Anne Jamison is the author of three critical books, including Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World. She teaches literature and culture from the eighteenth century to the present at the University of Utah. She lives in Salt Lake City with her dogs, her son, and an avant-garde poet. In Between Days is her first novel.
How did you get into reading/writing fic? What were your earliest fandoms, and what’s the newest one you’ve fallen for?
I first found online fandom when I was teaching Buffy as a TA for seven discussion sections and I got desperate (that is a lot of discussions). I got into reading Buffy fic a couple of years later, only after several failed attempts at looking for fic and really not enjoying it, by which I mean feeling scarred for life. I didn’t like it when the characters didn’t sound like the show and I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. One night I was bored to tears in the ER, and I finally found one I liked, and, Dear Reader, the rest was history.
So with fic, first it was Buffy and then out into the Whedonverse. I very selectively (remembering the scarring) ventured into certain beloved fandoms of my youth (though back then I wouldn’t have called it fandom), like Star Wars, some comic books, X-Files, Sherlock Holmes, and The Breakfast Club. Soon enough, I had read every single Veronica Mars fic. I have a distinct memory of researching in the French national library, getting an update on a Bones fic I was following, and looking it up in the reading room.
Recently, I am very carefully reading both new and old Veronica Mars fic. FOR REASONS. Mostly these days, I find secret old dead fandoms and read in them and tell no one. I don’t really like to weigh in as me in fandom arguments or conflicts (because of the professor thing), and I don’t really like having a hidden identity for that kind of thing, either, as it seems a bit disingenuous (for a pen-name, it seems different). But also, it has been a while since a current fic fandom really grabbed me. Probably the last one was Hannibal.
How has fic (reading or writing it!) influenced your professional work?
I began incorporating fanfic into my teaching in various ways from around 2007, a couple of years after I had started reading and writing it. I was very interested in the different ways fic could present narrative structure, genre, character, and frankly presented these very different forms that many people were writing and reading but people like me were considering. And of course I began considering issues of authorship, originality, and even literary history from a very different perspective.
Writing Fic changed my career pretty dramatically because I became a visible expert at a time when a lot of people in the media suddenly wanted an expert. So now fan studies is a big part of my career—but my most recent critical book was on Kafka and Czech culture, and that was a lot closer to my training.
When I started out, writing fanfic was more of a pure pleasure—I loved to try to have a completely different voice, to sound like someone else and adopt their concerns, to push back a little on elements I hadn’t liked. And in a profession where “publish or perish” is such a big deal and everything is tallied through a lens of accomplishment and prestige, I was thrilled to write completely outside that economy. To “waste time” felt like a kind of chocolate. I had studied fiction (and poetry) writing in New York and at Princeton and I kind of lost the joy of it, didn’t like the publishing industry (interned in publishing), and wrote poems destined only for my sock drawer. Fanfic was a very different mode, and I valued that about it.
But then I wrote 200K words of Breakfast Club fanfic, and then I wrote a novel, In Between Days, that is in many ways a Breakfast Club AU or Breakfast Club-critical fix-it fic. So that blended fic and professional, in a way. And I think writing fic made me more willing to publish it myself rather than take it out of the 80s, which is what my agent thought it needed in order to sell it. I don’t blame him at all! I am sure he was right. But I think based on my experiences with fic, I had more faith that someone would hear “John Hughes Noir” or “The Breakfast Club, but with more coke dealers” and think it sounded cool. And I definitely had become less invested in commercial publishing and the kinds of legitimacy it affords. I don’t think it is as much fun.
However, I also have tenure so other material concerns are not as pressing and I probably have cultural legitimacy to spare in some respects.
Are there things that you find fic generally does better than pro writing?
Fanfic can do sex better than pro writing, especially around consent—whether making it sexy or exploring the various ways consent can be dubious through power relations, etc. Of course, fanfic can fail massively at all of that! But when it does it well, I think it does it better. I think it can do a kind of granular emotional level better because readers will tolerate a slower pace. It can represent sexual and gender minorities and neurodiversity and disability better (and fail to represent them! And do a terrible job representing them! Fanfic is very, very big).
But really, fanfic can do so many different things that published fiction cannot, because fanfic can be as long or as short as the writer wants, can start or stop in the middle or at the end. It is much more free, and often more original, for all its various derivativeness.
You literally wrote the book on fanfiction! Did studying fic in a professional context impact how you read it?
I read fic differently for work than I do for pleasure. For example, I think the Omegaverse is one of the most fascinating things fanfic has ever done, and that some of the stories do weird but important political work. But it’s never what I’ll read when I read for myself, because it makes me vaguely nauseous (so many fluids). When reading for work, I’m more analytical, and I’m not just following my bliss or whatever. I’m looking for interesting, and I don’t care as much if I’m invested in the characters or world, because it’s not about me. I’ll be fascinated by something going on in BTS fic when I couldn’t recognize one of their songs.
When I’m reading for myself, I tend to want a particular combination of good writing, intellectual interest, and emotional engagement that’s not so different from what I’ve often read for pleasure. Sometimes I want more of a good thing, and sometimes I want solace or absolute denial of terrible things dumb show writers have done—like any other fic reader. I will read in a fandom where I don’t have emotional investment if the fic is good enough—because then I get the emotional investment. But that is rare for me. It happened with Twilight fanfic, where I never cared even one bit about the books, but some of the fic kept me up all night.
What makes you ship a set of characters together? Or what elements in canon make you want to read or write fic?
Angst plus humor is my OTP. I want a certain kind of friction, banter, tension, angst or conflict, but usually affection underlying those elements. The fiction can be about corpses or curtains—don’t care. Operatic or domestic, all good. A lot are variations on the Holmes/Watson or Kirk/Spock dynamic (or are, you know, those exact ships), and the others are basically variations of Elizabeth/Darcy. Han/Leia, Mulder/Scully, House/Wilson, Logan/Veronica, Spike/Buffy, Will/Hannibal, Merlin/Arthur… I find there is less femslash with these elements, and often it entails a genderswap, but I love it when I find it. Then sometimes there’s a show like Battlestar Galactica where I will read all the ships because they’re all weird and interesting. That’s the rare example where the world is compelling enough to drive fics I’ll want to read. Fantasy can do that, but I’m not a big fantasy reader.
Sometimes a fic fandom will start doing a particular thing very well. For instance, some of the historical fic around Steve Rogers is amazing, so even though I don’t get into any MCU ships, I’ll read that from time to time. MCU can also sometimes produce really entertaining gen or bromance, and I like that. I’m a sucker for bantery gen fic. My Little Pony had some incredibly funny stuff, and I didn’t respond to the canon world at all. I can’t really stomach The Walking Dead but some of the Michonne fic is awesome, so I read that just for the characterization.
When I think, oh look! Here’s something only fic can do!, I do a happy dance. And when someone does something weirdly literary, I squee, like Hannibal-Schopenhauer or Veronica Mars-Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes-Nightmare Before Christmas, Brontë Juvenilia AU, etc, weird Victorian crisis of faith Sherlock AU. That kind of thing makes my English professor heart sing.
Do you have fanfics or fanfic authors that most influenced you, or that you often return to? (Or are there fics that changed how you thought about what fanfic/storytelling in general are capable of?)
TheBlackArrow from the Twilight fandom really changed my understanding of what fic could do—it was a Twilight/Wuthering Heights crossover that I read because the author was one of my first commenters on a fic, and I was intrigued she said it was Twilight, but it didn’t matter if I hadn’t read the books. That was the first time I’d really read a standalone fic and the first time I’d ever read fic that was (although I didn’t know it at the time) so much better than canon. Obviously there are many others! I did write a book…
What are your favorite things about fic as a medium? Are there things about the fic world that you’d like to see changed or improved?
I like the collaborative elements, the fictive worlds, the strange collective relationships among stories and tropes, not just authors.
I wish fanfiction could be better about race. I think you can learn a lot about race from looking at fanfiction, but mostly what we learn is not encouraging. Of course, it would be odd if fanfiction were somehow immune to structural racism. But taken as a whole—and I am not talking about individual writers or stories—fanfiction exposes how entrenched whiteness is in patterns of storytelling, characterization, norms of attractiveness (and, of course, casting, although it doesn’t all come down to that).
Tell me your favorite tropes! What tropes are your catnip, and what tropes do you tend to steer clear of?
Catnip: Enemies to lovers, there is only one bed!, hurt/comfort, huddling for warmth, mutual pining, office/professional tensions, friends to lovers, social media/texting/digital relationships, set in fandom, casefic
Nope: soul mark/soulmate; very underage; omegaverse (unless for science!); daddy kink; feeding; reader insert
Authors in Fandom is an interview series where I talk to professional authors about their backgrounds in fandom and fanfiction. If you have suggestions for traditionally published writers I should talk to, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter!