Guest post written by author Lauren Shippen
Lauren Shippen, author of The Infinite Noise, is a writer best known for her work in fiction podcasts. She is the creator and sole writer of the popular audio drama, The Bright Sessions. She also wrote MARVELS, an audio adaptation of the popular comic and co-produced the #1 podcast Passenger List, for which she received a BBC Audio Drama Award, Webby, and British Podcast Award. Lauren was named one of Forbes’s 2018 30 Under 30 in Media and one of MovieMaker Magazine’s and Austin Film Festival’s 25 Screenwriters to Watch. She was born in New York City and grew up in Bronxville, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
I first discovered fanfiction in 2006. The TV show Bones was halfway through its first season and I was obsessed. I was shipping the two main characters without even really knowing what shipping was – I certainly didn’t have the words for it. And I barely had an outlet for this constant daydreaming about wanting two fictional characters to confess their love for each other. Tumblr had yet to be created, YouTube was still in relative infancy (I distinctly remember searching “Fox, Bones” and turning up 16 videos. Sixteen.), and Archive of Our Own was years away. I had few friends as a high schooler and none of them watched this show. What was I to do?
The official show’s website had a message board for fans, but it wasn’t very active. Despite this, I went on it every week, never commenting (I am that specific age of Millennial that is full digital native but was also taught not to talk to people on the internet in my youth), hoping that people would be reacting to episodes the same way I was. And then, one day, someone posted a link to fanfiction.net.
This was it – a community of people who understood this “shipping” thing that I had apparently been doing, and here they were, not only talking about it, but writing it into existence. I devoured so many fics, quickly discovering that it wasn’t just about shipping. Yes, I loved the fics where Booth and Bones finally got together, but I also loved the fics of the whole lab team just hanging out, doing mundane things, the fics that focused on the internal lives of side characters, the case fics that had mysteries as robust as the actual show. Fanfic helped me love the show in a deeper way, and it also started to teach me about narrative construction in new ways. Reading other peoples’ interpretations – over and over again – of the same characters helped me see the scaffolding of character building and storytelling. It taught me to backfill characters’ biographies, to find interesting dynamics in relationships that go beyond the obvious, to imagine characters in simple moments in their lives.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but all these lessons would continue to simmer in the back of my mind over the next decade, preparing me to write my own original stories and put them out in the world (and some fanfiction too). Beyond the fact that fanfic is worthwhile as its own creative endeavor – not to mention, just plain fun – it’s also a wonderful exercise that you can use to stretch your muscles, like making recipes from one of those subscription meal kits to get used to the basic techniques of cooking. The ingredients are already prepped for you and it’s up to you to make a meal out of them.
Part of my writing process involves applying the same kind of obsessive excitement and creative principles to characters that I created wholecloth. I make playlists for them, I write scenes with them that I’ll never use, and I try on every possible ship pairing like testing out different sizes of the same jacket. This doesn’t mean that I’ve explored every single narrative possibility in my stories – I think that might be impossible – but it does keep me open to follow threads of my story that weren’t planned from the beginning. Sometimes I’ll even throw my characters into worlds or situations they’d never exist in, just to see how they’d behave.
At the beginning of this year, I set myself a challenge – to write a single bit of fanfiction every month. No fixed ship or fandom, word count or genre. Just a challenge to explore, a challenge to try something different each month. I fell woefully short – I think I’ve written…maybe three? But it’s been helpful to give myself permission to write just for the joy of it. To write something I know no one will ever read, simply to play out a scenario I dreamed up about my fandom of the moment.
This self-imposed challenge grew out of writing one of the characters in my latest book, Some Faraway Place. Emily is the love interest of the main character, Rose, and writes fanfiction in her spare time. Specifically, Stucky fanfic (the pairing of Steve and Bucky from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which I may or may not have written myself). Emily wants to be a writer when she graduates from college – a poet in particular – but that’s not why she writes fanfic. She writes it because she loves it. Writing her character amidst trying to meet my deadline during a difficult year and a million other deadlines, reminded me that writing wasn’t just something that paid the bills or gave me anxiety. Writing is something I love. Fanfiction always helps remind me of the power and joy of stories, and why I tell them.
Creativity needs boundaries. In my opinion, if you keep things too open, too expansive, creativity will stagnate before choosing in which direction to blossom. I like playing in a defined sandbox or giving my writing collaborators defined boundaries. Rules help us all thrive. But that doesn’t mean I can never leave the sandbox. Sometimes it feels like my sandbox runs out of sand, and fanfiction can be a grab bag of materials that I can turn, alchemy-like, into new sand. And from there, I can turn that sand into sandcastles of my own imagining.
This metaphor has gotten away from me a bit, but you see what I mean: having a structure on which to place your story – whether it’s a structure you created or one you borrowed – can help your creativity flourish. And even people who make their living from creating their own stories can fall short when coming up with new structures or inventing new worlds. Just like fanfic helped Emily process what was going on in her personal life with Rose in Some Faraway Place, fic is the secret fuel that fans my creative flames.
