When I was 15 I wanted to be a Jedi. Okay, well, mostly I just didn’t want to be me, or live my life. And the digital remastered versions of Star Wars had just come out and I was obsessed with it and that entire universe and so, yeah, I wanted to become a Jedi. And I spent a lot of time day dreaming about being someone else, somewhere else and one day I started writing about it as well as just thinking about it. It helped, I found a lot of comfort in that, re-creating myself as someone else, someone special. Someone who didn’t have a whole bunch of problems. I never shared it with anyone, it was mine, worlds and characters I created within worlds someone else had created. It was just for me.
At first.
When I got hold of the internet – well, when the internet got hold of me – it all changed. I started reading fanfiction. Started reading Stargate SG-1 fanfiction, and found entertainment in it, and again, comfort in it. And when I started writing fanfiction and sharing it online I found validation in it. Instant gratification that I didn’t get from anywhere else. Didn’t get from sharing poetry or anything else online. And as much as I enjoyed reading fanfiction, I enjoyed writing a whole lot more.
Over ten years later, I still enjoy writing it. I still get that instant validation Instant validation that leads to instant gratification which pushes me to continue writing these weird little scenes in the lives of characters I did not create and do not own, but love and love enough to do research on, read about, write about over and over again. I’m not going to tell you it’s not a little odd, or even makes a lot of sense sometimes but whatever drives me on also drives millions of other fans to do the same.
I’ve written over 300 stories, ranging from 100 words to almost 20,000 words (in chapters) for several different fandoms. Those are the facts. I consider Stargate my first and continuing love, I still write the odd piece of fanfiction for both SG-1 and Atlantis, though now I mostly write fanfiction within the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
When I started, this was all very simple to me, I wrote what I wrote with no real thought of consequence, or readers, or hell even good grammar. I had one focus, Sam and Jack from Stargate SG-1 and that was about it really. I’m not sure when it happened, when it changed and became something more, something else, something complicated but it did and I didn’t start taking it too seriously, but I did start branching out. The world of fanfiction, of fandom was opened up for me, and I started writing different pairings, fanfiction without a romantic focus, angst, drama, humour. I like to think I’m funny, people have told me I’m funny. I get that validated a lot.
Beyond that there is a need for me to write fanfiction to fill in holes left by the media. I write and read what I want to see on paper, on screen. I want sex, I want LGBT characters, I want the girls kicking ass and the boys having happy endings. So if it’s not available to me, then I make it available. If I can’t find it, I write it. It’s driven a lot of my fanfiction over the years.
These of course, are my reasons for reading and writing fanfiction, and I hope, by writing about fanfiction and fandom, we can figure out some of the reasons other people have. What drives people to write out certain scenarios, certain pairings, certain types of fanfiction. I also want to write about why a million fans are writing novel length fanfiction (and then some) for seemingly no reasons other than they can and people like to read it. I want to discover some of the other stuff that goes on in fandom, like pairings, and trends and insanely in-depth alternative universes.
First off though, back to basics, Fanfiction 101 – the terms, the fandoms, the names and whatever else I think you’re going to need to know (and some stuff you probably don’t want to know) when it comes to fanfiction, fandom, and writing about it. If you have any questions, any terms you want explaining, any ideas you want investigating then let me know, here or anywhere else really. My user name is anxiousgeek on just about any site.
So, that’s it, that’s me. I hope you’ll join me in the near – future for an actual Fanfiction 101, and for more rambling about fanfiction.
Originally posted on the now closed Cult Den.