Episode 118: The Craft of Writing (Fanfiction)
In Episode 118, “The Craft of Writing (Fanfiction),” Flourish and Elizabeth interview Betts, a fic writer and professional writing instructor, about how different writing practices can inform each other on a craft level. They discuss how fanfic utterly altered Betts’s career path, what role it plays in her classroom, the effects of changing norms around fic critique and feedback, and why many people in fandom spaces are reticent to engage with literary fiction (and why they should give it a try).
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:01:35] Find Betts (and her writing advice!) on Tumblr.
[00:06:35] To listen to our Star Wars special episode, pledge $3-a-month or more to our Patreon!
[00:08:13] That was not all 13. Flourish and Elizabeth have blocked out the special episode on Primary Colors, because thinking about it is too painful (it was recorded pre-Trump).
[00:09:51] Our most recent episode was #117, “Fans and the Man.”
[00:10:11] This week our interstitial music is “Heat Haze” by Lee Rosevere from Music for Podcasts 2, used under a CC BY 3.0 license.
[00:14:45] Emmagrant01’s “A Cure for Boredom”: highly recommended!
[00:34:05] Because we did not get into it and these are our show notes, a positive review of Hanya Yanagihara’s polarizing novel A Little Life.
[00:43:34] We read this letter, from Amy, in Episode 76, “Camp Austen.” It said, in part:
“I think I have a complete-180 experience of fic reading to what you two described. The vast majority of what I read on AO3—canon universe or AU—is based on source material that I’m either mostly or entirely unfamiliar with. This is because I search for stories by tag, rather than by fandom or character. When I pull up AO3 to find a new fic, my motivation is hardly ever ‘I want to read a Drarry fic’ or ‘I’m in the mood for some 1D today.’ It’s more, ‘I could really go for a fake dating AU’ or ‘I need a cathartic hurt/comfort scene with found family, please and thank you.’”
[00:47:29] “The Very Secret Diaries” are well-covered on Fanlore.
[00:48:15] “The Weight” is actually available online! If you aren’t up for the whole thing, though, check out Fanlore for some truly groovy original illustrations.
[00:51:26] “Persephone” by Yahtzee is a fic about the movie Prometheus (and you have to be logged into the AO3 to read it).
[00:53:01] “Fred and George,” an eternal twincest fic generator.
[01:03:48] Betts’ Bellamy/Clarke with-an-asexual-Clarke fic “Zucchini” is the first rec in the 1/17/2020 “Rec Center.”
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #118, “The Craft of Writing,” parenthesis, “Fanfiction,” parenthesis.
FK: [laughs] You had to get both those parentheses in there.
ELM: You can’t just open a parenthesis and not close it. That would not be correct in most style guides or, probably, grammar.
FK: That’s true, that’s true, I just, I wasn’t sure how you know you were gonna read that. I wasn’t sure whether you would feel the need to state that it was closed. But I guess that you kinda do.
ELM: Yeah, you always have to, I mean, you open a tag, gotta close it.
FK: It’s true, it’s true. It’s true. OK. What are we doing this time, Elizabeth?
ELM: We’re talking about the craft of writing [FK laughs] parenthesis, fanfiction, parenthesis. Our guest today is someone that I am a very excited about: bettydays is her AO3 handle.
FK: Woo!
ELM: “Betts” is what we’ll be calling her. And she is a writing instructor. She is a fanfiction writer. She is an original fiction writer. I especially wanted to have her on because I know that she uses fanfiction in her writing instruction in the university setting, and she also uses her Tumblr to sort of do writing instruction for, you know, probably a lot—majority fic writers are the people who are reading this, and she uses fic as examples and really seems to be invested in kind of breaking down some of the craft elements of fic, which is something that I didn’t, actually don’t see very much out in the world. Which—it surprises me, because it’s a lot of people who are really interested in writing.
FK: Yeah!
ELM: You know, maybe people don’t have the language to articulate that if they’re not instruct, you know, teaching writing to students.
FK: Yeah, I mean I think that’s true, I think also that there’s a lot of…a lot of people in fanfic who like me are pretty much, more or less self-taught, you know. Despite having taken one or two classes, I would not consider myself to be particularly engaged in thinking about the craft of writing except in the context of actually writing things, you know.
ELM: Right.
FK: And sort of just doing it intuitively. Not to say without thought! That’s absolutely not what I mean, but just, you know, without sort of the structure that many people have spent a lot of time thinking about and developing [laughing] in like, ways to talk about it. So I’m excited to hear from her, because I don’t know, whenever I do get sort of a glimpse of that—or whatever, you start talking to me about something like that—it’s always like “Oh! You put things into words! That is right!”
ELM: [laughing] Ah, good! That’s, that’s the response I would like to evoke! “You put things into words. OooOOoOoo!” I think we should clarify quickly also what “craft” means, in case…
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: …people, even that term may not be known to some people. So you know, when we talk about “craft elements” and we’re talking about narrative prose fiction, that can mean a lot of different things. It can be things as, the kind of big buckety straightforward things as character development, characterization, plot, setting. You know. The really, super broad ones. It can be things that are a lot more nuanced, like say…narrative distance. You know? The close, a close third and a free indirect style and all of these things, which are about, about the perspective of your narrator and the distance between the narrator and the characters and how far inside a character’s head the narrator is able to go.
FK: Right.
ELM: Which is something I think fic writers are naturally, weirdly good at. I think that a lot of people are kind of just doing it by sort of, yeah, like in a self-taught way and in a kind of communal learning way, cause a lot of fic is doing it and then you start doing it. People do really interesting things, possibly without realizing it sometimes.
FK: I think it springs naturally from the way that fic exists, right, especially fic about a TV show more than anything else, or movies, just because you’ve got such a different sort of…there’s different affordances that writing, like, a novel has, to writing a screenplay or watching, you know, realizing a film or a television show. And so there’s naturally these changes in the way that the narrative is gonna work and the narrative distance and all of that that sort of just have to come out, almost. You know what I mean? So…
ELM: Right.
FK: I think that it’s sort of inherent in the whole way that a lot of fic exists and… I don’t know. And it’s exciting to put terms to it, and WOO!
ELM: Also, not to go too much into it before Betts gets here, but like, not just the way that fic exists but even the way it comes, comes into being in the sense of like…I think there are different reasons that people write it, but I think for a lot of people, it stems from a kind of a close study of characters that are doing things that you did not choose to make them do, and so even a lot of other fannish activity involves kind of deconstructing those decisions, and saying “Who is this character? I’m fascinated by them, why did they choose that? Why did they choose that? Why did they choose that?”
And that’s not necessarily the, that can’t be the instigator, unless you’re writing something that’s based on your own life or events that you’ve experienced, it’s not like, you know. If you create an original character, it’s not like you can stare at the things that they’re already doing and try to break those apart. Because you are the one that’s going to make them do the things. You know what I mean? And so I think that is something that’s really interesting and unique about fanfiction, and it—I think it’s really really good practice that you wouldn’t get writing original fiction for working on character, basically. So. So.
FK: Yeah! OK! So. But before, before we call Betts, we have some points of business.
ELM: Speaking of characterization and doing a bad job! We recorded a Star Wars special episode!
FK: [laughing] Ohhh.
ELM: So for the second episode in the row, let’s just say it at the top so people know about it. Patreon.com/fansplaining, that is how we fund this podcast. “Fund” makes it sound like it’s fully funded, and that’s not true, but it is how we are able to keep going, right? [FK laughs] But collecting some money for it and we are incredibly grateful to all of our patrons.
FK: Yeah, yeah. But it also feels like, whenever we ask for more money, it feels important to menton that we’re not breaking even so…
ELM: Yes. yes. So we are asking if you have been thinking about pledging, and you hadn’t heard about this, our Star Wars special episode is quite critical. We would not recommend it for anyone who really loved The Rise of Skywalker.
FK: Unless you want to get mad and you like that and you can guarantee that you’re not going to get mad directly at us.
ELM: Yeah, we’re just slapping a big content warning on it. [FK laughs] “Negative opinions!” But critical negative opinions, it’s not just, I think, idle bashing. And that’s for $3-a-month patrons. And it’s our 13th special episode, we’ve also done—can we even name them all? Brooklyn 99.
FK: The Favourite.
ELM: The Good Place.
FK: Black Sails.
ELM: The very first one was about our frustrations with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the broader Harry Potter franchise and the Harry Potter folks themselves, I think we wound up going into…
FK: Yeah, that one we really laid into that one.
ELM: Just letting it all out. We did, a few episodes later we did one of my favorite Harry Potter fics.
FK: And we did Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s fanfic.
ELM: Yes!
FK: With him on!
ELM: With him! And we’ve had Gav, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, my newsletter partner, on, to talk about Marvel and their relationship with the Defense Department, and how they work with the government to make some of these films. I think that’s not even all of them! But that’s many of them.
FK: That’s a bunch.
ELM: Buffy, we did a Buffy episode.
FK: They’re good, they’re fun—yeah so they’re all fun things that are about topics that we would like to talk about and you might like to hear about but aren’t really in the remit of our podcast.
ELM: Oh, oh, oh: related to this episode, we did a pair of episodes about our processes writing fanfiction!
FK: There we go! That’s probably all 13.
ELM: Those were really enjoyable conversations!
FK: Yeah! OK, great! So you definitely should pledge to our Patreon so that you can get access to all the special episodes.
ELM: Yeah, so they’re, also if you don’t have $3 a month, any amount will—well it has to be minimum $1, you can’t give us 50 cents a month. You could find another friend and pool your resources. But Patreon… [laughs] Don’t. Just skip it then. But if you can pledge $1 a month, you’ll get access to the Javi special episode. $2 a month you get early access, $5 a month you get your name in the credits and a really cute enamel pin shaped like our fan logo sent to your house. And $10 a month, you get like a tiny zine that we make a few times a year. We have another one in the works right now, we’ve been saying that for a little while but it truly is in the works now, I swear to God.
FK: You swear to God?
ELM: I swear to God the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
FK: That sounds pretty, pretty binding, Elizabeth. [laughing]
ELM: I wouldn’t use the Holy Spirit’s name lightly!
FK: OK! All right, so there are other ways that you can support us if you don’t, you know, have any cash to throw at Patreon. One of the best things that you can do, actually, is to subscribe to us on iTunes, if that’s your preferred podcatcher. Cause that helps us in the iTunes rankings, and helps more people see us. But you can also do things like send in messages, comments, questions, fansplaining at gmail.com is a really great way to send those in. You can also call us at 1-401-526-FANS. That’s F-A-N-S. We haven’t had a voicemail in a while, so you know, get on that, guys!
ELM: Come on, call us! Call us if you’ve been thinking about some of this stuff, so. This episode, last episode was very different, about corporations. Wide range. The two genders. Corporations…
FK: Corporations and writing advice! [both laugh] All right! On that note, let’s go to talk to one of the two genders, apparently.
ELM: Yeah, you, a corporation, can go talk to writing advice. Perfect.
FK: That’s what we’re gonna do.
ELM: Yep!
[Interstitial music]
FK: OK, I think it’s time to welcome Betts to the podcast! Hi Betts!
Betts: Hello!
ELM: Thank you so much for coming on!
B: Thank you for having me!
ELM: We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. Flourish tried to pin this on me, saying this was only something I want, but really Flourish needs all the help they can get with writing. [Betts laughs]
FK: HEY.
ELM: [laughs] I’m kidding. Oh my God! [all laugh] You take that real seriously!
FK: Hey now!
ELM: No no no no.
FK: It’s just because you’re my most consistent editor that I really trust what you say about my writing, Elizabeth.
ELM: Or take it, take it very seriously.
FK: Yes! I do, generally speaking. You know that I do.
ELM: Thank you very much. Thank you. OK. All right. Before we start talking about writing, let’s talk about you for a little bit. Do you want to give us like a kind of, I want to know your fannish—actually I wanna know your writing history too.
B: OK.
ELM: What’s your backstory?
B: OK. Let’s see. The first fic I ever read, I was 11 years old, and it was Dark Angel fanfic. Dark Angel was a show on FOX. [FK gasps] Yeah.
FK: Oh yes it was.
B: It’s my favorite show of all time. And it was, I was looking for Max and Alec, Alec was played by Jensen Ackles and Max was played by Jessica Alba. And I found a fic on an Angelfire site and I’m like, “Oh my God, this is amazing cause there are only two seasons, the show got canceled, and you know, people are just writing more of what I wanna read!” But, I was 11 and it was explicit, and I got so freaked out and I was like I like squeaked and I exited out of the window! [all laughing] And I swore I would never read fanfic again.
ELM: Oh my God. Wow.
B: So…
FK: You were so self-policing!
B: I was! I was a very obedient child, I was just terrified, I was terrified I would get in trouble, and so eventually, you know, a lot of stuff happened. I found fandom again when I was 23. I was a writer insofar that I journaled all the time. Like, I’ve been kind of an obsessive journalist since I was 14, and so I was very used to writing more nonfiction things, and that’s what I read. I read a lot of memoir around the time. So when I found fandom again, I was in this space of like, you know, nonfiction, and I was a banker, and like, I was a very very professional, you know, kind of person. I owned a house. You know? [all laugh] And I just took myself very, very seriously.
And so I was on Tumblr already because a friend of mine was like, “There’s this website and it’s just lesbians and cats, like, you’ll love it!” So I joined Tumblr! And I, I just, I got really obsessed with it right away, and I was just one of those people who reblogs lesbians and cats, and I wasn’t really affiliated with fandom, and one day I found a link to emmagrant01’s fic “A Cure For Boredom” in the Sherlock fandom, and I remember distinctly thinking, “I’m bored! I would like a cure for boredom!”
FK: My God. That’s incredibly pure.
B: I do! I do! Right? And so I—
FK: You really, I’m just getting this impression you’re so pure. Would you describe yourself as being just, like, a pure soul?
ELM: I’m sorry, like—can I just say: Flourish, are you familiar with this fic?
FK: I, I know the name, but I don’t think I know. No.
ELM: Did you, did you know when you were clicking on it the explicit nature of this fic?
FK: [laughing] I mean I coulda guessed that.
B: I looked at, I looked at the tags, and I was like “OK.” This was like a week after, not a very long time after “Reichenbach Falls.” So there were six episodes of Sherlock and there would not be more for like two years and I knew this and I was like, “I could just watch these six episodes over and over and over again.” So I’m like, “Anything. I’ll take anything.” And, because I already had, like, this obsessive personality, but I had no outlet for it before. So I read “A Cure for Boredom” and I was like “OK, I’m just going to nope out when it gets to the sexy stuff, and I’m just here for Sherlock,” you know.
And I started reading it and I was like, “This is the best thing I’ve ever read in my entire life.” Like. [all laugh] I had plans that evening with a bunch of friends, we were gonna go to dinner, and six hours later my face is pressed to my monitor, I’m in this blanket burrito, I’ve forgotten to eat, I haven’t turned on the light, and I’m just like, I’m just clicking next chapter, next chapter, next chapter. And like I canceled all of my plans for the evening because I’m like “This is more important!” And I was born that day, really. [all laugh]
ELM: Incredible!
B: And so I just…cause you know, AO3 was in like, full swing at that point, and so I just, I just went ham. I just read every Sherlock fic I possibly could. Like, it was just, it was just consuming, you know? So that’s how I found it, and I know I was, you know, this is—God, this would have been 2013, I think. And so I just read all this Sherlock. I didn’t even consider writing. Like, that was not a—this was a, I was a lurker, like, 100%, I didn’t leave kudos, I didn’t have an AO3 account, I just read the fics and I just kept going. I just inhaled them.
So eventually I got to a point where, like, I had slowly—because SuperWhoLock was a thing, I had slowly moved into Supernatural, because Jensen Ackles, right? Cause I had, I had started in Dark Angel, and I’m like “Oh!”
ELM: Grand unified theory here, it’s all comin’ together! Yeah!
B: And so I was like, “OK.” And I started reading some Destiel, and I had like, I had this really like volatile like friend break-up one day, and it really messed me up because it was one of those friends where we just talked all day every day or whatever via text, and all of a sudden I had all these words that I normally gave to one person that weren’t going everywhere? [FK and ELM sigh and laugh]
It’s really an issue of quantity, you know!? And so I just started writing Destiel, and…
FK: I wanna both laugh and cry!
ELM: It’s very sad origin story!
B: It is.
FK: Quote, “It’s really an issue of quantity,” though. [all laugh]
B: It, it felt so much like I had, like, my, my 10,000 words that I normally gave to like this person, or however many, and I needed to put them somewhere else! And for some reason it took the form of, like, a Destiel canon-divergent stripper AU? And…
ELM: Sure, sure.
B: And so when you go “Are you a pure person?” By this point, I had already read like the worst of the worst, like, I was just, I was in it, I was 100%. And so I, I posted like a chapter a night, like, it was just, it was just like coming out of me, because I didn’t think anybody would read it, you know? I was just, I was just throwing it to the wolves, getting it off my chest, and people were actually reading it. [laughs] Which was what was terrifying! And also, like, really thrilling! Because I felt, I felt so connected to this community, and now I was finally able to, like, speak to it instead of just take from it.
And I just, I really really had so much fun, every, every night before I went to bed I posted a chapter and I woke up the next morning to read my handful of comments or whatever. And it was just the most, like, validating thing. I wouldn’t say, I had a pretty normal life, but I wasn’t used to getting any attention like that? And so you know, it was, it was unlike anything I had experienced before, and I thought, you know, “Well, I’ll probably just…” I was one of those people who would start things and not follow through. And I thought eventually I would give this up and writing was just, like, a thing that I would get into and then leave again. But no! I just never stopped.
It’s really, my writing story even continues, because I moved fandom to fandom and then I eventually applied for an MFA. I got it and I got into the MFA and then I found teaching and I feel like the story is just, kinda goes on from there. But that’s how I started.
ELM: Was, so, you think that if you hadn’t started reading fic again seven years ago, you wouldn’t be on this, like, you’re—you’re on a wholly different career path than you were then.
FK: Yeah, I was gonna say: you weren’t like, writing as a…I mean you were writing, journaling, but you weren’t writing as an “I’m gonna be a writer” sort of way before you…
ELM: Like a novelist, yeah, right?
B: No I wasn’t, and in fact, it never even occurred to me that that was a choice, because I was in commercial finance. Like… [all laugh] I have a degree, I had a science degree in psychology—not an arts degree, science degree in psychology—and I had spent 10 years at a bank, and that was where I was just going to spend my life.
No, if I hadn’t found fanfic, I would not have found writing, because I needed people reading and encouraging me, and I needed a place to put things when I was done with them that didn’t have, like, an editorial board, you know? There was no rejection to it, because I was still at that point like extremely rejection-sensitive, and it’s taken like a long time to get over that. You know. I had—you sit in a room with people in an MFA in they just like talk about how terrible you are for two hours or whatever. And eventually yeah, rejection always hurts but eventually it’s—to me anyway I can manage it. But you know, at the time I just needed somewhere to put all the things that people did want to read them. Because I would take a no-response as a rejection, you know? Because it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t encouraging enough to just write something and have a couple people be like, “Hey, this is cool!” Like, it was, it was nice to slowly build a following and a readership and to make all these friends that I made and be able to speak to one fic to another fic to another fic and, and build something that was bigger than its parts.
ELM: I feel like this is such a good endorsement for fanfiction!
B: Oh my God, fanfic absolutely changed my life and so I tell people this story all the time because it’s, like, it’s everything to me.
ELM: Yeah, and I just, I think it’s unusual, I feel like—Flourish, the fact that we both kinda jumped on the same thing at the same time—I do think it’s unusual to find people who weren’t really writing at all in any way. You know, cause people often talk about, even if they wanna be professional writers, they’ll say “Well, I always wrote things, and I wrote fanfiction,” you know what I mean? But I think it’s really interesting to have that, that kind of direct trajectory. I think that’s quite rare. Do you disagree, Flourish? You’re makin’ a face.
FK: No no no, I agree, but I feel like a lot of times it’s either, like: “I always wrote fanfiction, from the time I was really little, and I just wrote fanfiction all the time and I wrote it,” that’s the more common…honestly for me sometimes I feel like “Wow, if there wasn’t fanfiction maybe I would—maybe I would write more that wasn’t fanfiction!” You know?
ELM: Yeeeeaah.
FK: Cause the validation is so great, and who wants to like, query and, you know what I mean?
B: I know, yeah!
FK: But yeah, I do agree.
ELM: OK, so this is an incredible origin story and I love it. Let’s, let’s get to the—so when you’re teaching writing, do you think about writing fanfiction as you’re teaching writing? I wanna kind of tie these things, I wanna tie that with the work that you’re doing together. Because as I’ve already said, you are one of the only people on my feed who takes, like, craft of fanfiction like—writes about it so clearly and, and coherently, and you’re not afraid to actually kind of treat your asks sort of like, in a pedagogical—they’re explicitly pedagogical, right, you know? You’re not like “Well, here’s just what I think.” You’re like “I’m willing to instruct,” it feels like I’m taking a little bit of a class when I read your posts, you know what I mean?
B: Oh, thank you!
ELM: They’re great, they’re such good post! [laughs]
B: So, when I’m teaching creative writing…so I teach two courses right now, Composition and Creative Writing, and there is like a major Venn diagram overlap. But in Composition, you know, we’re working to write research papers, mostly. And you know, analysis, types of writing that you would find in a university setting. In Creative Writing, I have a lot more freedom, and so since I went into the MFA as a…as what they called a “self-taught” writer, since I had no creative writing—traditional creative writing instruction before that point, I developed my class around how I taught myself how to write, which involved very heavily fanfic.
And so I would take, when I started writing fic, I would take a concept that I wanted to improve on—and I did this very systematically, very scientifically—take a concept I wanted to improve on, and I would do all this research, and I would find like, resources and what other people thought of it and whatever, and then I would write a fic where I only focused on that single thing. And then everything else I didn’t care about. So like, if I was focusing on character development or voice, then it didn’t matter what anything else was doing. I was just, one thing at at time.
And so I got to develop my class around that, and that, like, I have these like—I have lesson plans, and I have a week dedicated to fairy tales, and a week dedicated to…and the fairy tale week is actually about form. And how to break form and invoke meaning. And I have a week based on character development, a week based on, on endings, which is called “Exit Strategies.” [all laugh]
And so I do very much bring in fandom context into my classroom, because we also talk about—I should say, I meet with students one-on-one, because I’m, I think I’m better one-on-one than, you know, just standing in front of people talking at them. And I can usually tell by sitting in front of someone what their interaction with pop culture is. [all laugh] And so, like, they’ll be talking about their story, and I’ll just kind of insert, “Do you like fanfiction?” [all laugh] And it’s amazing, it’s amazing how many faces just like light up, like “I didn’t know I was allowed to write that, I didn’t know I was allowed to do that.” And I’m like “Yes, please please please write fanfic, please write things that are a step away from it, please begin with a fic and then move original,” you know.
And so when I phrase it like “You can start something with something you’re familiar with, and then slowly work it around into something original,” and that kind of branches off of what I see as a major block for a lot of people who are writing original fiction, which is there are just too many decisions to make when you face a blank page.
FK: Yeah.
B: And that is the major benefit to fanfiction: fanfiction is very, very much about a response to something that already exists, and because it’s a response, you always have something to draw from, you always have something to speak to. And so when you’re writing original fiction, it’s just—it’s just a complete sandbox. And that’s, that’s usually how I teach it too, is that you know, original fiction you can go on a beach and have a good time and build sand castles and stuff like that, but you can also go to a playground where there’s already stuff there. You know? And they’re both fun!
ELM: Yeah.
B: They’re both a good time, but it’s a different kind of good time. And so I think decision fatigue is really—is something that stops a lot of people from writing original fiction. And so I think a lot of people, if they begin with a derivative work, if they begin with a transformative work, then that—that can be the first draft. And then the second draft you change it a little bit more and you change it a little bit more. Because I mean, all literature is speaking to other literature. You can’t write anything in a vacuum.
ELM: Mm-hmm. It’s funny thinking about this because I remember I took a class, I took a creative writing class in college…towards the end of college, but it was a beginner class cause I hadn’t taken it before and most of the rest of the class was underclassmen. So I felt elderly even though I was like 20, 22, and they were like 18, you know. And I was like “I’m the oldest person in the world!”
But it was, it was very funny to me how many people in the class who were young, who were towards the beginning of college, were writing stories about high school, but they didn’t really have very much to say about it? And I think it’s because if you feel like you’re really kind of hemmed in by your frames of reference, right, and you know—and then I remember there were also people who wrote very generic office settings.
B: Yes.
ELM: And they were like 18! And I remember the professor just being like, “You, you might wind up in this situation, you don’t have to do this right now,” you know? “Wait until you have this terrible job! Don’t like, pretend,” you know, which I thought was very funny to think about, you know. But it is interesting how, when I think about how much more vibrant…I’m sure I’m reading work in fandom by people who are 18 right now that is, you know, when you have that starting place and you don’t feel like you’re kind of…not to say that, 18-year-olds have a huge vast number of experiences! But I think plenty of people may have had a relatively limited kind of…I mean, people of all ages have limited experiences, obviously. That’s life. But you know.
FK: Well I was gonna say, I kind of wonder—and maybe you can speak to this, Betts, too–I wonder if something about how fanfiction is so often so much about characterization, if that helps? Because I feel like a lot of times the, when I read stories that are about, like, life in a setting, and the setting is like—you don’t know what that setting is, like, the characterization can carry it, right?
B: Yeah.
FK: But a lot of times, like, when it’s original fiction, if you’re just like “Ah!” and you don’t have strong characters or strong setting, then it’s like “Oh, I don’t know about this, guys.” [laughs] “Back to the drawing board, maybe.”
B: And I think that’s the draw of major franchises. So Star Wars, Marvel, because there is a setting that you can pull so much from, and then you know, the exceptions to that rule are like, the Inception fandom. That only had the one thing, but then they still made that a widespread setting by incorporating the other films that Tom Hardy and JGL had done. And so even, even with a lack of setting, fan people find more. [laughs] They find, they make the canon larger.
Harry Potter too, just, these huge universes. Because there is definitely a marriage between character and setting, and I think, I think fanfiction works in…kind of duality, because you know, usually you’re either exploring the universe or you’re exploring character. Modern AU’s more character, and then you can have a totally OC fic set in the universe to further explore the universe. So it is a very good point about the idea of the, the marriage of character and setting and how original fiction can sometimes fail on both fronts. [all laugh]
FK: It is a lot harder to fail on both fronts with fanfic. Cause you’ve got something, you know?
B: Yeah! Yeah.
FK: Whatever you’re not strong on, you can, you know, just like…
B: Uh-huh.
FK: Go grab that.
ELM: Right. It’s funny, though, cause one of the things—I mean as we’re joking about original fiction failing at certain things, I think you are one of the, Betts, one of the few people on my feed also who seems to have a really…there are so many people on my feed who, ah, write things like “Only fanfiction is good!” Or “Only fanfiction does X, Y or Z!” And often it’s like, things that frankly I think a lot of literary fiction does quite well! You know? Like, “Only fanfiction does emotional depth,” or something. You know? Or like, “breaks the structures of commercial fiction.” Well, that’s literally like, how it’s defined, right? You know, it’s like, breaks the three-act structure or whatever, you know.
B: Yeah.
ELM: And I really appreciate every time you’re always around the corner being like, “False! Read some other books!” You know? [laughing] So I thought it’s worth bringing up as we trash some unsuccessful original fiction.
B: Yeah.
ELM: But you know, there’s unsuccessful things of all sorts, right? And what’s “success” when you get right down to it.
B: So I refer to fanfic as the “cool cousin” of literary fiction. [FK laughs] Because they can like, they’re the person in the family that can get away with anything, because they’re the youngest, and… [laughs] And they’re the baby of the family. I have a family of, I have a youngest cousin and he can do like—he does anything. He does whatever he wants, and everyone’s like “Oh, how cute!” [laughs] But, you know, literary fiction is like, you know, has the burden of responsibility, of carrying culture in a certain way. So.
You talked about decision fatigue, I think some of the issue is empathy exhaustion in some way in that if you are really invested in a major universe, you don’t have to start all over anywhere, whereas every time you pick up an original book, you have to start from the ground up. And so that takes a certain amount of energy, whereas it doesn’t take any energy at all to pick up a new episode of something. You know? There’s, there’s, you can watch two episodes, two hour-long episodes of a Netflix show and it feels different than watching a two-hour film, because of that emotional investment. So you have to be, you have to be reintroduced to a whole new setting, all new characters.
And I think in a world where we have so much content, and there are certain paywalls sometimes to that content, and in the case of literary fiction it’s sometimes really hard to get into these stories, because they’re not about the hook, they’re not about the draw. If you can find that meaning in a universe and a ship you’re already invested in, it’s always easier to go for that, you know? Because you know the kind of people who are writing fanfic. You know that they’re not gonna let you down. Whereas when you pick up a book, it’s completely new. It could have a sad ending, it could have misogyny, it could have triggering content cause it doesn’t have those warnings. So there is a kind of security in fanfic that I understand how difficult it can be to move away from that. I think I read fanfic, nothing but fanfic, for maybe two or three years, and when I picked up a book again I was like “God, this is hard! It’s so hard to get through these things!” You know?
FK: Yeah! That’s, well, it’s funny because I think that you put your finger on something that had kept me out of reading literary fiction that I didn’t already know about for a long time, because it’s all of those things, but it’s also that actually, you know: literary fiction doesn’t come to you. Do you know what I mean? Like—I mean I know it does for you, Elizabeth, because everybody that you know is in like, the literary universe and like, you are…it just comes to you, it shows up.
ELM: Yes, I don’t have any friends who aren’t in the “literary universe.”
FK: I don’t know. You, like, were a book critic and like—people send you things! I don’t know. You, you, you somehow know all these things.
ELM: It literally comes to me. It comes to me in the mail and I don’t want it. I’m like “No thank you! I didn’t ask for this!”
B: It is, it is very contained in that if you are not already in this community…it takes a time capital investment to get into literature in the same way it takes a time capital investment to get into fandom.
FK: Exactly. And so it can be really hard if you, like, especially if you didn’t—you know, if you go through a period and you like don’t…and then you’re like “I wanna pick up a book and read a book! I’d like to try a literary novel! Let’s pick up…a book!” And even if you like go, I don’t know, read, read whatever The Millions or something where there’s book reviews, the Times Literary Supplement, I don’t know. If you read something like that…
ELM: That’s a dated reference, thank you.
FK: …you still look through it and you’re like, “I guess I’ll pick…this one?” You know? Because you just don’t know the context. So like, I mean, you know, it’s funny because now, when I do read literary fiction, it’s pretty much because Elizabeth said something about this [laughs] and it helps!
ELM: Cool.
FK: Because even if you said something bad about it, it’s usually at least a little bit interesting, and even if I have no idea how to like…
ELM: Yeah yeah yeah, no! Like, I’m like, “Oh, I spent every day for two weeks crying on the R train while reading this,” and you were like “I’d love to read that.”
FK: I read that, it was great.
ELM: “I’d love to read it.”
FK: It was great. [ELM laughs] I cried so much and I tried to explain to everybody I knew why I was crying and I couldn’t. This is, we’re talking about—
ELM: A Little Life.
FK: Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life, yeah.
B: No! No, do not talk to me about that novel. Do not. [all laugh] I could, I could spend this entire podcast talking about that novel and the problems that I have with it, sorry Hanya Yanagihara.
ELM: Oh wow, wow. We’re gonna defend it.
B: Are you?!
ELM: No, it’s, it’s very divisive. Very divisive. Yeah!
B: OK, OK.
ELM: No, we’re not gonna talk about A Little Life. We’re not.
FK: I don’t, I don’t know what my, I don’t know what my opinions were about it, because I—I have no craft opinions, my opinion was it made me cry like a fuckin’ baby.
B: OK. That’s fair!
FK: So like, that’s all my opinion is: I cried a lot, I usually don’t cry when I’m reading novels or anything else, I cried.
ELM: No. We’re not discussing this.
FK: A lot.
ELM: I have craft opinions about it but we’re not discussing it. [all laugh]
B: We can get into it at some point. Because I would really—
ELM: Yeah.
B: I would really like to hear the perspective of somebody who enjoyed it, because there are so many things that I did love about it, but that failed in so many ways. OK. But here’s what I was gonna say! [ELM laughs] Here’s what I was gonna say: Oh! No. I can’t talk about it. I’m not gonna talk about it. I was gonna say something about—
FK: I just, just, just to translate for our listeners, you’re not seeing the facial expressions that are happening here, it’s like the facial equivalent of like slowly cranking a chain back into its like crank…I don’t know what they’re called. You know. Like, winch.
ELM: What kind of chain are we talking about?
FK: I don’t know, a big chain.
ELM: Oh, all right.
FK: Maybe, maybe, I don’t know, maybe the kind of chain like an anchor chain on a boat? Just pullin’ it back into its winch?
ELM: Oh good, make it about a boat.
FK: It’s about a boat.
ELM: Thank you.
FK: Just for you.
ELM: OK.
B: I remember what I was gonna say! OK. I think it’s really telling also, whenever anybody recommends anything to me, or if I start to watch a movie or a new TV show, like, I immediately go to AO3 and see how many fics are there, because if it’s disappointing I need somebody to fix it for me. It’s also how I get to new things, like I’m obsessed with The Witcher right now, but like it’s still, it’s still an infant fandom, and…
ELM: Yeah but like, give it like two…
B: I know.
ELM: By the time this comes out there’s gonna be like 50,000 new stories, genuinely.
B: I’m excited about it but it’s also like, I’m one of those people, I’m not like a trendsetter in any way, I can’t see something and just immediately be like “I’m going to write like a 70,000 word fic about this.” Like, I have to read what other people have written, and then the ideas start happening! But right now, I’m like, I’ve watched the show now twice and I have no ideas for fic, what do I do?! Because now I’m just obsessed and I have no outlet. [laughs] It’s very unpleasant, and I don’t know how I lived like this so long!
But yeah, I think that there’s a certain safety net in fanfic because there are genre constraints. It is a genre of freedom, you can do whatever you want, but—and I know things have changed, now there is definitely a pull towards happy endings, focusing on a ship rather than plot or other mechanics, you know. Usually they do follow the form of like, some kind of coming together of two characters or more. It still functions as a genre, you know? There are still certain expectations. And because of those expectations, I think there is a certain comfort in always having fic to go to.
ELM: You know, it’s interesting, because we talk a lot about this, and about changing norms and all this, but it has been interesting over the last few months, I’ve been—I don’t know if you know that I never posted any of my fic ever until two months ago.
B: Oh, really?!
ELM: After writing fanfiction for two decades. Yeah. That’s right. So I’m a special case. But it’s been very interesting to me, because I’ve been posting this like, novel-length fic, and the—some of the comments have been, they’ve been utterly convinced that it, the ship is going to break up by the end!
B: I get this every single…
ELM: Do you get this too?!
B: Every single multi-chapter.
ELM: I don’t, I don’t understand. This is fascinating, OK. I wanna hear more about this. Have you gotten this too, Flourish?
FK: Dude, people did this on my like, Reylo romance novel. And I was like, “I don’t know, have you ever…” [ELM laughs] “Have you ever read a Regency romance novel? I understand there’s some Gothic elements and you might think it’s a Gothic, but even in Gothics, usually they end up together but unhappy! So like…I don’t know why you think that this is gonna take a hard right turn, but you do you, you’re clearly really emotionally invested, maybe you’re just expressing the anxiety you feel at this moment?”
B: Yes.
FK: “Even though knowing it will be resolved?”
ELM: That must be it, right? Because—
FK: It has to be.
ELM: There’s no way. And I do find it very interesting because I don’t think everyone, I mean, so we’ve talked a lot about this on the podcast, about how when we talk about fanfiction—I do think there’s inconsistent or like, mismatched expectations. Fanfiction is not the romance genre.
B: Right.
ELM: Right? You can’t sit here and say, right, that fanfiction needs to have a happy ending. But you can sit there and say a romance novel does, because…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That’s what romance just has decided is the official, that’s what makes it a romance, right? But I think there’s probably thousands if not millions of people who are involved with fanfiction who do think that it should have a happy ending.
B: Yes.
ELM: Right? And so that’s why I find this to be such a fascinating, it’s like you’re real time—it’s almost to me like you’re watching a panto. Like a pantomime. You know? Where you’re like, you know a panto, right? Flourish, do you know panto?
FK: I know panto.
ELM: Betts, do you know?
B: I don’t think so.
ELM: So in Britain at Christmas they have this thing called “panto,” pantomime, where they do like certain shows like, there’s Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk, they’re all stories you’ve heard of. And they’ve got a lot of elements that are very, it’s for children but adults take their kids. And there’s always drag, and there’s always very cartoonish villains, you know. And it’s, there’s a lot of audience participation, right? So like, the villain will like sneak up, you know. And then the kids will shout. You’re supposed to shout, like, “Look behind you!” Except with a British accent, right, because you’re a small British child. [B: laughs]
And it’s just like, it’s so communally scripted and it’s hundreds of years, you know, these are very very old performance traditions of, you’re signaling everything and you’re actively responding and you’re responding in a scripted way. And I wonder if this is people…people’s unconscious performance of that, is… “Oh no!! Are they gonna break up?!” And you’re like… “No. Obviously, they’re having a fight. They’ll be fine. Have you read a fanfiction? Don’t worry,” right? You know? And then what are you supposed to do as the author, just be like “I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen, but of course they’ll be fine.”
B: Yeah.
ELM: Right? [laughs]
B: I do think there’s multiple layers to it. In some cases, the freedom of fanfic to do whatever you want and not having an editorial board to approve of what you’re posting in any way—there’s also a danger in, I think when somebody says “Are they going to have a happy ending,” in some ways they’re asking “Are you going to, like, give up on this?” Not necessarily abandon it, but are you going to rush an ending? You know? Or are you going to just sink this ship to be mean? Or…because it’s just one person, it’s not, it’s not an editor going through it, we’re not working under the romance genre where we’re gonna end up with a paperback on a shelf.
So I really think this stress comes from, yes, the performativity of “Oh my God, is this going to have a sad ending?” But also the freedom of the form lends itself to, yeah, maybe you’re gonna sink this ship just for fun. And so that’s where that anxiety comes from.
I also have this sense that the people who leave those comments tend to be on the younger side of things? And potentially not as familiar or have read the hundreds of fanfics that maybe we have? Or thousands… [laughs]
ELM: Hundreds? C’mon.
B: Tens of thousands! [all laugh]
FK: Yeah, hundreds of thousands. It is, it is kind of funny though, because like—yeah. Maybe millions. It is kind of funny though because, ah, it’s not like that has always been the standard thing, right? Like, when I think back to like, my first—you know, my first fandom, right? X-Files fandom, that was absolutely not, it was not expected that necessarily people would get together by the end. You know. There was a lot more like, non-romantic fic. And there were whole genres that were based around like, there’s going to be a case file.
B: Yes!
FK: And maybe there were these other things that would happen in it, but pretty much it was going to be a case file. The kinds of case files that you would see on the show. But with more detail because it’s like a novel length, you know. Or it’s going to be a conspiracy story, it’s going to be like, a thriller. Like the movie. And maybe these things will happen, primarily that’s the point. And it’s interesting because it really has—I don’t know, that’s the question, right? Because I never go into a fic expecting those things anymore. But I used to, and when I read old fics I’m often like, “Oh yeah! There was—there was a time when we did this!” [laughs]
B: Yeah, and I think a lot of that has to do with if you interact in fandom via AO3 as your central hub. Like, we’re living in a time when it is so easy to be multifandom and to move fandoms.
FK: Yeah.
B: That emotional investment that I talked about is so easy to transfer from one place to the next. It is—the experience of Star Wars fandom is not that different than Marvel fandom. They’re both enormous, you have to find your own subcommunity, it’s not a holistic community. Whereas I think when you read fanfic on these archive sites, and you interacted with only maybe a handful of people—or if you were on LiveJournal and you’d have private communities—you would develop genre constraints within smaller spaces. And so now the wider the space we’re in, the wider those expectations and potentially the more, the more we’re learning to conform and sadly police each other when we choose to break the expected form.
ELM: I think that’s a really good point. There’s, there was a letter we got—oh God, it was probably two years ago now? Right? It was right when I got into the X-Men fandom.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: We talked about AUs, when I was learning to love AUs for the first time in 20 years in fandom.
B: Yay!
ELM: I, I still don’t love them in every fandom.
B: That’s fair.
ELM: But some fandoms they really work.
B: Yeah.
ELM: But, we got this letter from someone which we’ve talked about multiple times since, cause it really struck me and I think—Flourish, did it strike you as much as it struck me?
FK: Yes.
ELM: It struck me.
FK: Struck. It struck both of us. It was like a one-two punch.
B: I’m listening.
ELM: So—the letter said, it was something like “You know, I probably am doing it wrong, but I read by trope and I often don’t know the source material and I just click on the trope I want. And I—” Basically, I mean, the letter was saying “this is what I do and it’s probably wrong but…” and we were like, “First of all, it’s not wrong!” There’s, there’s no wrong way to do it. But also, we—it’s really really stuck with me, because I think that person…not only are they not alone, I think that they represent a growing number of people and the way they use the—and the AO3 in particular.
FK: Yes.
ELM: But not necessarily that. You could do the same thing, I mean actually, you know Wattpad much better than I do Flourish, could you read by trope on Wattpad? Not as easily.
FK: Yeah, I don’t think as easily. And you know, actually, there’s a lot of fanfic culture out there that’s not the Archive Of Our Own, for all that the AO3 is really big and important. There’s lots of people on Reddit, on Fanfiction.net, on message boards, and in those spaces—which, you know, I go dive into often for my work—it’s not the same. Right? There’s actually a wider variety of genres that are represented!
Not to say that it’s always the thing I want, because sometimes I’m like “Wow, I really do not care about your fantasy of being on the Star Trek Enterprise, young man. Don’t care!” You know? “The Star Trek Enterprise.” The starship Enterprise. [ELM laughs] I didn’t care.
ELM: You’re gonna get kicked out of the fandom, Flourish!
FK: I do care a little bit. You’re allowed to have your fun and like, that’s fine, but I don’t necessarily always wanna read it, you know? But, it’s cool that there’s a space fo that in a way that I feel like there’s not necessarily always a space for it within, like, the fanfic circles that I think we naturally have been reading in recently.
B: Yeah. And I recognize my, my scope of fandom is incredibly limited because how new I am? And that I’ve…
ELM: Well you’re not that new, I love that you prefaced it that way, but you’ve, you know, you’ve written so much fic and you’ve been around for, you know, you’ve been reading—it’s close to a decade! That’s a long time!
B: I’ve always had AO3 and Tumblr, though. And so…
ELM: Yeah.
B: And those are still tools that I use, and so I recognize, so when I found out there was a greater history to this thing that was like my entire life—like, I read so many Fanlore pages about the history of, of fandom and you know, that just sent me down rabbit hole after rabbit hole after rabbit hole, because I was so invested in this history that was so rich and interesting and so different from anything else I’d encountered. And that we could have this community of, of what is statistically women and non-binary—basically not cis men!—writing about sexuality and writing about all these things and the struggles that they’ve had to go through. And honestly, like, I annoy so many people because I go through that history. If I go to a bar with anyone… [all laugh] I get on this topic at all, like, I—two hours pass and I’m like “And then this, Strikethrough happened—” [laughs] “Our fandom foremother Astolat…”
FK: OMG Astolat is a fandom foremother now!
ELM: Flourish, it’s been quite some time.
FK: It has been, I guess so, but like—wow.
B: Right? And, and this is, this is my perspective, because I joined in 2013, is that, is that, there was this older space that I can never know. And like, I encountered it in some ways. Like, I read—oh, this is gonna take me forever to think of. That Lord of the Rings shitpost that was super famous, like one of the very first memes…you know, and I encountered it, but I wasn’t in it. I wasn’t part of the space.
FK: “Very Secret Diaries”?
B: Yes! “The Very Secret Diaries”! Oh my God.
FK: I love that you described “The Very Secret Diaries” as a Lord of the Rings shitpost. This is going to be recorded forever. Amazing.
ELM: Put that on Fanlore.
FK: Lord of the Rings shitpost.
ELM: “Referred to in 2020 by bettydays as…”
B: Were they not?! [laughing]
FK: I mean we didn’t have the term “shitposting” at the time!
ELM: I think it’s fine to, to retroactively apply the term “shitpost.”
FK: Retroactively call it a shitpost.
ELM: To things across the last several thousand years. There’s been a…
FK: Yeah.
ELM: There’s been a lot of shitposting. That’s undeniable.
B: I love those.
FK: It’s funny though because you’re talking about this really, there’s things in fandom that I feel this way about also. Like, I mean, I don’t know. I always bring up when we talk about how different fanfic is over time, I always talk about “The Weight,” you know, my favorite zine fanfic that you still can’t find online. I don’t know that many of them, because it’s hard to get them. And how weird it is and how like, it’s got—it’s interested in such different things than most fanfic is today and stuff. That’s a similar feeling, it’s interesting. I wonder…what is, what it’s gonna be like in 10 years when we are the, you know, unreachable back-in-ye-olde-Tumblr-days.
B: Yes. I think about that all the time. What is this gonna look like?
ELM: But the archiving technology—it’s so different, it’s, it’s so…the archiving is so deliberate.
B: Yeah.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: At least, at least for the AO3 I—obviously not on Tumblr and like, I don’t know. Did you see that big post going around that was a history of the last decade on Tumblr?
B: Yay! Yes.
ELM: It was like a panel for each of [laughs] I was like, “Oh, what a grim time we all had here for the last 10 years!” I didn’t join Tumblr till 2012—
B: Me too!
ELM: So I shouldn’t claim to have been there. Yeah, that’s right! But the deliberateness of the AO3 is, I mean, I—you know, like, Betty I don’t know if you know but I’m in a fandom that was most active in 2012. And even having that record and most of that fic was being posted—I mean, it was simultaneously being crossposted on, like, the, like, LiveJournal and on kinkmemes and stuff. But it was immediately being posted there, and to have that record of it—you can see, I mean, there are trends in the stuff that I’m reading from almost a decade ago that I see less of now.
B: Yeah.
ELM: But the fact that it’s so easy to see there and it’s so well-documented and it’s so easy to look at I do think makes a difference, as opposed to trying to do archeology from…
FK: Yeah, that’s true.
ELM: …hings that were crawled on, you know, whatever you call it, on the Internet Archive from, et cetera…Schnoogle? [all laugh]
FK: Well, or even, or even, or even well-documented things that had a sensible back end, it’s still hard to get things out of them.
ELM: Right. Oh, I’m sorry, did I insult Schnoogle? I just wanted to say that word out loud.
FK: Oh no no no, it was, that was a bunch of—it was a bunch of gum and string.
ELM: Yes. I am familiar, I was familiar with…
FK: [laughing] It was really a bunch of gum and string.
ELM: I hear you’re familiar with the webmaster, Flourish.
FK: Yeah. It was gum and string.
B: I do wonder about the future of the genre and if it’s going to go the way of genres that started in a similar way, like science fiction, which was also, you know, in the early days populated by people under pen names and very kind of looked-down-upon, and then slowly grew to what we, the way we see sci fi now, which is well-regarded—well, for some of us a well-regarded genre. [laughs]
And then same with comic books, you know. Comic books is another community that took time and also money capital investment and I think the example I always give is Stan Lee, whose pen name was Stan Lee because he made comics and he wanted to save his real name, Stanley Lieber, for what he would determine, like, his real grand literary work. You know. And then he literally, like, he legally changed his name to Stan Lee, because that’s who he was.
And so I’m so interested in the idea of like, a future where you know, the—the Destiel stripper AU I wrote is like—is actually like, widely read later on, you know. And I don’t want it to be, dear God. [FK laughs] When I say, when I say you should read “Persephone” by Yahtzee, when I say “A Cure for Boredom,” you know, are those things that in 20 years are going to be more widely regarded than they are now? Is, is fanfiction changing as a genre to be—because of the accessibility we have with the AO3–is it going to become more widespread and regarded more highly?
ELM: I feel like there’s an element, I think those analogies are really interesting. I feel like the money element does actually change things.
B: Yes.
ELM: But I also think that like you mentioning, you know, the accessibility of it—those genres also developed under very different technological circumstances, right? So if you have this kind of like, mass availability of a non-monetized literary genre, that’s like, there’s precedent, but also it’s like kind of rewriting the script a little bit. I could see a future where this stuff is taught in classrooms without it having a monetary trajectory like those genres, do you know what I mean? Just because of sheer, I don’t know. Kind of just making the case for non-monetized, right? We’re, we’re big defenders of the non-monetized fic space.
B: Yes.
ELM: Just existing.
B: Yeah.
ELM: Not necessarily saying people shouldn’t monetize, but you know what I mean…
FK: You know, I always make the joke that the one thing you can make less money at than fanfiction is poetry. [B: laughs] And that’s a thing that we teach all the time!
ELM: Quite true. Flourish, do you think your grandchildren will teach fanfiction at MIT?
FK: I don’t know, but I kinda hope so. Carrying on a family—
ELM: It’ll be a legacy.
FK: Family tradition. You know. We’ll be like an old fanfictional family.
ELM: They’ll teach classic literature—my grandmother’s Fred and George incest generator…
FK: Genuinely, totally gonna happen. [B: laughing]
ELM: Yeah.
FK: You heard it here first. See you in 60 years.
B: Fantastic.
ELM: You know, not, not two weeks ago, not one—no, two episodes ago rather, Flourish was cheering on a meteor to hit the earth in ten years. Now nine. So…
FK: Now I’ll be around at 93, going “In my day…”
B: Yeah!
ELM: [laughing] OK. We’re running short on time, but I wanna make sure we get a little bit to, back to the pedagogy element of it. And I think one of my questions would be: how do you feel writing these posts in a broader conversation within I would say the AO3-oriented fanfiction space where constructive criticism is verboten? This is something that we, you know, even in the last episode as we were mentioning that you were coming on, talking a little bit about—just for context, cause you probably haven’t heard it yet cause it just came out—but like…not that you have to listen to this podcast, but…
FK: You kinda do.
ELM: I feel like you kind of, you kind of get into this space where when there is no constructive criticism—and I’m not saying that people should be leaving critique on people’s fics, this is not what I’m advocating—but then you wind up with having very little space in broader conversations for actually talking about how to improve writing. And I think for all people’s things saying “I’m just here to have fun, and I don’t want anyone to leave mean comments on my fic,” I don’t think that means that people don’t want to become better writers. And so I’m wondering how you position yourself as you say, “Well, sometimes there are better ways to write things, and you can do whatever you want, but here’s how you can make it clearer for the reader.” Right? Like…
B: Yeah! So I definitely try to position things that, ah…position any kind of writing advice or pedagogy toward the goals that you want to achieve or what you should aim for, and your personal taste is the most important. So is the vision you have for your piece what’s coming out on the page? And if it’s not, how can you make your vision clearer? And how can you put it on the page that way? Cause I don’t necessarily believe that stories need to be immersive or need to be written a certain way. Because everyone has a different view of what they perceive to be good writing. I think—well, one, AO3 comments are not the place to receive critical feedback, because you might not necessarily understand that vision, you know? And so that’s why, you know, you guys mentioned that you beta for each other? Because you have that relationship, you understand…
ELM: Oh no no no. We don’t beta for each other.
FK: She edits my nonfiction.
B: OK.
ELM: Yes.
FK: And I edit yours.
ELM: Yes. That’s true. No. Flourish, you want me to beta for you?
FK: Possibly? Yes!
ELM: [laughs] All right!
FK: If it’s ever something, if I’m ever writing something that you would read!
B: But the point is that there is a time and space for all manner of criticism. And I think in fandom, if you don’t understand where a person is coming from and you don’t understand the greater function of their work or specifically what they’re speaking to, it’s very difficult to leave any kind of constructive criticism. And there is a school of thought that believes all criticism, you should listen to all criticism. But in fanfiction, which is defined in some ways by its earnestness and vulnerability, I think—I don’t necessarily think you have to go into it with that kind of thick skin. You know?
If you choose to be in spaces of criticism, if you publish a book, like, you need to be prepared for the fact that people aren’t gonna like it. You know? And hopefully by the time you get to, to traditional publishing a book, you can—you can set up those boundaries to say, “What people think of my work is not, has no bearing on who I am.” But when you’re writing in fanfic, which does not have that editorial board, which does not have that barrier, I think it’s a lot more difficult, because you’re not writing for a critical audience, you’re kind of writing for your friends. And so do you expect your friends to be assholes? You know? [laughs]
You should, your friends probably want you to be good at it, you know. So I do think, I do think when it comes to constructive criticism in fanfiction, yes, I agree that there are many writers who wanna get better. But they wanna get better on their own terms. And they wanna hear that the things they want out of their work are valid things to want in work. And they don’t necessarily have to be writing to a greater aim of, of what other people perceive “good writing” to be.
ELM: I think this is a really great answer. I just, how do you do it? Like, I feel like you, you strike a really great balance! Like, how are you doing this? Are you just particularly talented?
FK: Yeah, it really is kind of magical.
ELM: Yeah! [laughs]
B: Well, I, I, I try and live by the philosophy that, uh, all writing is valid and important and all interests are valid and important. And you know, you just have to work with what the other person is doing, what the writer is doing, and try and understand what they want from their work. In some cases, especially with students—I think students are particularly, are a big challenge, because they, they come into a classroom and they want an A. They don’t want to write anything.
FK: Right.
B: They just want a grade. And so I have to, my, my prompt in my classroom—the big project is “write your biggest risk,” which is what is the thing that you are most terrified to write? And I—sometimes, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I say, “If you knew you were going to get an A in this class, what would you write? If that was not an issue, what is the thing that you want to say?” And so when writers start asking themselves that question of like, “What is the work that I’m doing?” Not just like, “I want Rey and Ben Solo to kiss,” you know. What is the work of that? How is that actually speaking to how you felt about Rise of Skywalker or whatever? And understanding the greater context that you’re working within.
It’s easy to strike that balance if you have—if you can, if you really can accept that everyone has their personal aesthetic. Everyone is developing something greater and speaking to a larger genre and lexicon.
ELM: That feels like, I mean, like, you didn’t explicitly say it, but that feels like directly taken from the ethos of—what you bring into the classroom, directly taken from fanfiction in terms of an approach to writing. Right? It’s what, what would you do if—right?
B: Yeah, and I can’t stand like—pretention is like the antithesis of, it’s like everything I hate in the world. Because if you can, if you can find what somebody is interested in, the thing that really sparks them to start talking, you can get them to generate ideas. You can get them to write. And so a lot of what I do as a teacher, and specifically like when I’m interacting with people online or writing these posts, is trying to get to that, that core spark of what is gonna make you want to immediately exit out of your Tumblr window and start typing. You know? That’s the goal when I talk to anybody, is like: what is the one, the one “ah-ha” moment that you’re gonna be like, “I need to write this right now or I’m gonna pass out.” Like, that’s, that’s the goal. [laughs]
ELM: This is making me wanna immediately wanna close this conversation and go work on something.
B: Yes!
FK: I was gonna say, I, I kind of—I really wanna go write something now.
ELM: It’d be really meta.
B: All writing is valid and important!
ELM: Yeah! I mean I was already gonna work on something afterwards, but now I feel especially inspired! So…
FK: Yeah, maybe I’ll go back to my roots and write some Snape/Hermione.
B: Oh my God I’m gonna cry!
ELM: [laughs] Yeah! If this leads to one more Snape/Hermione fic in the world in the year 2020, that—I think that you’ll have accomplished your goal.
FK: I will go down with this ship. [laughs]
ELM: Oh man, incredible. OK. All right. I’m sorry to say though: we really do need to go.
FK: And write fic.
ELM: [laughs] But this is, has genuinely been inspiring. I think other people are gonna find this equally inspiring. Like, I hope so. I hope everyone turns this off and goes and writes some stuff.
B: I hope so too! It’s what I want of the whole world, because when you—when you write the things that you wanna write and you can see the things that are inside you made manifest, you become a better person. Like, you have to. That’s just part of the process.
ELM: Oh!
FK: Oh, wow.
ELM: That’s right! When you put more Snape/Hermione in the world, Flourish…
FK: OK, you know what? Elizabeth? No.
ELM: I respect your ship, don’t worry! Don’t worry! Yeah, don’t worry about it!
FK: It has been a delight having you on the podcast, Betts, thank you so much for coming.
B: Thank you so much for having me, this has been so fun!
[Interstitial music]
ELM: All right, so, is that everything I promised it would be?
FK: It was everything that you promised it would be. Betts is delightful, and extremely funny, and full of really good thoughts about writing!
ELM: Yeah! Kinda makes me sad that we’ve never, we’ve never been in the same fandoms, because she’s a great writer and I wish there was more overlap so I could, like, read all of her fic. But I’m not that kind of fic writer where I just read things that I don’t, I don’t know or care about.
FK: Yeah, you know, it really—talking to her, so, one of my oldest unfinished fanfics is a Dark Angel fic.
ELM: Holy shit.
FK: In which I—yeah! In which I, so it turns out we’ve got lots of things in common, so I can’t believe that I have not like, more deeply engaged with Betts before. So yeah, this, this made me think about, you know: should I write some Snape/Hermione, or should I dust off that old Dark Angel fic, just for Betts?
ELM: Wow. Those are the two genders. [laughs]
FK: Those are the two—Dark Angel and Snape/Hermione! No, I don’t know if I’m actually gonna do that because I just moved and I have a lot of things to do in my house to make it liveable. [laughs] But, you know…
ELM: You need to take some you time.
FK: Dark Angel’s been off the air for many years, so it’s not like this is a rush.
ELM: She’s also written a bunch of—you liked The 100, she’s written a bunch of Clarke/Bellamy. I don’t know if that’s your jam.
FK: I could—I could get into that possibly, although I don’t really…
ELM: You could jam to that. Wanna read 100 fic?
FK: I could possibly get into that, yeah.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Only if it’s a really good, like, really good bisexual Clarke.
ELM: I have no idea.
FK: OK. That’s my, that’s the thing. Like, het Clarke? Like, people who ignore the whole bi Clarke thing? No go for me.
ELM: I will say that we had a, um, one of Betts’ fics recced in “The Rec Center” just by chance last week, and it was—
FK: Oh, lovely!
ELM: It was an ace Clarke! It was a modern AU, if memory serves.
FK: Mmm. I could buy that, possibly!
ELM: Maybe we’ll, we’ll put it in the show notes, so people can check out that. We’ll put all of, all of Betts’s links in the show notes.
FK: That’s great. I am going to probably go and fall into a hole of Betts fic now.
ELM: [laughs] Betts hole. Have fun.
FK: Betts hole. [all laugh] All right. So just really quickly to remind everyone: go pledge to Patreon, and go—
ELM: If you have the means.
FK: Yeah, well, duh! I mean, obviously, don’t, like, don’t take food out of your mouth to give it to our Patreon. That would be absurd.
ELM: Spend your last dollar on us.
FK: Yeah. Don’t do that. And, uh, give us a voicemail: 1-401-526-FANS, or email us at fansplaining at gmail dot com. Subscribe to us on iTunes and…
ELM: Send us some questions, honestly! We’re probably overdue for another AMA episode, so anything that you’ve been thinking about. Cause we get a lot of questions or comments that are related to things we cover, but if there’s anything that you’ve been mulling over or whatever…especially questions, sometimes we get suggestions for episodes and often they’re not really things that we think we’d be able to pull off for a whole episode, but we appreciate those anyway—but things that can be a shorter segment, we’d love to kind of dig into some of these, these topics. So.
FK: It’s true.
ELM: Send it over, please.
FK: All right, that fic really is calling me now.
ELM: All right, have a nice time. Please report back.
FK: [laughs] Talk to you later, Elizabeth.
ELM: OK bye.
[Outro music]
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