Jim Hines speaks about Fanfiction

[sartorias]

Over here at his LiveJournal.

The take-away is that writers write.

(Curiously enough I recently read a YA novel that converses with fan fiction, by Rainbow Rowell, called Fangirl.)

Comments

[breathingbooks]

I read Fangirl recently. Really odd absence of online community for the fanfic writing character.

[sartorias]

Well, the way they finessed that was having Cath have like thirty or forty thousand dedicated readers, so she barely had time to deal with comments, which eventually her sister takes over. But outside of that, Rowell presented her as very private, and almost pathologically guarded, so I bought the dynamic as presented.

[breathingbooks]

I bought the comment bit, but there was a reference she makes to back when it was just a group of fans writing Christmas stories or something for each other, and it seemed odd that she wasn't still talking with any of that implied small group, even if purely about fandom stuff. Also, I don't recall her reading fanfic in the story, which seems like it would have been an obvious choice for a stressed person seeking familiar comfort.

I didn't hate the book by any means - it just felt like it almost got fandom right.

[sartorias]

That is an excellent point about her reading fic.

[3rdragon]

I haven't read the book (yet). And I'm not, and never really was, active in fanfiction circles. But I did, back in the day, participate in a number of online roleplaying communities, some of them very actively. I considered those people my friends, and felt closer to many of them than I did to a lot of people I knew in real life.

But ten years later? Heck, even five years later, I wasn't in contact with anyone. (Okay, no, that's not true, I did persuade one person to apply to my college and later come, and we're contacts on LinkedIn. But we don't really talk.) Sites die. People change and drift away. The administrator of a site goes inactive, and it gets more and more frustrating to use it, and eventually people leave. The group may not have enough cohesion to move en masse to a new location, especially not if there isn't an obvious choice of platform to move to that does exactly what you're looking for. You get busy for a few months, and when you come back, things are kind of dead. Somebody stops logging in, and if you