- Hey Princess.

- Hi Lindsay.

- So have you ever done the fan fiction before?

- Yes, many moons ago.

- Oh yeah?

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

- Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Zutara lives on forever.

What about you?

- Phantom.

(laughing) Phantom of the Opera, not the Billy Zane Phantom.

The bad one, the problematic one.

- So on a scale from disappointed to disheartened, how deep is your shame?

- My shame?

Pretty deep, how about you?

- You know, sometimes I feel ashamed, but other times I'm like, "You know what, I like my trash."

- And that is what we are, trash.

(laughing) (air whooshing) (bell dinging) Our relationship to fan fic as a concept has changed, but not just fans' relationship to it.

The professional publishing world also has a wildly different relationship to fan fic even from, like, 10 years ago.

So what has caused this shift, and what does that change even look like?

Part of the human fascination with narrative is a desire to expand on the stories we hear.

- One popular narrative is the story of the trickster hero.

Like in the American South we have the Jack tale about a guy named Jack, or in the black diaspora we have the spider-god character, Anansi.

These characters have no original author, but over the years have gained popularity in their communities through oral traditions.

But the modern concept of copyright complicates our relationship to characters and narratives, which are no longer the intellectual property of a culture, they're the IP of a person or a company.

- Fan fiction website Archive of Our Own, who I lost a Hugo to last year, co-founder Francesca Coppa defines it simply as "creative material featuring characters "from works whose copyright is held by others."

There's kind of an unspoken understanding that you aren't supposed to make money off of fan fiction, which is part of why copyright holders usually let it slide.

And as a result, it kind of exists in this legal gray area.

Most IP owners let it exist, and some even encourage it, because it facilitates a good relationship with fans.

- But for me, what's really interesting about fan fiction is the negative connotations that have dogged it over the last few decades; that fan fiction is embarrassing, that it's neither real writing, nor a good writing exercise, that it is something to be relegated to the daydreams of pre-teen girls.

- But not only that, professional authors' relationship to fan fiction has changed.

Many authors began as fan fiction writers, and are kind of out and proud about that now.

Some continue to write it for fun, and sometimes they just swap out the names of the copyrighted characters and publish their fan fic as original fiction.

- Where fan fiction used to be seen as a joke, writers today have been coming out of the closet so to speak about their own history with fan fiction and how it helped form their professional careers.

That's right, we have Hugo and Nebula-winning fan fic authors now.

(air horn blows) Some history.

- [Lindsay] What we know as fan fiction has its roots not on the internet but in fanzines, specifically, science fiction fanzines from the early 20th century, which actually published fan fiction at the time.

To Harvard English professor and writer Dr. Stephanie Burt, fan fiction is a phenomena that has always existed in some form or another as a way for fans to meaningfully interact with the media they liked.

Says Burt, "First there were fans of science-fiction novels "and magazines who held conventions "and traded self-published journals "as early as the nineteen-thirties.

"Or, first there was Sherlock Holmes, "whose devotees, hooked by serial publication, "pushed for more stories, formed clubs, "and wrote their own."

- Some say that fan fiction itself isn't writing, that real writers don't participate in it.

That, if you want to write, you have to write original stories, you know, like James Joyce, and William Shakespeare, and Dante, and Salman Rushdie.

- [Lindsay] Says Burt again, "No clearer path from new writers "to potentially interested readers "has existed in the history of civilization.

"Not all stories are stories "that other people will seek out.

"If you can work your memories, hypotheses, "or fantasies about living away from home, "or about gender transition, or about retirement "into a story about Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, "maybe the many people who care about Batman and Robin "will care about your thoughts and experiences, too.

- This challenges the idea that fan fiction is the toy of the creatively-bereft; that the only good fiction is writing that's 100% original.

Why, for example, is John Milton's "Paradise Lost" or James Joyce's "Ulysses" canon without ever questioning their originality, even though they're just retellings of the Bible and The Odyssey, respectively?

- Well, part of it is copyright jankiness.

Ulysses and Paradise Lost are based on stories that were never copyrighted, because copyright was not a thing in Homer's time.

We have a wholly different relationship to copyright now than James Joyce and John Milton did.

But that can't be all of it.

Ever since modern fan fiction gained popularity in fanzines, particularly Star Trek fanzines, it's predominantly been the wheelhouse of women.

Best-selling author and Hugo winner Seanen McGuire sees the phenomenon as partially a response to a lack of female-oriented storytelling in mainstream and published mediums.

In her essay "The Bodies of the Girls Who Made Me: Fan Fiction and the Modern World", she writes, "Everyone who grows up on a diet of Western media learns, "on some level, to accept The Default as their avatar, "because we historically haven't had much choice.

"Want to be the hero, instead of the love interest, "the scrappy sidekick, or the villain?

"Embrace The Default.

"Learn to have empathy with The Default.

"He's what you get.

"We stopped writing about ourselves "and started writing avatars, "characters who could represent us in the stories "without quite being us."

- It's no coincidence that a large part of the fan fiction community has been built by women, POC, and LGBTQ writers in a professional publishing world that has only relatively recently begun to represent them.

Fan fiction is having something of a reckoning over the last few years.

Writers like Seanan McGuire or NK Jemisin, successful authors who are vocal proponents of what fan fiction has meant to them as creative minds, or websites like Archive of Our Own creating living documentation of fan fiction's vast community while advocating for free speech, or academics like Francesca Coppa publishing both commercial fan fiction and research on the subject.

- Star Trek fandom was the starting point for many science fiction professional writers.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg was an early Star Trek fan fic writer.

She went on to publish her own fantasy series, starting in 1974, and Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the most prolific and beloved science fiction writers still writing today and writer of the Vorkosigan Saga also dabbled in Trek fanworks early in her career.

But these are early examples of professional authors getting their start in fanworks, which is not the same thing as repackaging your fan fiction as original fiction and then publishing it.

- When fictional fanworks are re-written and sold as profic, the fannish code for this is filing off the serial numbers.

50 Shades of Grey, which originated as Twilight fan fiction, might be the cliche of fan fiction reworked for publication, but it's actually been a thing for a while.

There are a few obscure incidences from the olden times.

For instance, in 1985, author Teri White published a Starsky and Hutch fan fic as "Cowboy Blues," and in 1997 author Susan Matthews reworked her Star Wars fan fics into "An Exchange of Hostages" and the Jurisdiction series.

You love to see it.

- But since the 2000s, perhaps in no small part because publishers have taken note of fan fic authors who already have big followings of their own, it's gone from anomaly to actual trend.

Cassandra Clare was a Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings BNF, which for those not in fandom parlance know means Big Name Fan.

She became hugely popular in Harry Potter fandom for her Draco Trilogy, much of which was reworked into her bestselling Mortal Instruments series.

And a shocking amount of one fan fic subgenre called RPF, which means real person fic, which is exactly what it sounds like, has been reworked for publication, probably because you can't really copyright a person, so there's a lot less copyright jank there.

You can just write about a real person and pretend it's a fictional character.

After is the most famous example of this, reworked from the fan fic of the same name, about a college alternate universe, or AU, featuring Harry Styles from One Direction as a bad Harry Styles.

But there's a truly staggering amount of One Direction fan fic that has had its serial numbers filed off for publication.

- So not only are some authors permissive of fan fiction, even starting their careers as fan fic writers before making the transition, some just cut out the middle man and publish their slightly reworked fan fiction as original fiction.

JK Rowling has been generally supportive of fan fiction, but not all authors have such a benign relationship to the concept of fan fiction.

Authors who aren't so keen on fan fic range from the mildly disapproving, like uncle George R.R.

Martin, who has said "My characters are my children.

"I don't want people making off with them, thank you.

"Even people who say they love my children.

"I'm sure that's true, "I don't doubt the sincerity of the affection, but still.

"No one gets to abuse the people of Westeros but me."

And the writers of Game of Thrones.

- And that brings us to Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice, who was once very hardcore with the whole cease and desist letter thing, to the point where pretty much the entirety of Vampire Chronicles fan fiction throughout the 90s and 2000s existed on locked down LiveJournal groups, with some fans even claiming to have been harassed by Rice's lawyers.

"The characters are copyrighted.

"It upsets me terribly to even think "about fan fiction with my characters.

"I advise my readers to write your own original stories "with your own characters.

"It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes."

Yeah, that's my Anne Rice voice.

Although, to her credit, she has mellowed out a little since then.

- Even pro authors like Seanan McGuire, who continue to write fan fic themselves, would prefer that you don't send your own to them, because it can muddy the waters of whose idea is whose.

Said McGuire in a tweet from 2017, Fan fic is awesome and amazing and I love it and if you try to tell me about your fan fic, I will shut you down like a Blockbuster video.

Some authors have cited a 1992 incident involving author Marion Zimmer.

She was initially very supportive of fandom and fan fiction in particular.

But while writing a new novel, she realized that it touched on themes of a fan fiction she had already read.

Bradley decided to scrap the novel altogether rather than risk a lawsuit.

- So where fan fic used to exist mostly in the underground in the realm of pure hobbyism and sometimes in locked LiveJournal communities out of fear of litigious authors, fan fiction's emergence into the mainstream has changed our relationship to it.

Professional authors are fine admitting their past, and sometimes present, as fan fiction writers.

It's no longer this shameful activity done in shadow, but an activity that is recognized as a valid way to improve your skills as a writer.

As Neil Gaiman puts it, "I think that all writing is useful "for honing your writing skills.

"I think you get better as a writer by writing, "and whether that means you're writing "a singularly deep and moving novel "about the pain or pleasure of modern existence, "or you're writing a Smeagol-Gollum slashfic, "you're still putting one damn word after another "and learning as a writer."

And that is my best Neil Gaiman impression.

- How did you know about my Smeagol-Gollum slashfic, Neil Gaiman?

- Cease and desist!

(soft jazz music)