My Fanfic Manifesto (or, Unlearning the Shame of Writing For Yourself)

My first fanfic was like most young writers’ first fanfics: bad.

If you have read one shitty, schlocky Phantom of the Opera fanfiction, eagerly written in the afterglow of a tween’s first exposure to the Broadway supersmash, you have read mine: a sequel or prequel or alternate universe rectifying the musical’s bittersweet ending and setting its misunderstood, Byronic artist up with a girl (typically named something like Rose, Aria, Belle, etc.) who would actually appreciate him, unlike that Chad-chaser Christine. The conflict is never an arc as much as it is a line from Point A to Point B - (Insert Ingenue Here) meets the Phantom, immediately falls in love with him, and sets out to put this poor, broken little teacup back together using the power of her incorruptible pure heart. The dream lady who was absolutely not a stand-in for eleven year old me was, much to my delight, successful within about three chapters, ending the untitled story just as quickly as it began.

For many budding writers, fanfiction is their first foray into long-term storytelling outside of the demands of English class, experimenting with the concept that you can actually write for fun, on your own free time. Sure, lots of us wrote one page short stories and poems as little kids, but what fanfiction offers is undeniably tantalizing to the formative creative mind: an opportunity to play with a ready-made cast of well-rounded and appealing characters, in a world you already love, using a medium which makes your story feel more real and legitimate.

At the time I wrote it, I was reentering public school after doing most of middle school at home - I already had a fairly small number of local friends, but I had moved up a grade and left most of my peers behind. The funny thing about recognizing for the first time that you’re well and truly on your own is that you don’t immediately go on the defensive, especially not after spending some time away from regular social interaction. You’re acutely aware of the distance between yourself and the rest of the world, but when you’re younger you figure that the best you can do is carry on and keep being friendly. And in your eagerness to get to know other kids, you may wind up oversharing certain things about yourself to invite them to open up about themselves.

Like, say, your horrible, horrible Phantom of the Opera fanfic.

A group of boys who generally got along well with most of the eighth graders, myself included, approached me sitting alone at lunch one afternoon, my pink journal with colorful birds flying across the hardcover open in front of me. They asked politely if they could read my story, and I eagerly agreed - what was I gonna do, say no to a peer review? I peeked towards their table as they began to huddle over the journal, wondering if I would observe any reaction, but before long the school’s special education teacher strode across the cafeteria and pulled the book away from them, looking stern. My stomach clenched instantly: I thought I had done something wrong, even though Rose/Aria/Belle’s tryst with the Phantom was so chaste a Catholic nun would have rolled her eyes at it.

“They had a marker out,” the teacher said as she returned it to me. “It looked like they were going to scribble all over your book.”

The journal was still untouched, safe in my arms - but the knot in my chest didn’t untangle itself until we were home hours later.

The cultural identity of fanfiction has really bloomed from the time I put my Phantom fantasies to paper to now - while fic has been around even before the dawn of contemporary fandom, the current social media landscape has, as with many things, expedited its rise to the public consciousness. Much like the rest of fan culture nowadays, writing fic at any age isn’t just acceptable, it’s in vogue. Those who were early pioneers without the luxury of the internet must never have expected the word “fanfiction” to make its way into the public vernacular, much less the medium itself. No, its wider audience and accessibility don’t come without drawbacks, but when well known names like Chloe Zhao and Michael Sheen cop to reading fanfic, or even writing their own, you have to marvel at how far it’s come.

But while the community has become prouder and more popular than ever, I struggle to shrug off the stigma, loosen up, and have a little fun consuming and writing fic - a stigma which I’ll admit is largely self-imposed.

I don’t even know what I have to be embarrassed about when I put it on paper. I’m not aching to write stereotypical smutty boys love fantasies about video game characters meeting in coffee shops during the Purge - nor is it my opinion that if those are the stories you want to write, you should be embarrassed. Making fun of fanfic tropes may be a trope in and of itself at this point, but there’s no denying that fic is a valuable act of self expression, with the luxury of as much freedom and anonymity afforded to you as you want.

There’s that ugly little itch in the back of my head, though - and to its credit, it’s never made a completely unrealistic point.

Someone will find out.

Who’s to say how? Will you accidentally post a link to the wrong account? Will you be hammering out a few chapters at the exact moment a coworker passes behind you? Or will it be because it slipped out in a moment of poor judgement? And what happens then? Do you live with the paranoia of not knowing whether or not you’ve lost all credibility with your peers? Do you out yourself, turn it into your identity and let yourself be the butt of the joke? It ultimately doesn’t matter. Someone will find out - and when they do, you need to be prepared for whatever consequences you’ve brought upon yourself.

Once someone knows, everyone knows.

(Being on the autism spectrum particularly exacerbates these fears: in a world which demands we mask to survive, any crack in the persona you craft runs the risk of splitting wide open and laying the black hole of your hyperfixating mind bare.)

And make no mistake - I frown on the concept that since old fandom had it hard, new fandom should, too. Getting shit on just for the act of something which is ultimately harmless isn’t a necessary rite of passage, and I certainly don’t resent folks who have never and may never experience that. Younger fans being able to communicate with others in their fandom sphere and share their work without fear of being judged is a net good no matter how you slice it, and while it may have given rise to its own set of issues, it offers newcomers of all ages a simple, unifying comfort: you are not alone.

But if I can laud the progress fandom’s made in the broader consciousness, why is it so hard to accept that those benefits apply to me as well?

I was home for the past year or so because of Why Do You Think, eventually returning to my old high school to work as a substitute teacher while completing my Master’s. Ten years earlier (ew) I’d spent my time in those classrooms at the absolute height of my teenage cringe era, copying manga panels to learn expressions and obsessively making online quizzes about OCs nobody but I had any context for. Now, I was quietly researching family horror while pumping lofi study beats for students who were just as exhausted as I was.

I felt the memories I’d left in the walls every day, though: I remembered believing I could try anything. I remembered being afraid of what people thought of me, but not so afraid that I wouldn’t defend the stuff I liked, no matter how dumb or how bad.

My dissertation was emotionally demanding. The accompanying research paper was burning every cell in my brain.

Would it really be so bad if I had something of no consequence for myself on the side?

I was so tired that I didn’t have the heart to say no.

Any time I needed a break from writing my bloody family drama (and believe me, it was getting bloody), I pulled up the document. Just a few stretches of witty dialogue or a quick action beat here or there to start, but very quickly I was actually accumulating large bodies of text at a time. I was doing a pretty impressive amount of work for a while: by the time I finished my dissertation, I’d completed and published two chapters on AO3, to surprisingly good reception - three months later, I was a few passages into writing a sixth.

And then halfway through, I froze.

I didn’t know if it was as smart as I’d banked on it being. I didn’t want anyone to know it was mine. I saw too much of myself in the main character, in spite of my best efforts. More worryingly, I feared that if I kept writing, I would never stop, and if I didn’t stop, I would put myself further at risk of being found out.

Why did I do this? I wondered. Why did I take a chance on something I would never stop being ashamed of?

I hastily abandoned it.

It felt like returning to a diet after a week at Disney World gorging myself on Mickey waffles and Dole Whip - resetting to Real World Mode and throwing myself into projects with real-world weight. All projects I enthusiastically poured my heart into, of course, but projects which would have practical use. Pieces I could claim as Delaney Jordan, not under some online handle I barely trusted to keep me safe.

And yet, months and months later, the itch hasn’t numbed - but I keep wondering why, for some reason, that irritates me. Why there’s some disapproving editor in the back of my head who stubbornly refuses to take anything with a recognizable IP on it, even though it costs nothing to publish and isn’t even under my name, and why, when I wouldn’t tolerate that attitude from anyone else, I take that editor’s word as gospel.

Maybe that original concept is firmly shelved, too tainted by that moment of creative crisis, but new ideas continue to sprout up in the corner of my brain it once occupied, each more enticing than the last. Big ones, small ones, funny, frightening. I feel the garden there, in full bloom - I don’t even need to get over the gate to see how well they’re growing.

I really just need to get over myself.

A few months ago, my mother ran into a girl who had been my childhood best friend until being moved across classes and grades and schools caused us to slowly fall out of contact. The pandemic had caused my already sparse social media activity to grind to a halt altogether, so it fell to my mom to give her the rundown on what I’d been up to recently.

When she mentioned I had earned my Master’s in scriptwriting, my friend exclaimed “I remember that story she wrote when we were in middle school! That story about the opera? It was so good!”

Someone will find out.

Once someone knows, everyone knows.

All there is to decide is how much that matters to you.