Fanfiction Made Me a Literary Scholar

Last year, I was given a deeply nostalgic gift: Illumicrate’s beautiful exclusive editions of Trudi Canavan’s Black Magician Trilogy—a series that had been one of my favorites in my late teens—complete with embossed hardback covers and Diana Dworak’s new endpaper artwork. Reading this series again prompted me to log back into FanFiction.net, a website where I was once a frequent reader and contributor, for the first time in over a decade. I clicked on a BMT fanfic that sounded interesting and curled up with a cup of tea in cozy delight. 

As I read, something about the prose felt strangely familiar. By chapter two, I was laughing out loud. I was reading my own fic, written when I was sixteen. Eighteen years on, it was still online, having accrued a respectable number of favorites on its (somewhat melodramatic) fourteen-thousand-word story. It felt like a full circle moment, as if I had unexpectedly met an old friend. But it was also bittersweet, because somewhere between earning three degrees in English literature—then becoming a lecturer and publishing my first academic book—the teenager who had glued herself to a desktop computer after school to write fiction for pleasure had disappeared. And yet, I wouldn’t be here today without her.

Long before I learned what close reading meant, or encountered intimidating phrases like intertextuality, narrative theory, or hermeneutics, I was already practicing them—just in a very different classroom. My training ground was not a school or library, but LiveJournal communities updated at 2 a.m., FictionAlley.org profiles with glittering pixel art, and the niche depths of Archive Of Our Own where writers of all ages performed feats of narrative ambition that my own undergraduate students today rarely have the chance to attempt. Fanfiction was where I first learned to read attentively, write un-self-consciously, and to take seriously the complex relationship between text and reader, author and interpreter, canon and “fanon.” I was conducting close linguistic analysis simply to capture the cadence of a particular character: After all, you didn’t want to get comments from invested readers complaining “this is too OOT” (Out Of Character). I would rearrange the narrative structure of my own fics because I had loved the pacing of someone else’s. I would self-edit to feedback from readers according to what was landing well. All of it felt like play. But it was also an education. When I later sat in university lectures learning about focalization, diegesis, and narrative tension, I felt a quiet recognition. I had been doing this sort of work for years; I simply had not known its name. 

When I stepped into academia, I quickly learned how little respect this world earned. That I read and wrote fanfiction was something to hide. As a university student, I assiduously worked through my reading lists, genuinely enjoying some of the set texts (the high fantasy fan in me raced through The Iliad, and Shakespeare’s comedies were never a chore)—but I wasn’t about to tell my Latin-speaking, private-school-educated, white middle-class peers that I already knew what a good paragraph looked like because I’d spent the better part of high school writing and reviewing fanfic. Being a multi-ethnic, international school kid from Turkey with an inexplicably American accent was already plenty to explain. So, bit by bit, I got caught up in what I “had to” read and know, leaving behind the secret joy of dishing out novel-length stories for a bunch of strangers on the internet.

Fanfiction is still dismissed as unserious: a guilty pleasure at best, juvenile at worst. The judgement mirrors the way mass-market paperbacks sold in supermarkets rarely make it onto university reading lists. Even now, as a lecturer, mentioning fanfiction in academic spaces tends to prompt a slightly embarrassed laugh. “It’s a fun thing,” colleagues admit: “at least it gets young people reading.” The implication lurks beneath the surface: Fanfiction may train enthusiasm, but not skill; passion, but not literary discernment. The literary academe’s dismissal of fan-created writing is not only unimaginative, it reveals how our structures of publication, distribution, and intellectual property are entirely geared towards enshrining fiction as, above all, a product. In doing so, it doubles down on the idea that textual creativity is the domain of the lone genius who must either create an entirely original “product,” or not at all.

Fanfiction as a creative practice already assumes what any literary scholarship worth its salt must acknowledge: Narrative is a social act. It is created under, and carries the traces of, our shared experiences at any given time. When a book or television show handles trauma carelessly, or reduces female characters to plot devices, or implies queer desire only to shy away from it, fandom responds by reshaping the story. Where traditional creative writing workshops rely on clear hierarchies, genre coherence, and marketable-length works, fanfiction communities tend to play with these. There is no single authority whose judgement is final. Instead, there are beta readers, commenters, moderators, and co-authors, all contributing in different ways. Beta reading in fandom can be astonishingly rigorous; people donate hours to improving a story simply because they care about it. Many of us lecturers are hard-pressed to dedicate the same kind of time when reading and annotating a student essay, simply because we often have hundreds to handle. Studying and teaching literature can, ironically, turn out vastly less personal than soliciting feedback on your fic from thousands of strangers online.

My formative experiences of writing were not neatly composed essays for school, but long, messy, derivative stories typed late into the night on Windows XP. I was not trying to produce something original and marketable. I was trying to understand what made my favorite characters tick; what would happen if a storyline veered in a different direction; how a minor event might develop if given more attention. To write good fanfiction, one must read with a kind of mild obsession that no teacher could have forced out of me. Yes, I admit, sometimes it was a touch lust-fueled (finding older, complex characters more interesting than teenage boys comes with the territory of being an only child adultified before her time). But it was also about the lack of pressure. You don’t have to be a professional in fanfic. You don’t even have to be a native speaker of the language you write in. 

This sort of writing encourages you to let go of what kills creativity: the need to get things “perfect.” There is a romantic myth that writing ought to be slow, painful and refined through lengthy bouts of solitary suffering. But fandom simply does not work like that. People draft huge chapters overnight, update long-running epics weekly, and experiment with new ideas. There is no pressure to be definitive, only the excitement of the story and the knowledge that readers are waiting. By the time I sat my first timed essay or faced my first academic deadline, I already knew how to write quickly and consistently without being too precious about it. The instinct to keep going, to produce imperfect work regularly, was built during those late-night writing sessions when the only reward was the joy of seeing a deluge of comments on your latest upload. This is a far cry from what I still encounter in academia: People terrified of putting a foot wrong, paralyzed by the blank page.

It’s worth asking why academia has been so reluctant to acknowledge the pedagogical value of fanfiction. The overarching reason goes back to what much does: the global economic system we are in. Fanfiction has an uneasy relationship with the concept of authorship, ownership, and monetization. Literary studies geared towards the imperatives of capitalist market values deem originality and solitary creative labors of utmost importance. It wants one name behind the product: a single mastermind who can be paraded out for book tours, signings, and conventions. This is imperative for securing intellectual property, and ensuring that everyone involved—editors, publishers, distributors—get their cut from any reuse.

Fanfiction undermines this at every point. It is derivative by design and collaborative in practice. It thrives outside commercial structures and pays no regard to copyright as a measure of legitimacy. It undermines the assumption that originality is the highest literary virtue. It isn’t driven by racking up institutional accolades, as real names are never used. It not only suggests that writing can be meaningful even when it builds directly on existing material, but it often reveals a hidden truth: No writer is an island. Storytelling is a communal, not an individual, act, even if we put one author’s name on it. Any author is inspired by countless others, and stands on the shoulders of their own favorites.

Storytelling, in other words, is an impulse, not a project. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow show that for tens of thousands of years, human beings created stories not for ownership, but as communal, improvisational acts. Whether oral, gestural, or written, they were passed around for pleasure and leisure. Storytelling thrived long before private ownership or the notion of literary “products.” The instinct that drove me to write fanfic as a teenager was part of this older, collective history of narrative. Fandom’s sprawling, unpaid, co-created archives are not an aberration but a digital-age continuation of something very human and very ancient.

That fanfiction today proliferates without monetary compensation shows how recently we accepted the idea that creativity must be validated and enshrined through its market reception. Fandom quietly refuses all of that, and in doing so, it reveals how arbitrary those rules really are. If readers and writers can co-create meaning, what becomes of the author’s authority? If more readers resonate with a pseudonymous fic by someone with a day job instead of with a celebrity author, what becomes of the publishing world’s profit imperatives? If students learn to become good readers via fic, what of the academe’s claim to arbitrate literary value? Dismissing it altogether is easier than grappling with these large aesthetic and political questions.

Whatever the answers, fanfiction won’t go away, because it represents a radical space of literacy. It is accessible to people who might never have seen themselves as writers. It welcomes teenagers producing multi-chapter works, ESL writers experimenting bravely in another language, queer writers reshaping narrative worlds that have excluded them, neurodivergent writers finding safety in anonymity where formal classrooms failed them. There are no fees, no prerequisites, no admissions processes; you don’t know an author’s race, income or gender. It is a comparatively level playing field that reminds us we are driven to creative labor because we are human, whether or not financial compensation enters the picture.

Fandom taught me to pay attention, to question the politics of authorship, and to dare venture into the heavily classed and raced sphere of literary criticism without imposter syndrome. It gave me a version of literary culture that was unafraid of passion and unembarrassed about the pleasures of the imagination. And despite the distance between my current job title and that sixteen-year-old me hunched over a keyboard late at night, I am certain that everything I value about literature began in those early, communal, online spaces. Rediscovering my own fics reminded me that the most meaningful literary communities are still the ones built outside institutions: messy, irreverent, unprofitable, and utterly alive.