Essay: Are “Fan-Fiction Writers” Writers of a Genre or Fan Seceding From Fandoms?

Writing fan-fiction is one of many interactive activities that impassioned fandoms engage in. Fan-fiction encompasses tribute pieces, satires, parodies, alternative endings, speculation, character theories, plot predictions, what-if scenarios, fictional-world conspiracies, fan mail, and character meet-and-greet fantasies. Writing fan-fiction is distinct from plagiarism due to fair-use and crediting the original work’s author.

The issue with so-called fan-fiction writers, which differentiates them from fans who write fan-fiction, is that the title “fan-fiction writer” withholds the fact that their derivative works are inseparable from original author’s canon. “Fan-fiction writers” are plagiarizing the original author by claiming that their unauthorized works are their own. Fan-fiction is the original author’s intellectual property. The literature’s concept belongs to the writer who conceived it. Fans who write fan-fiction are co-authoring unofficial works. However, labeling a codependent activity of fandoms as a separate profession is misappropriating the original author’s writing credit. To call a plagiarist a “fan-fiction writer” is ironically why copyright laws are necessary: to protective the original author’s claim in the public domain.

Ghost-writers are legitimate writers instead of plagiarists because they are authorized by the original author to pen canon. Writing fan-fiction is to admit that your derivative works are non-canonical adaptations of the original author credited. Research papers papers are written by researchers just as fan-fictions are written by fans. I make this comparison, because research includes citing ideas, paraphrasing methodology, summarizing thought processes, and quoting excerpts that others wrote while also writing in your own words.

The question is, can a fan-fiction become a standalone work/series if all of the original work’s ‘Easter-eggs’ are removed? For example, the 50 Shades of Grey trilogy adaptation was thus inspired and influenced by the Twilight Saga, and not derived from it. That is why the Twilight formula has created tropes, and why it had been used as an archetype of young adult fiction, but doing so is not plagiarism; it is genre. Genre is template, such as a Byronic hero in a gothic romance novel, to create an original work inside that mold, or by breaking the generic mold.

“Fan-fiction writers” exploit, fans writing fan-fiction explore, ghostwriters develop, and (original) writers create contributions to the human experience. To become a writer, you write own story (in your perspective, in your own voice), because half of the fun of writing is problem-solving by configuring creative solutions. With this already being done by the original author, fan fictions enjoy benefit of another’s hard work. However, whenever this piggybacking is done out of pure love for the original work, as the cliche goes, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. So, in idiom terms, ‘fake it until you make it’ until your novel revisions are your vision of your brainchildren.