Rewriting the Rules of Fiction

[pynchonoid]

Rewriting the Rules of Fiction
Amateur authors writing tales about favorite
characters are drawing big audiences and landing book
deals. Meet Harry Potter's grandparents.
By JOHN JURGENSEN
September 16, 2006; Page P1
wsj.com

She writes about a group of young wizards attending
the Hogwarts School. She has legions of readers
throughout the world.

Her name is Hannah Jones, and she's 19 years old.

Fan fiction, stories by amateur writers about
characters from their favorite books, movies and
television shows, was once mainly a fringe pursuit.
Now, it's changing the world of fiction, as Internet
exposure helps unknown authors find mainstream
success. Some Web sites are attracting unprecedented
numbers of readers and, in some cases, leading to book
deals. They are also feeding the appetites of readers
and viewers who can't get enough of shows like "Lost"
or "House."

There's a librarian in Rathdrum, Idaho, who spent 10
years posting her writings about a character from Jane
Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" online; Simon &
Schuster paid her a $150,000 advance to publish the
works as a three-novel trilogy. In Brooklyn, N.Y., a
free-lance copy editor has become one of the Web's
best-known "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter"
fan-fiction writers, and has landed a three-book
publishing deal for a young-adult fantasy series. When
a comic-book store manager in New Jersey decided to
take his first stab at fan fiction this year, entering
a contest sponsored by Showtime's "The L Word," he got
the attention of a literary agent, who signed him last
month. And Ms. Jones will soon have her first book
published.

One sign of the growing influence of these authors and
stories is that media companies, usually quick to go
after people who use their copyrighted material, are
increasingly leaving fan fiction writers alone.
Mindful of the large, loyal audience the writers
represent, many companies are adopting an attitude one
media professor describes as "benign neglect." While
most professional writers say their lawyers advise
them not to read fan fiction to protect themselves
against charges of plagiarism, some say they check the
numbers of fan fiction stories posted about their work
regularly as a measure of their success.

The rise of fan fiction is part of the spread of
amateur-created content online, from viral videos to
music playlists and blogs. Increasingly, audiences
have become used to watching videos posted by other
users on sites such as YouTube and MySpace. Reading
fiction online is another extention of this trend.

Ms. Jones, who has been writing fan fiction since she
was about 11 years old, got her start writing about TV
shows and movies like "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid," but took off in the fan-fiction world when she
moved into "Harry Potter." The J.K. Rowling series is
by far the biggest source for fan-fiction stories on
the Web now, dwarfing franchises such as "Star Wars."
 

Ms. Jones is best known for a series called "The
Shoebox Project," which she writes under the name
"Jaida" with a writer named "Rave." The story is a
prequel of sorts, focusing on Harry Potter's now
deceased parents, along with two other wizards, Remus
and Sirius, imagining them as teenage wizards finding
themselves in high school during the 1970s.
Interspersed in the text of the stories are scrawled
notes that look like they were written by the
characters themselves.

In one critical turning point in the series, Harry's
grandparents are killed by Death Eaters, minions of
the dark lord Voldemort -- a plot point that mirrors
the killing of Harry's parents, described in Ms.
Rowling's series. But Ms. Jones says she was chagrined
to learn later about an interview with Ms. Rowling
where the author told readers that Harry's
grandparents had died of natural causes.

The series, which Ms. Jones began the summer before
her freshman year at Barnard College in 2004, is up to
25 sections and the equivalent of 600 pages. While Ms.
Jones says it's impossible to track how many
individual readers her entries have, nearly 5,000
people have signed up to be automatically notified
whenever she posts a new part on LiveJournal.com, the
Web community favored by many fan fiction writers.
Each installment generates hundreds of reader comments
and reviews.

Ms. Jones was contacted by Frank Fradella, an author
running his own small independent book-publishing
company, New Babel Books, who had read her work on
LiveJournal. Next month, he's publishing her first
print book, a collection of poetry called
"Cinquefoil."

Like virtually all fan fiction, "The Shoebox Project"
was created without the permission of the author or
publisher. Many authors don't object to the
fan-fiction surrounding their work, seeing it as a
sign of a devoted audience rather than an act of
copyright infringement.

Meg Cabot, author of "The Princess Diaries," says she
herself was once a fan-fiction writer, writing stories
inspired by Anne McCaffrey's fantasy novels about
dragons when she was in high school and college. "I
never told anyone. I've started admitting it now," she
says. She says she was delighted to discover that her
books had inspired hundreds of stories by fans.

Although Ms. Cabot says she occasionally goes online
to see the tally of "Princess Diaries" and "Mediator"
fan-fiction stories, she says she never reads them.
Legal advisers warned that if she did read fan
fiction, she'd be opening herself to potential
lawsuits from fans who could claim she'd stolen their
ideas.

Some authors take a less friendly view of the genre,
however. "No matter how flattering, it's still
robbery," says fantasy novelist Chelsea Quinn Yarbro,
whose vampire works have inspired a number of
fan-fiction writers. She estimates that her attorney
has sent out about 20 "cease and desist" letters to
writers and owners of fan sites. Ms. Yarbro says this
has caused some of the writers and sites to take their
stories down.

For much of its history, fan fiction centered on the
science-fiction and comic-book worlds. While the
subject matter of fan fiction has expanded greatly, to
include everything from "Desperate Housewives" to the
Bible, the genre has several entrenched tropes. Many
stories take the form of prequels, imagining the back
stories of central characters. Crossover fantasies
also have long been a key element of fan fiction,
pairing characters from different books or shows.

"Shippers" (the term is believed to be derived from
"relationship") are writers that explore -- and often
invent -- relationships between characters. A subgenre
of this is "slash," which creates gay relationships
between characters such as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
from "Star Trek." Slash fiction is often sexually
graphic, and fan fiction's association with slash has
made some mainstream authors and TV networks wary of
it.

Increasingly, however, media companies, undeterred by
the stigma of slash, are looking for ways to
capitalize on fan fiction and its large audience. A
company called FanLib is working with networks and
publishers to create fan-fiction promotions and
contests for books and TV shows.

FanLib recently launched a romance-writing contest
with HarperCollins's Avon imprint. "We're looking for
ways to reach the real core readers," says Liate
Stehlik, Avon's senior vice president and publisher.
To avoid copyright problems, they had writers create
chapters of a novel from scratch, instead of basing
them on one particular book.

FanLib's first high-profile project was a fan writing
contest earlier this year devoted to "The L Word," a
Showtime drama about a group of lesbian characters.
FanLib Chief Executive Chris Williams says that 20,000
people registered on the contest site, where one of
the show's writers assigned scenes.

The possibility of being discovered was a motivation
for aspiring novelist Ervin Anderson, who was one of
the seven contest winners and the only male to win.
The manager of a comic shop outside Philadelphia
called Fat Jake's Comicrypt, Mr. Anderson, 35, works
on his own fiction at night. He was a casual watcher
of "The L Word," but when the contest was announced in
the spring, he saw it as chance to get an audience
with industry professionals. In the second week of the
contest, voters picked one of his scenes, which
touched on eating disorders and mental illness. "Being
a straight male, I wasn't sure I could compete. But
everyone was very welcoming," he says.

With press clippings about the "L Word" contest in
hand, he met with a literary agent and signed a
contract in July. He's also entered the HarperCollins
contest, and has read four romance novels by popular
author Julia Quinn to prepare. "As a struggling
writer, you've got to take advantage of every
opportunity afforded to you. You really never know
where your break is going to come from," he says.

At the same time, however, many fan-fiction writers
shield their identities online and keep their pursuit
secret from friends and colleagues. Meredith Elliott,
who works at a theater company in Vancouver, British
Columbia, has a following for her writings based on
the TV show "House," but has only told her mother
about her hobby.

"There's a sense of guilt. I always feel that I should
not be using somebody else's characters and should be
doing my own writing," she says. "But then I remember
I am doing my own writing."

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen at wsj.com


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