I've been drawn to writing since childhood. It's the only serious dream I've ever had.
And yet, if you'd asked me about my writing ambitions a few years back, I probably would have told you I'd missed my best shot at ever completing a manuscript dr...
How Big Magic Made Me Ditch My Disdain for Fan Fiction
Lately, all people on social media want to talk about is whether Twitter is dying.
To me, it's not as strong a conversion tool as it once was for driving eyeballs to web content, but you can't beat it for cultural conversation.
Take publishing.
We're lucky to be alive at a time when writers whose creative work has traditionally been ignored are speaking back to the establishment, demanding to be heard and represented.
If you're on Twitter, you can skulk hashtags like #weneeddiversebooks and #publishingsowhite and watch in real-time as the barriers created by racism, the patriarchy, classism, colonialism, and ableism start to fall to the wayside.
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Like their Hollywood counterparts, agents, publishers and booksellers seem to be grasping that there's money in creative work that includes a wider array of human experience than that produced exclusively by white guys for white guys.
Yet in the midst of all this change, people need stable rage points to cling to lest the whole frame of reference for literary exclusion and snobbery disappear.
Ergo: "Fan fiction is terrible."
I mean, is there a more perfect literary scapegoat to kick as you smugly tell yourself: "I may not be crushing this draft but by God at least I'm not writing fan fiction?"
Which basically makes fan fiction the reality TV of the literary world.
Until recently, that's exactly what I thought.
50 Shades of Think Piece
Last year, as Fifty Shades of Gray scrolled across e-readers everywhere, made truckloads of money at the box office, and spawned a thousand hot-takes, I wrote an essay arguing that commercial fan fiction's rise is morally and creatively bankrupt (normally, I would link to my essay for your reading convenience, but Wattpad doesn't allow that).
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I put a lot of effort into drawing lines between "real" adaptations and fan fiction; in reality, the pedigree for literary borrowing clearly flows all the way back to Shakespeare's pen and beyond. Adrian Fridge, whose piece I was responding to, rightly called me out for that.
