Writing The Big One

This is going to be one of the more self-indulgent posts, as it deals with some of my personal experiences in media fandom, and I doubt it'll be all that interesting to anyone who isn't familiar with fanworks – that odd little niche of media fans that writes fanfiction and draws fanart and edits together video mash-ups and so forth. These are fun and – in my opinion – perfectly harmless activities that unfortunately exist in a rather gray area of intellectual property law, so I've avoided writing about them too often. And until now, I haven't said much about my own dabbling in fanworks. You see, up until about eighteen months ago, I wrote fanfiction. A lot of it.

Now I wasn't some starry-eyed wannabe writer who thought any of her stories were anything special, or would lead to becoming the next J.K. Rowling. I was writing mostly as a form of stress relief. My most prolific period was when I was in a serious rut, very bored, lonely, unfulfilled, and altogether unhappy. So I wrote crummy romance stories about characters in TV shows by the dozens, typing out wish-fulfillment scenarios and what-ifs. I write for a living, but nothing creative or fun. The fanfiction stories were a great outlet. They were mostly terrible, and I took great care in anonymizing every pseudonym they were posted under, but for a while it was fun to play author. There's an audience for everything out there, no matter how obscure. If you have even the slightest amount of competence and creativity, someone out there will read your stuff. I never became a BNF (big name fan), but I did attract a few regulars, and I liked being part of the wild, weird fanfiction community.

After a couple of years, though, I lost interest. My output dropped, my tolerance for the endless drama of fandom culture decreased, and I steadily turned my attention to other activities. Real life got better. I started writing this blog, which I found a more rewarding and versatile channel for my media interests. The real kicker though, was that I wrote The Big One, the fanfiction story that put me directly in the spotlight for the first time. I'm not going to identify the real title, because it's still online and I prefer, like George Costanza, to keep certain activities in different worlds, as far away from each other as possible. When I decided to drop fanfiction writing for good, I went ahead and deleted just about everything I had ever posted, over a hundred different stories posted over the course of about four years. I send saved copies to anyone who asks for them, but I wasn't comfortable leaving them online any longer. Except The Big One.

Despite being written for a very obscure old media fandom, The Big One has been read by hundreds of people. I've received dozens of comments and E-mails about it, almost all of them gushing and emotional. People have posted recommendations for it everywhere. They're still posting recommendations, over a year and a half since I first put it online. The latest one from a few weeks ago claimed that the story had changed her life. A link to it popped up in an online lesson plan from a private school last year. Someone turned it into an audio podfic, with permission. Readers told me they'd printed The Big One out and saved it. They told me they were truly touched and grateful that I had written it. They told me that it mattered.

And I said you're welcome and I was happy that they had liked it, but frankly the attention spooked me. I thought the story was pretty good and was gratified that people liked it, but I knew it was amateur work. I knew it wasn't nearly as good as the people putting it on a pedestal were saying that it was. Call me a cynic, but I know my own limitations. And being around that kind of praise and being subject to that kind of hype is a little dangerous. It's much too easy to fall for that kind of easy adoration, to take it too seriously. I wasn't interested in that, and I decided at that point that I'd gotten just about all I was ever going to get out of being in that corner of fandom. So I quit.

Looking back, it was the right thing to do. Toward the end of my fanfiction writing stint I was mostly writing out of habit. Once I stopped, I was never hit with the urge to go back to it. I took down all the other stories I had written and rarely hear a peep about them. I left The Big One up because I worried that taking away access might upset some people. Now, I'm not so sure. Fandom has a short memory, and there's always the next, nicely-formatted piece of melodramatic fannish indulgence for people to get worked up over. There's always the next newbie author looking for a creative outlet, willing to put in the time and effort.

I got a lot of good writing practice and good times from fanfiction, but in the end it wasn't something I was ever entirely comfortable with, and I knew when it was time to stop. I'm glad I got to go out on a high note, though, that I got a little taste of being internet famous. But honestly I think I'd rather be known for this blog than being the author of The Big One.
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