The write to reply

Sam Leith

• Last Updated: December 15. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 15. 2008 5:30AM GMT

JK Rowling's first editor, Barry Cunningham, holds his copy of The Tales of Beedle the Bard. PA

It started – doesn’t everything? – with Star Trek. Back in the 1960s, devotees of its creaky scenery and tubby men in jumpsuits set up their own fanzines. Small circulation mimeographed documents with titles such as “Spockanalia” started circulating like samizdat in the old Soviet Union.

In these magazines, gradually, there began to emerge a kooky species of Trekkie-to-Trekkie communication. The fans started writing innocuous stories about their favourite Star Trek characters and passing them around. It caught on. They called it “fan fiction”.

Fast-forward to 2008, and the launch of JK Rowling’s first post-Potter production, The Tales of Beedle the Bard. As sales of The Tales tick inexorably up through the millions, so too will what you might call tales of The Tales. For as well as being the most read-about boy wizard in the history of literature, Harry Potter is also far and away the most written-about. The slightest new addition to the canon of his universe will see fan fiction proliferating like buds of yeast.

In the fanfic world, Harry Potter has whipped the golden snitch clean away from James T Kirk and his pointy-eared pal. The site www.harrypotterfanfiction.com boasts of getting 40 million hits per month; and that’s to say nothing of www.mugglenet.com’s fan fiction site, or www.fictionalley.org, or any of the other places Potteriana can be found. The one thing that unites all of these sites, oddly, is that JK Rowling’s own writing is not to be found on them.

So, who writes this stuff? The answer, slightly surprisingly given the boy-geek milieu out of which fan fiction arises, is girls; or, in many cases, women. Around four-fifths of fan-fiction authors are female – as is a prominent chronicler of the scene, Mary Ellen Curtin. As long ago as 1970, Curtin found that 83 per cent of Star Trek fanfic authors were female.

Since then, the advent of the internet has globalised the phenomenon to an astonishing degree. In a culture where we’re often warned of waning literacy and vanishing attention spans, it can’t but be encouraging: here are men, women and children passionately working to give and get pleasure from the craft of prose.

Their numbers are huge. Last year the web traffic monitor Hitwise found that the site www.fanfiction.net – which hosts amateur elaborations on everything from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to The Smurfs – was accounting for well over a third of all traffic to the 700 literary/writing and author websites they monitor. It was getting more hits than www.apple.com. Having started as a place to post riffs on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it now has up to a million and a half registered users.

But, really: who does write this stuff? I have a confession to make: me. A few years ago, I dabbled in fan fiction. My early efforts included a darkly comic little vignette involving JK Rowling’s noisome house-elf Dobby in an unfortunate Yuletide accident – “Waarrrgh! Dobby is on fire, Harry Potter!” he screamed. “Dobby’s head is on fire, Harry Potter! Oh, Harry Potter, it hurtsithurtsithurts! Oh, help, Harry Potter! All Dobby’s socks will be ruined!” Judging by the feedback on the site, some Harry Potter fans thought I was being facetious.

But as I wrote more, I found that while the fun of making cruel jokes wore thin, the pleasure of trying to write properly – to create plausible characters and put them in fully-realised situations – not only endured but grew stronger. And that pleasure was reinforced when your successes were rewarded by positive feedback. As a long-standing comics geek, I set a story in the X-Men universe. I experimented with a couple of Philip Pullman’s armoured bears, and essayed an off-canon experiment with Legolas and Gimli from The Lord of the Rings.

Fanfiction is as diverse as fandom itself. There is fanfic based on computer games, on Hollywood films, on TV series, on comics, on real-life people (though that’s generally regarded as somewhat of a different category) and even, in some cases, on actual written works of fiction – or “books”, as we used to call them.

Some writers produce book-length screeds; more put out “drabbles” of a hundred words at a time; more still publish stories in single-chapter or two-chapter chunks. Where a writer gets engaged by his or her story, the work will appear – as Dickens’s did – sequentially, in instalments. And they can reach Dickensian proportions.

The content and style varies wildly, too. A large part of the community is dedicated to courtly romance – with whole websites springing up dedicated to so-called “slash” (a romantic fantasy involving two established characters, the name meaning the oblique that would separate their names in the description of the story: “Kirk/Spock”, for instance). Some are offshoots that develop hints or suggestions in the original – rather in the manner of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which is a book mentioned in the Harry Potter universe. That could be seen as a rare instance of a writer producing fanfiction based on their own work.

Another genre of story likes to collide the worlds of different characters (an amateur version of what comics readers have long known as the “crossover” – where the Hulk fights Batman, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cross swords with Cerebus the Aardvark). Others place an established set of characters in a different world – what’s known as the Alternate Universe or “AU” story.

Again, this is no more than to take a fantastically enjoyable literary parlour game to the next level. A couple of years ago I found myself in conversation with a novelist friend who had been knocked flat by admiration for The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s hilariously bleak, cannibalism-and-grim-death fantasy of post-apocalyptic America. Oh come on, I scoffed where are the laughs in that? And out of our disagreement proceeded an elaborate fantasy about an anthology we’d edit, where each story would introduce McCarthy’s characters into the world and prose style of another writer, or vice versa. PG Wodehouse seemed to offer the richest comic possibilities.

In truth, fanfiction is probably less of an innovation than it might at first sound. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea – imagining the life of the first Mrs Rochester – stands in the same relation to Jane Eyre as any extended work of fan fiction does to its original. The only differences are that it was published by a professional writer for profit – so has a wider readership and a longer life. More than one writer has produced a sequel to Gone With the Wind – and when Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone came out in 2001 Margaret Mitchell’s estate sued for breach of copyright.

Copyright – as Randall would tell you – is a point worth bearing in mind. Technically, the characters and situations from which fanfiction proceeds belong to the writers who originally imagined them or the studios that own the shows. The attitudes of authors to the phenomenon varies, but most come down on the side of toleration or even encouragement.

JK Rowling has long taken a benign view of the thousands who enjoy setting their stories in her world – provided they don’t do so for commercial advantage. The science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock was more generous still – allowing other writers to set their fiction in his multiverse. Only a few – the vampire writer Anne Rice being the best known – have moved aggressively against fan fiction.

Anne McCaffrey – author of the fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern – is a more or less typical instance of a sensible middle ground attitude. On her website she has posted some rules, and explains half-apologetically that her hopes of seeing her books filmed “requires that I handle all fan-related material very carefully – sometimes more carefully than I would like”. She permits fiction, art and even online role-playing games based on her work, provided it is not for commercial gain.

For the most part, these waters are negotiated with courtesy – hardly surprising given that copyright infringers are, at least in theory, devoted followers of the copyright holders. Fan fiction sites often carry prominent disclaimers, and remind users of writers who object to fan fiction, requesting their wishes be respected.

Courtesy is just as important between the fans as between fans and authors. Those who post fiction are reminded to do their readers the kindness of running their stories through a spell-check. Users are often expected to give their own work a “certificate”, and many sites expressly prohibit the posting of lewd material.

These sites resemble a large, geeky and generally serious-minded writers’ workshop. Experienced users volunteer to “beta read”, or copy-edit, others’ work, and to prevent abusive posting many sites make it possible to block anonymous comments. My own experience has been of speedy and for the most part encouraging – or at least, constructive – feedback. One user rebuked me for giving a war-hammer to a dwarf who anyone – duh! – knows actually wields an axe. But for the most part comments come at the level of “cool” or “Good story, lol! When are you posting the next bit?”

As Melissa Wilson – a longtime fan fiction aficionado known online as Merlin Missy or Dr Merlin – writes in her Guide to Fan Fiction, that’s the key: “Really, though, there is one single overriding reason that I and most everyone I know writes fan fiction for the internet: FAN MAIL!”