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Why I Play With Other People's Toys
A Fan-Fiction Manifesto
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Dear Visitor,
When people find out that I write fan fiction, some of them say, "Ooh, cool!
Can I read some?"
Others roll their eyes. "Fan fiction?" they say. "Oh, please. Don't you
have any ideas of your own?"
If you're the first kind, welcome! If you're the second... well,
let me tell you a story.
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ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a painfully shy, introverted eight-year-old boy who had
an astounding teacher. Mrs. Brown’s favorite words were, "What if?" She read the children fables and
challenged them to write their own. His was about a royal baker who, desperate to please the king, added
way too much yeast to his bread dough until it rose... and rose... and rose... and finally exploded,
splattering dough all across the sky to form the clouds. She’d show them pictures—pictures of places,
of people, of activities—and ask, "What’s happening here? What just happened a moment ago? What’s going
to happen next?"
Our little boy loved it. He loved creating whole new worlds on paper. All on
his own, he wrote a whole action-adventure mystery story that same year. All right, all right, so the
story was about the search for a stolen bag of M&Ms; the point is, he started telling stories, and it
opened up his world.
He was still painfully, unbearably shy and withdrawn. More often than not,
he was too afraid to write down his stories at all; that way he could be sure that no one would ever,
ever see them.
Time passed, and he found himself drawn to the theatre. As a lighting guru,
and later on as an actor, he could step into someone else’s world for a few minutes or a few hours at
a time. It was escapism with gravitas. But reality would still be waiting for him when he was done,
and even his own private worlds had become a barren, lonely place.
And then he went off to college,
and almost at once he discovered something magical: a writing group called Starbucket. They were flaky,
silly, brilliantly creative lunatics who loved nothing better than to tell stories together. They told
hundreds and hundreds of overlapping stories, leading each other’s characters from one adventure to the
next, more often than not weaving in characters and settings and backgrounds from stories they’d all
seen or read before, but taking them in new and startling directions. It was like Mrs. Brown’s class
all over again: "What happens next?"
It was a revelation! The shy young man found stories old
and new pouring out of him. His worlds no longer kept him apart and isolated; now they bound him closer
and closer to these new-found friends. He wasn’t hiding away in a private world, he wasn’t ducking away
into some long-dead playwright’s world; he was sharing his own imagined world, and his friends were exploring
it right along with him. It was extraordinary.
He’s been sharing imaginary worlds ever since.
He’s won awards for his academic work exploring the worlds of the great poets and playwrights; he’s
published more than a dozen stories, he’s co-written one novel and he’s halfway through one on his own,
he’s written an educational musical play for a statewide tour, his third original children’s play will
have its second full stage production this summer, he’s developed a set of ghost stories based largely
on his own research and he's performed them almost 300 times, he’s written his own stage adaptations
of tales by Dickens and Poe and Coleridge; he’s even written a couple of original games.
And yes,
he'd still sometimes writes new stories about old characters--"fan fiction," as he learned that it was
called. He used to hide these stories away; they were fun to write, but "nice people" don't talk about
such things, he thought, and it's not like fan-fiction ever leads anywhere near real writing work.
And then one day, writing under a pseudonym and with his fingers firmly crossed, he submitted a script--unasked,
uninvited, strictly on spec--for the latest Star Trek television series, Deep Space Nine. Time passed,
new episodes continued to air, the characters on the show continued to develop, the opportunity for anything
like his story ever to happen passed...
... and then one day the phone rang. A script supervisor
at Paramount was calling, inviting him out to the lot to pitch.
So, in the middle of grad school,
up to his eyeballs in Chaucer and Shakespeare and William Blake, our young hero took a week and traveled
to Los Angeles to meet with the executive producer of the Star Trek franchise to share his ideas for
future episodes he could write, instead. If not for a bad case of last-minute stage fright (something
he will never allow too happen like that again), something might even have come of that meeting.
Still, having had it at all is, as the Klingons would say, "honorable."
As fan-fic goes, he
figures he's done pretty well. And it's only appropriate that the script and the meeting were for Star
Trek, a franchise which has outlived its creator--a franchise which exists today only because of writers
and producers willing to play with Gene Roddenberry's toys.
I lied to you, though. I said there
were two responses to "I write fan-fic": (1) "Ooh, let me read some," and (2) "Oh, come on, can't you
write anything original?"
There's a third, you see. Some people scowl, and mutter things like
"copyright" and "trademark" and "intellectual property." "How would you feel," they growl, "if you
went to all the trouble of creating a new imaginary world and people came along and started telling their
own stories using your characters and situations?"
Well, our hero loves that sort of thing--that's
how he makes his living! He's opened thousands of children’s eyes to science by welcoming them into
a lunatic world of mad-scientist zeal. He's persuaded thousands of people to pay good money to share
the world of his self-scripted ghost stories, and he's done it so well that they've applauded and tipped
and even written fan letters at the end. And he's persuaded thousands of tired, cranky, jaded theme-park
teens to turn over their last few dollars to play his games when they could play free games, instead--often
by letting them join in on his lunacy: "Show me something blue," he'll cry, "and you'll get buy one,
get one free!"
Alone no longer, he's found his truest home at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire,
a place built entirely on the idea of creating an imaginary world and inviting people to share in it.
People come looking for him, they ask directions to him, and they laugh uproariously at his jokes day
after day after day.
What does he do there, you ask? Is he the king? Is he a noble, or a swordfighter,
or at least the royal jester? No. No, he's the pickleman. He sells pickles. Pickles on a stick.
Big, green, skewered vegetables on little, wooden, shish-kabob sticks.
Lots and lots of pickles,
in fact. Ten thousand of them in 2004 alone.
And he does it by being the big, bold, off-beat
actor-writer-goofball that he is--and by creating an obsessive, all-consuming world all his own, and
inviting people to join in it.
And some take that world with them when they leave. Last fall,
on one of the special days the Faire holds for school groups, a teenaged boy came up to him and told
him about an event at his school. Each student was asked to re-create his or her favorite part of the
Renaissance Faire experience. Some did Shakespeare, others did sword-fighting, some did Elizabethan
dialect....
"I," said the boy, "did you."
So I know how I'd feel if my fiction were fan-ficked:
I'd feel just the way I did when I learned that my acting had been. I'd be surprised, and stunned, and
a little defensive at first, but ultimately, I'd be deeply, deeply honored.
Because if we writers,
like artists of any kind, aspire to a small glimmer of immortality, then surely it's a measure of our
success in that quest when we create a world other writers want to inhabit on their own.
And
that is why I write--and invite--fan fiction.
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