Fandom Meme, 15 follow-up questions

asakiyume asked a couple of follow-up questions for the fandom meme question 15 yesterday (“15. What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?”), which I thought I’d answer in their own post.

15a. Had you been writing original fiction before 19, but Torchwood gave you your first push to write fanfic, or---?

Oh yes, I had written three execrable novels before I was 19. When I was in third grade I wrote a Holocaust novel; Number the Stars was very formative. When I was in eighth grade I wrote a secondary world fantasy novel, about which I remember almost nothing, although I’ve still got some old maps from the story. When I was 16 I wrote Julia, the tale of a telekinetic girl forced, forced I tell you, to go to an ordinary high school after her teachers at the Academy decide that she is just a little too disdainful of the hoi polloi.

(Julia may have been a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, I can neither confirm nor deny.)

I read a lot of fanfic in high school, and I wrote a few short pieces for RL friends, particularly for The West Wing. But The West Wing was an intimidatingly high-quality canon to post fic for (and the fic was intimidatingly high quality too!), whereas Torchwood, and I say this with love, was a hot mess.


15b. How did your original fiction and your fan fiction feed baby-writer you?

Okay, so the thing about fanfiction is that (presuming you are writing for a reasonably active canon) there are people who want to read it. You do not have to buttonhole your friends in the locker bay and bribe them with cookies and browbeat them six months later (my teenage self had no shame) when they still haven’t read your latest magnum opus, and suspect on the basis of their guilty twitchy look that actually they did read it, and hated it, and will never, never tell you.

In the world of fanfic! In the world of fanfic, absolute strangers to you will read your work voluntarily. They will leave comments! Sometimes those comments will consist solely of keysmashes because you made them feel SO MANY feelings! Sometimes they curse your name because you made them cry, and you lift your face to heaven and cackle with satisfaction like a minor evil god.