abridged version of
an article written originally for Powers of
Expression. Wendy C Fries also writes as Atlin Merrick.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 