What is Fan Fiction?
The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as 'stories involving popular fictional characters that are written by fans and often posted on the internet.' It is sometimes abbreviated to 'fanfic.'
I'd define it as a wealth of stories derived from other celebrated or well-known sources. When another author's work is used as a springboard for something new and original, that's fan fiction.
Why Do People Write Fan Fiction?
a) I'll start with the reason which may first spring to the minds of many. It is easier in some ways, to craft our writing to fit a worldview we're already familiar with, rather than creating a totally fresh world with brand new characters. When we and our potential readers already know and love a cast of familiar faces and their setting, we are free to dive straight into the action, because there is already a fan base.
Some fan fiction authors simply love the characters in pre-existing fictional worlds, feel they can't get enough of them and wish to add even more beyond the canon. Howard Pyle's 'The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood' fits this category. The legends of the heroic outlaw and his loyal band had been circulating since the Middle Ages when he decided to compile his own omnibus of stories in the late nineteenth century.
b) Sometimes authors feel triggered by an original canon. When source material seems sadly shortsighted or lacking, they may decide it needs to be threshed out, or even totally redressed. If something in a story presses our buttons, taking steps to set it right in our own way may be a pro-active move, or skillful literary protest. This may be by re-telling the tale from the point of view of another character.
A famous example is Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys' answer to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Rhys explores Edward Rochester's doomed first marriage from the point of view of Bertha, aka the mad wife in the attic. This fan fiction, now a classic itself, brings out Bertha's vulnerability, her powerlessness and lack of advocates to stand up for her.
Another revealing example is Longbourn by Jo Baker, who decided to re-tell the story of Pride & Prejudice from the servants' perspective. When events made famous by Jane Austen play out against the lives of the Bennet family's hired help, we readers get a chance to see familiar characters in a way we've never considered before.
A very recent example is Adventures of Mary Jane by Hope Jahren. This author is a great Mark Twain fan, yet the gullibility and passivity of the appealing character Mary Jane in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn galled her. Jahren explains in her introduction how she decided, 'We can fix this!' In her mind, Twain's version left much to be desired, which she deftly expanded upon without changing his canon. This includes making Mary Jane more intrepid by giving her a set of her own adventures.
c) Sometimes we may simply wish to draw from source material as a creative way of making some new social commentary or observation. Barbara Kingsolver's award-winning Demon Copperhead mirrors Charles Dickens' David Copperfield from start to finish. Using the framework of a famous Victorian classic to tell her own contemporary story about the deplorable foster care system and horrific opioid crisis in the Appalachian region of America is Kingsolver's ingenious way of suggesting that human nature hasn't changed.
Barbara Kingsolver certainly isn't the first author to have had the brainwave of adopting a well-established older story to mold her own take on it. The popular Broadway musical West Side Story is a mid-twentieth century re-telling of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, focusing on New York city's rival gangs. And speaking of Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew became Pygmalion which morphed into the musical, My Fair Lady, starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. And not all that long ago, American author Anne Tyler did her own take on it in Vinegar Girl.
One of the most ambitious examples of all may be C.S. Lewis' re-telling of the Christian gospels as fantasy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with his majestic lion Aslan taking on the role of our Lord and Savior.
d) A fourth reason authors may decide to write fan fiction is to bring out more nuances or finer points from the original material which fellow fans may relish. Sometimes inspiration about book friends we all love and admire seem too good to keep to ourselves. This is the main reason why I decided to have a go.
I hope I've succeeded in showing that other important reasons for writing fan fiction exist than simple self-indulgence in prolonging our attachments to our favorite characters (although isn't the fun of that enough?) And I've hopefully proven that some quality, highly acclaimed examples may even fly under the radar of being fan fictions, although that is certainly what they are.
Introducing my own attempt.
Two side characters from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women series have become main characters in a spin-off which I've shared on Archive of Our Own, an extensive site devoted to fan fiction. I always thought my two young men (for I now consider them mine) had huge potential, but Alcott was burned out by the time she wrote their incidents in Jo's Boys. She'd written just enough to capture my imagination, so this year I indulged my passion and developed their storylines into an all consuming project I named Longing For Home.
The first of these is Jo March's nephew, Emil, who follows his dream of going off to sea, but gets caught in a shipwreck. I've extended his couple of chapters from Jo's Boys to include a supporting cast of new characters, and a longer, slower burn of his romance with Mary, the captain's daughter. The other character is Nat Blake, a destitute former foundling who the Bhaers send overseas to study music. Nat is a talented violinist who battles anxiety and an inferiority complex from his impoverished background.
Giving these two young men voices of their own has been an extremely satisfying writing project, especially since I set out to stick within the parameters of canon. I resolved to weave in as much from Alcott's original source material as I could without ever deviating outside of the lines. I like to think Louisa May Alcott might have been happy with my result, because it's my tribute to her writing.
If I've stimulated your curiosity, please check out Longing for Home. You don't need to be familiar with Alcott's work to enjoy it. Archive of Our Own (AO3) is full of gifts such as this. Having spent time reading stories by many others before I ever dreamed of having a try, I now regard fan fiction authors as an extremely generous bunch of people who I'm happy to count myself among. For writing free novels and stories for fans to enjoy is surely a painstaking random act of kindness and labor of love.
And if you don't choose to commit to something so long at the moment, you might like to start with this shorter fan fiction I wrote. It's the perfect size to have with a cup of tea and slice of cake. And it features somebody we surely all know well.
Keep your eye out for my further upcoming posts about fan fiction. I will soon share some of my initial experiences about the fan fiction site, where I initially feared to tread but am now so glad that I did. It is a venue full of pseudonyms, and the one I've chosen (Ada Sage) is combination of my grandmother's given name plus the embodiment of wisdom, which also happens to rhyme with her maiden name, which was Ada Gage.
More later. (And by the way, every fan fiction I've mentioned in this blog post, I aim to review.)
