Cary Attwell

It is one of my great disappointments in life that I will never be able to even come close to approximating the artistry Michael Chabon effortlessly executes in all of his books. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of my favorites (which I once lent out to someone in quivering glee at being able to share his words but then never got back, to my eternal dismay); it was the first book I'd ever read of his and I was awestruck by the way he crafts words so beautifully together.

As he's one of my literary heroes, I approached his essay about fanfiction in Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands with trepidation, half expecting the same censure you hear from the plethora of high-profile authors out there who very publicly rail against fanfiction as a kind of theft, as a lazy practice, as being inherently subpar.

But here's what Chabon had to say about it: "Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving, we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

If I actually used Facebook, I'd break the Like button on that quote.

The rest of this post will not be able to say it any better than he did but, gosh darn it, I'm going to give it the old college try anyway.

Full disclosure, if you haven't already guessed: I read and write and love fanfiction.

No matter the source material, there is always something more to mine from that universe. Life doesn't end when a few select problems are resolved, conversations don't fade to black and any number of things can and do happen in the background outside of the protagonists' knowing and sphere of influence. Unsaid things happen in and out of the story we're told, and sometimes those incidents deserve (or demand!) their own story too. I don't think I'm alone in saying that there have been countless times in my life when I've gone, "Nooo!" when I realize it's the end of the book and there's to be no more (and sometimes go straight back to the beginning so I won't have to put the story away).

In that sense, I see fanfiction as the ultimate form of flattery. It means my imagination has been sparked in ways it's never been before your book/show/movie came along; it means I love your universe, story and characters so much that I can't bear to let them go; it means I want to go on a dozen more adventures with them and revel in the light of their brilliance, shake them when they're being stupid, hurt when they hurt and hold them close to my heart.

Though less so than in years past, fanfiction still carries quite a heavy stigma, full of Mary Sues and self-inserts and ungrammatical nonsense enough to make your head explode. True, there is a lot of dreck out there, just like there is a lot of dreck in traditionally published works. But I promise, cross my heart and hope to die, that there are fanfic writers across the world who are downright outstanding, who ought to have publishers crowding outside their door with a battering ram to get them signed to a multi-book deal, who don't need an established universe to tell their stories, but use those universes out of reverence and love.

It's not a lack of respect from which fanfiction stems, nor delusion or lackluster enterprise. Fanfiction, as I have encountered it throughout the years, is an expression of appreciation -- for words, for worlds, for characters, for the creators themselves who have, knowingly or not, gifted an endless sandbox to their fans to build something new from whatever wonderful things have been afforded them.