The Publication World is Built Upon 15-Year-Old Girls

Do you want to know a fun fact about me? In 2018, I discovered fanfiction.net. Yes, I was late to the party. No, I did not find Tumblr or Archive of Our Own or Wattpad. I found fanfiction.net, and it became a site I lived and breathed. By the end of Year 13, I had developed a following. I was writing Hunger Games SYOTs (Submit Your Own Tributes), which you won’t be familiar with if you're like the majority of the population.

Essentially, fanfiction.net acts as a large forum where you can interact and share your stories with a community. SYOTs capitalise on this, allowing others to submit their own characters to the Hunger Games story that you write. That's exactly what I did. I would stay up late at night creating my own tributes and excitedly sending them off to other people's stories, curious to see what the authors would do with them. People would submit their own characters to my stories, and I would watch as they commented and interacted, cheering on their own creations.

I see this as a wonderful allegory for what fanfiction can be: a platform to take other people's characters, expand upon them, and give them a new life. It's a tool for writing and for nurturing new authors. By the end of Year 13, I had finished my story. It spanned 55 chapters, received 306 reviews, amounted to 256,522 words, and even included a subplot about the queer President of the Capitol. 

To date, this is probably one of my greatest achievements and the best thing I've ever done to develop my writing. I was able to take Suzanne Collins' world-building concepts and breathe my own life into them. I focused on what I enjoyed most: creating characters and mapping out their lives (and deaths).

So, where has this led me? Well, thanks to the skills I developed during that insane year of fanfiction writing and the validation from the comments, I was able to further pursue my writing. And here I am today, writing to you in Salient.

The fanfiction to author pipeline is real. Many globally successful books have been published off the back of fanfiction. This beautiful passage I'm about to quote would never have existed without fanfiction. 

“Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly.

“No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck… hard. Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.”

My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so… hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified.

“You want to play on your Xbox?” I ask. He laughs, loudly.

“No, Anastasia, no Xbox, no Playstation. Come…”

Yes, for anyone who's been living under a rock (or perhaps not chronically online), that was a passage from E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey. It started as fanfiction, titled ‘Master of the Universe’, based on Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. It was mostly written on a BlackBerry phone. 

The author of popular series The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare, initially gained recognition by publishing Harry Potter fanfiction before moving on to her six-book series, which printed 24 million copies worldwide. Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife, the second book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, was inspired by Pullman's own fanfiction. After by Anna Todd was inspired by a One Direction fanfiction. It even extends to streaming blockbusters: Netflix's The Kissing Booth was based on the book of the same name by Beth Reekles, who first published it on Wattpad in 2010 at the age of 15.

This is just a small list of well-known authors who have used fanfiction as a launchpad to create their own published writing. Whether you're a fan or not, you’ve got to acknowledge the commercial success of these series, even if they weren't always critically acclaimed.

Surely bigger named authors must look down upon this craft, right? After all, Suzanne Collins is the one who did all the hard work to come up with the world that I reimagined. While I couldn't find any information from Collins herself regarding whether she wanted to read my fanfiction (including the cringey parts I wrote), I prefer to admire how much effort I put into it and be kind to my younger self. In life, that's an attitude we can all adopt.

C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, actually encouraged fanfiction, often writing back to his young fans and supporting them to create their own tales in Narnia. Leigh Bardugo, the author of Shadow and Bone, is honoured by fanfiction. In a now-deleted blog post, she explained, "I'm delighted that anyone would feel invested enough in my characters or the world I created to want to write stories based around them—even if it's because they don't like where I took the narrative (who got killed, who got kissed, etc)." Neil Gaiman, Rainbow Rowell, and Marissa Meyer all write fanfiction, and in Neil Gaiman's case, some of it gets published.

But my favourite take on fanfiction comes from Henry Jenkins, American media scholar at the University of Southern California, who stated, "Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk." With that argument, the most anti-establishment thing we can all do is pick up our laptops or pens and papers and start writing fanfiction.

There are mixed reviews out there, and many grumpy authors will demonise young fanfiction authors like me. In fact, George R.R. Martin describes fanfiction as "training wheels" and believes that authors need to write without them. But, George R.R. Martin, aren't training wheels a vital part of learning how to ride a bike? Personally, I believe that when you publish something, you surrender it to the audience. It's no longer yours, it's the readers' to interpret as they wish. And there's deep beauty in that.

We often talk about ‘killing our darlings’ in the literary world, but we also need to release them. We need to love and cherish the author's process, and then we need to set it free and watch the magic that can come from it. We need to honour and acknowledge the authors who have helped us get to this stage of being able to publish our own literature. But we also need to feel a sense of freedom, the freedom to make mistakes and practise with other characters. To morph and develop them until they become something of our own. 

Ultimately, my argument boils down to my own experiences. Fanfiction has been an invaluable tool that has brought me to where I am today. When used respectfully, it becomes a beautiful medium that encourages and inspires the next generation of young writers, even if they are currently 15-year-old girls.