I'm going to assume you've clicked on this guide because you saw some fanfiction and fandom terms and got curious, so, to start with a basic definition: fanfiction, or fanfic for short, is a transformative story written based on a pre-existing media. The media can be anything; a book, a movie, a podcast, a game, or even a real person, though that's a slightly different case, and obviously the media part doesn't apply there. The story can be about pretty much anything within the limits of your imagination, just like original fiction, with the main difference being you're using characters, worldbuilding, and lore that existed before you started writing.
While you may have heard of famous works that started as fanfictions and were adapted into original works, such as Fifty Shades of Gray by E. L. James or City of Bones by Cassandra Clare, that is not actually what most fanfics are written or shared for. If you want to write fanfiction because the idea of a pre-existing audience appeals to you when you translate the fanfiction to an original work, you're welcome to do so, but know that the pre-existing audience is not guaranteed, and you would be in the minority among fanfic writers.
Additionally, to dispute a well-known stereotype right out of the gate— no, not all fanfiction is smut, and it's not all sexual in nature. Some of it is, and I'd recommend you don't get into fandom with an unexamined bias against it, but if you don't want to read explicit works, you're not going to be out of options, not by a long shot.
Fanfic is the fastest-growing form of writing in the world. Working in ‘fandoms’ anonymous authors bring their own gloss and invention to novels, films and tv series, developing characters, expanding narratives and, in the ‘slash’ genre, boldly going where the conventional genre writers fear to tread in relationships.
In ’The Democratic Genre’ poet Sheenagh Pugh explores fandoms as diverse as Jane Austen, Blake’s 7 and The Bill. She discusses fanfic terminology, its mechanisms for participation and support, the differences with conventional publishing and, for the first time, the literary standing of the writing.
Fanfic is now an established cultural phenomenon – this book is its essential guide.
The production, reception and discussion of fanfiction is a major aspect of contemporary global media. Thus far, however, the genre has been subject to relatively little rigorous qualitative or quantitative study-a problem that Judith M. Fathallah remedies here through close analysis of fanfiction related to Sherlock, Supernatural, and Game of Thrones. Her large-scale study of the sites, reception, and fan rejections of fanfic demonstrate how the genre works to legitimate itself through traditional notions of authorship, even as it deconstructs the author figure and contests traditional discourses of authority. Through a process she identifies as the 'legitimation paradox', Fathallah demonstrates how fanfic hooks into and modifies the discourse of authority, and so opens new spaces for writing that challenges the authority of media professionals.
Before Fanfiction investigates the overlapping cultures of fandom and American literature from the late 1800s to the mid-1940s, exploding the oft-repeated myth that fandom has its origins in the male-dominated letter columns of science fiction pulp magazines in the 1930s. By reexamining the work of popular American women writers and their fans, Alexandra Edwards recovers the literary history of American media fandom, drawing previously ignored fangirls into the spotlight.
