What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

In the Beginning

The first book I ever wrote was a work of fanfiction.

Aged about five, I wrote a story about My Little Pony, illustrated it by tracing over pictures from my colouring book, then taped all the pages together to make an actual booklet. It was messy and childish and probably very sweet, and it was the most natural thing in the world for me to do, because this is how little kids play: by taking characters they know and like and transposing them into new narratives. Making up dialogue and adventures for my toy ponies during solo games involved an identical creative process to writing those same stories down, and if Starscream of the Decepticons sometimes joined in, too – well, why not? As films like the Toy Story franchise and, more recently, the Lego Movie are eager to point out, children don’t tend to compartmentalise their play. It doesn’t matter that Batman and Sailor Moon come from completely different franchises: if you have action figures of both to hand, then why not try and figure out which one would win in a fight? Toys are props in our earliest narrative engagements: they show us that it’s OK to cross the streams and create new things, to build pirate ships crewed by Barbie and Han Solo and random plastic animals invested with Original Character Status by sole virtue of our loving imaginations, because really, that’s what they’re there for.

And then, somewhere along the way, we stop – not because the benefits of creativity, imagination and empathy are suddenly any less, but because we learn to prioritise official narratives over our own; or at the very least, to stop viewing our participation in the story as a natural means of extending it. We become self-conscious, aware of the boundaries of fictional worlds in a way we weren’t before. Which isn’t to say that the impulse to tell our own or hybridised stories goes away; far from it. But like Philip Pullman’s Lyra learning to reuse the alethiometer at the end of The Amber Spyglass, the transition from childhood to adolescence, or from adolescence to adulthood, often requires us to relearn consciously actions we once performed without thought; not because the actions themselves have materially changed, but because our awareness of their implications have – as, indeed, has the sophistication of our storytelling. Children’s playtales are an unapologetic Super Smash Brothers brawl of conflicting worlds and characters brought together for the sole purpose of having fun; and however hard we might try to recapture that sense of freedom as adult storytellers, our awareness of setting and context means we’ll construct these new stories differently.

SFF in Conversation: Foz Meadows – Thoughts on Fanfiction.

9000 Words of Awesome

(via thebooksmugglers)

In which I ramble on at length about fanfiction, narrative interdependence, slash, the omegaverse, gender and kink.

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