When we left off in Fanfiction, Part 1: A Brief History, we’d just discovered the wonders of a centralized fanfiction hub: FanFiction.Net. While a great boon to the fanfiction internet landscape, it invited many more eyes– and more scrutiny. Copyright holders only had to type in a single web address or search their property’s name…

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,…