All writing is dialogue. Not dialogue as in he-said-she-said, but as in referencing and relating to other ideas. Choosing to write about vampires, for example, puts you in dialogue with works like Dracula, The Vampire Chronicles, and Twilight. Writing a historical biography of a famous leader or innovator forces you to dialogue with historical texts, other biographical works, and interviews with witnesses or relations. Even a memoir, as personal as writing can be, is in dialogue with the history of the memoir genre, as well as texts and experiences from your life, from your favorite movies to your gender identity. No art can stand fully isolated– everything is referential. 

Many in the history of traditional publishing take issue with this view. Anne Rice, in her famous Amazon Reviews rant, said, “For me, novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art.” (Pay no attention to the fact that she wrote the first draft of Interview With a Vampire after watching the movie Dracula’s Daughter). Other authors embrace their influences, like fantasy authors acknowledging the influence of Tolkien, LeGuin, or Pratchett throughout their work. There is another category of author, though, that takes this dialogue and pushes the media they’re referencing directly into the text itself: fanfiction authors.

Already I can feel some of you cringing at your screen. Putting fanfiction writers on the same level as traditionally published writers, or even self-published authors, can make people uncomfortable. After all, aren’t fanfiction authors just “playing in someone else’s sandbox”? Or, in many a detractor’s words, “stealing”? 

Well, first, cringe culture is dead, so jot that down. Second, while fanfiction is, by definition, amateur in nature, its effect on the modern publishing industry gives away its cultural importance. In the years since Fifty Shades of Grey, a book famous for being Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, more books based on fanfiction or fanfiction tropes have taken to the shelves. BookTok (a subset of TikTok that recommends books) is famous for using what used to be fanfiction-specific language to describe the books they’re recommending– and book marketing is starting to follow suit. That doesn’t even touch on the deluge of self-published work that dances around the edges of copyright, flying low on the radar of Kindle or Wattpad.

So how did we get here? At what point did fanfiction enter the mainstream and begin to alter the publishing landscape? While I can’t answer definitively, I have a few theories. To dive into those theories, we’ll need to cover what fanfiction is and its long, storied history. Join me for Part One of a two-part series where we take a brief look into the history of fanfiction so that in Part Two we can discuss how we ended up where we are.

What Is Fanfiction?

Before we jump into the history of fanfiction, it might be helpful to give a few definitions for the uninitiated. Below are some of the terms I will be using throughout these posts and their rough definitions: 

• Fan: Someone who is an enthusiast, or enjoys something a bit more than the average amount. The root word comes from the word “fanatic”.
• Fandom: A community or subculture of fans that has been created around a piece of media (book, movie, television, or otherwise) or activity (sports fans, tea fans, etc.)
• Fan Works: Used to describe anything created (artwork, costumes/cosplay, meta-analysis, writing) within a fandom that is derived from or uses parts of the original source material.
• Fanart: Artwork that is created using aspects, characters, or settings of an existing piece of media, made in an amateur capacity.
• Fanfiction: Fiction, poetry, or other writing that uses aspects, characters, settings, or plots of an existing piece of media, made in an amateur capacity.
• Fanzines: Small, self-published magazines created for a community. They are typically filled with fan works of all kinds and sold at cost or given away for free. Also abbreviated as “zines”.

If you’ve never heard of fan works like fanfiction or fanart before, these definitions can sound alarm bells in your head. What about copyright? Couldn’t Disney sue you for writing fanfiction about Han Solo and Luke doing the horizontal bop? Well, yes– and no. The history of copyright and fanfiction is complicated. Let’s take a closer look. 

The Land Before Copyright

Before copyright, publishing was the Wild West. Stories were told, retold, and published only when deemed important enough, or the patron rich enough. Actual books were hard to come by and came at a hefty price for the slowly-burgeoning literate populace, which left most people consuming stories in an alternative way: plays.

One of the most famous writers in history, William Shakespeare, regularly pulled entire plots, characters, or settings from historical novels or contemporary texts. Othello and Romeo and Juliet were not singular creations pulled from Shakespeare’s head, but scripts in direct dialogue (literally) with other, well-known works of art, modified for the stage and to elicit audience reaction.

If authors weren’t pulling entire plots whole cloth, they may write something called an “unofficial sequel” instead. Unsatisfied with the way an author had ended their story, any writer could pick up the pen and continue the character’s journey and publish it. This famously happened to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote, who found an unofficial sequel featuring his windmill-charging knight had been written by a man named Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (a pseudonym). It, frankly, wasn’t very well written, so when Cervantes published his official sequel to Don Quixote, he added some direct ribbing toward Avellaneda’s work.

It should be noted: we can’t call unofficial sequels or all of Shakespeare’s plays fanfiction. There was no modern concept of fandom in those days, and wouldn’t be for some time. Still, the origins of the form are there, with the love of retelling stories and playing with another author’s characters reaching back hundreds of years.

The Statute of Anne & The First Fandom

As printing processes evolved to be faster and cheaper, literacy continued to rise. The only obstacles in literacy’s way were monopolistic publishing companies who retained the rights to books forever. To combat these monopolies and advance cultural education, Britain enacted the world’s first copyright law, the Statute of Anne. The Statute of Anne allowed publishers 14 years of protection (21 years for anything already in circulation) before books fell into the public domain. 

The Statute of Anne was soon replicated in other countries with the same short-term limits. These limits allowed unofficial sequels and pastiches (books written in the style of the original author in order to praise or give homage) to thrive. Some notable examples include Sybil G. Brinton’s Old Friends and New Fancies, a “what-happened-next” for many unmarried Jane Austen characters, and A New Alice in an Old Wonderland by Anna M. Richards, which took a different Alice into Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. 

It wasn’t long before the first “official” fandom was born. Centered around Arthur Conan Doyle’s character of Sherlock Holmes, an entire community came together to celebrate the fictional detective. When Doyle killed Holmes, public demonstrations of mourning and letter campaigns eventually convinced Doyle to bring the detective back. At that time, what could be seen as the “first” published fanfiction appeared. A friend of Doyle’s, J.M. Barie (Peter Pan), wrote and published The Adventure of the Two Collaborators featuring Holmes and Watson with Doyle’s blessing.

Of Shifting Perceptions & Star Trek

While still young, fandom continued to thrive in local or regional social circles, with many fans staying in communication through letters and meet-ups. These circles grew alongside access to mimeographs (old-school copy machines), with dedicated fans pooling fanworks into zines and distributing them among their community. Fandom communities remained relatively small until two cultural shifts occurred: the release of two highly-lauded transformative works and the first-ever broadcast of Star Trek. 

In 1966, The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys took the literary world by storm, winning several awards and commendations within its release year. That same year, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was staged at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to much acclaim. These two pieces of work were anything but original– the first, based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and the second a skewed view of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In creating these transformative pieces of fiction, Rhys and Stoppard shifted the public’s perception of what constituted “original” art.

Also in ‘66, the first episode of Star Trek premiered. What that first episode sparked was one of the largest and most vibrant fandoms to date. Fanzines like Spockanalia and T-Negative popped up and began circulating fandom spaces, sometimes even reaching writers or actors on the show. The showrunners responded in kind, submitting letters of thanks, as themselves or in-character, for future zine editions. This fandom communication and letter-writing affected the show in many ways, from altering how Kirk and Spock were depicted to saving the show from cancellation after the second season. Once the show ended and was subsequently syndicated, the Star Trek fandom spread alongside access to the first Xerox machines. Fanzines filled with fanart and fanfiction spread like wildfire, creating the basis for fandom as we know it today.

The Mouse

In the years since the first copyright laws had been established in the US, they’d been updated and tweaked with relative frequency. The biggest came in 1976 when the new US copyright law stated that works would retain their copyright for “either 75 years or the life of the author plus 50 years”. This slowly began to push unofficial sequels and pastiches out of the market, but amateur fanfiction continued to thrive. 

Still, a shift began to occur. As easier methods of duplication and printing became accessible to wider swathes of people, fanzines and fanworks had a longer reach. Copyright holders found it easier to access these zines and fanworks and, unlike the Star Trek creators, weren’t so pleased with what they found. In 1981, Lucasfilm Ltd. sent letters to several Star Wars fanzines, gently “reminding” them that the characters were copyrighted and that they would not tolerate “pornographic” content. While these kinds of threats were relatively rare, questions about the legality of fanfiction began to rise as access to fanworks expanded. 

Copyright changed again in 1998 with the Copyright Term Extension Act, often called the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. Pressured by Disney, who did not want to lose the first commercially-successful Mickey Mouse cartoons to the public domain, the US Congress extended the copyright term limits to 120 years, or the life of the author plus 70 years. This left almost no room for legitimate dialogue with past or current literature and raised new questions about what copyright did and didn’t allow when covering such an extensive period. It also coincided with the founding of one of fanfiction’s biggest historical landmarks, setting up legal battles for years to come.

Welcome to the Internet

Of course, the internet was around before 1998. Fanfiction had already adapted, with early internet fans creating Usenet groups and building entire sites to host fanfiction for their preferred fandom. Fanzines and mailing lists didn’t disappear, but many were digitized with the creation of email. That said, even with the entirety of the internet available to them, many fandoms remained cloistered together, rarely interacting with each other and sticking to their preferred media. Until 1998. 

Enter FanFiction.Net, a website where anyone could make an account and post fanfiction for any fandom. It was searchable. It had follow functions. It allowed you to curate lists of fics you loved. Most of all, it allowed anyone to read any fic they could find and comment on it. The fanfiction community, once divided, exploded within this central, searchable hub.

As the internet continued its climb from “luxury” to “utility”, more people found their way into fanfiction and associated fandoms through FanFiction.Net (or its many successors). What was once a niche community, sending physical copies of zines around a mailing list, now found itself open to the public. Anyone could read anything for any fandom, or multiple fandoms if crossovers were your style. But, with this increased visibility, fanfiction didn’t just make it to the eyes of other fans– it also made it to copyright holders. And some? Were royally pissed off.

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Join me next month for Part Two of this series, where we’ll take a look at how early-internet fanfiction legal battles shaped fandom culture and how it’s affecting the publishing landscape today. Until then, whether you’re reading our Book of the Month or X-Files fanfiction, happy reading and happy sipping!

Sources: 
This post is an INCREDIBLY brief history of fanfiction, pulled from several sources like Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia. That said, a good chunk also comes from the wonderful Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison, which goes much more in-depth than I can and comes with insightful commentary on the culture and avant-garde nature of fanfiction. If you have a chance to read it, I highly recommend it.