Bittercon: Tourists - Creating Characters and Stories in an Existing World

How do you create something unique and original within the space of something already established and loved?  What freedoms exist there that don’t exist when creating a completely original work, and what freedoms don’t?

This topic just begs for a fannish look, don’t you agree?

The thing about fanfiction is, you probably aren’t doing it if you don’t feel a deep need to play with these characters, this world, these themes.  I got into fandom because I had this really rude plot bunny for a fic that just wouldn’t et me go, and I knew I was never going to make any progress on my novel until it was written.  (Five years later, and No Difference is finished, but the bunnies keep coming, gah!)  This is in itself a sort of freedom.  We’re playing with somebody else’s toys.  We’re free to poke into the corners unexplored in canon.

We don’t have to introduce anybody to the characters or world, and we’re free to focus on the bits and pieces we’re most interested in.  An original fantasy novel that focuses on the bitterness and pride in two deeply damaged thirty-somethings while there’s a chosen one running around somewhere would almost have to be parody based on the concept alone, but is the plot of some truly wonderful Harry Potter fanfics.  I personally like to pull some of the icky bits of a universe out and hone in on those.  It’s very hard to do that in an original novel, and it tends not to make a reader see things differently than they did before the way it can in fanfiction.

To an extent, people publishing in an established universe is like being paid to write fanfic, but even fanfic is much freer.  We write AUs, fusions, genderflips, mpreg, ship fics, fix-it fics, shameless porn, whump, and a dozen other things that would be forbidden for these writers to do.  They usually write under strict guidelines, and of course face approval or disapproval before their work can be unleashed on the wider world. 

But they still get to crawl around in the shadowy corners of the world they’re writing in, and sometimes, when they find something hidden there, it has a whole lot more impact than it would in an original novel because it changes the way the reader looks at the whole fictional universe.

There is also a certain psychological freedom.  Few of us fic writers, and I suspect almost no one writing a tie in or shared universe work is attempting to write the Great American Novel.  This isn’t to say there isn’t some seriously powerful fanfiction out there, but it’s probably not going to end up in a high school English anthology.  It’s easier when you know something isn’t going very far to just to let go and write.

So my friends, most of you read fanfiction, and many of you write it yourselves.  What are your thoughts?  How do you make something fresh when you play in somebody else’s world?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic adapted from a panel at the 2011 Worldcon.