I spend a lot of time defending fanfiction to my friends that are plowing through traditional writer’s workshops. When I stumbled upon a recent article by Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K., I found some brilliant arguments in defense of homage and confiscated worlds.
Starting with this:
However, there is an equally rich tradition of writers whose fascination with a certain book leads them to expand its original scope, place on it their personal imprint, or suggest an alternative interpretation. John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which returns to the Bible; John Gardner’s Grendal, which tells the Beowulf tale from the monster’s perspective; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which imagines a prequel to Jane Eyre from the first Mrs. Rochester’s point of view; and Jon Clinch’s recently published Finn, a take on Mark Twain’s famous tale, are but a few examples. In these instances, the author returns to the world created by the original book in order to develop its most compelling absences or silences.
Reyn goes on to list and explore several other current writers who, like her, found their inspiration and the means to work their craft through another writer’s world:
Tolstoy’s framework of a plot provided an inexperienced writer like myself with a phantom structure.
In his modern-day Odyssey, Ben Ehrenreich felt free to veer off the original myth by playing with setting and place, mixing together the ancient and contemporary, swords and helicopters. The greatest benefit for a first novel, he says, is that he “knew how it started and how it would end.”
[Jeff] Hobbs puts it this way: “It gives you your jumping-off point, gives you a certain comfort level. Before you’ve ever published, it’s a little harrowing to be working on it, and very uncertain, so to feel like you’re holding hands with one of the greats helps you feel a little more confident moving along.”
The already existing structure, more than anything else, is what appeals to the fanfic writer in me. It’s not that I don’t create my own worlds – all I do is create worlds – but the shaping, revising, shifting patterns of those worlds limit my easily overtaxed mind. Fanfic is the apprenticeship I couldn’t find in writer’s workshops. It’s like having Rilke hand deliver a letter to my home each week. What turned me away from traditional, academic writing programs – and I was a product of them from the age of fifteen on – was the narrow, blind focus of workshopping. Writers need to be nurtured; they don’t, as a species, do well without a master gently pushing them on to better and better things. In lieu of Rilke I find great comfort shaping worlds within pre-existing worlds. Everything I take from fanfiction translates directly into renewed confidence and skill in my original work.
But how lovely it is to hear Reyn validating appropriated literature.
These writers are deconstructing the classics, but I think the points are equally valid for fanfiction writers. When Reyn discusses her love affair with Anna Karenina (on her way to a PhD in Slavic languages and literatures, she found that Anna Karenina “pushed her way onto the page” and opted for an MFA instead) her descriptions are visceral, beloved. She describes a scenario that anyone who has ever written (or read) a fanfic already knows: something about a world, a character, an atmosphere, catches your attention and you have to create/find more than the original text provides. There are connections and meanings that have to be explored, and those explorations inspire countless amateur writers to add more to an already loved world.
Although some may consider it presumptuous, the impulse to tinker with the canon originates from a desire to engage with those books that are most meaningful to us: “If you, without being too pretentious, try to think of literature as a very long conversation,” says Ehrenreich “what you did and what I did finds some small place in all that chatter.”
I think we’re fast approaching a time that fanfiction doesn’t have to be a writer’s dirty little secret (much like my friends who hid their Botox treatments from me five years ago but now want me to touch their new boobs). Borrowing worlds and structures is a much needed part of the process, a way to make sense of the nonsensical, or a method of absorbing a craft that requires us to summon fully realized realities from nothing.
Or it may be that we’ve reached a place of such convoluted information and surprise that writers are comforted by a known atmosphere. William Lashner says in Reyn’s article, “’It’s a thrilling process to digest one work and then create something new by it. We’re picking books that stayed in our bones, so that when we are using it as a springboard it feels very much a part of us.’”
(From: “Rewriting Anna Karenina,” by Irina Reyn, Poets and Writers Magazine, Jan/Feb 2008: 33-37)