A few years back, there was the usual internet furor over a New Yorker article, this one about teen reading.
As YA literature continues to spiral up in popularity, the article stayed in my mind, mostly because of a quote from another article:
MISHAN: Teen-age boys don’t read, apparently. As Caitlin Flanagan writes in this month’s Atlantic, an adolescent girl “is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”
Not long ago I was reading some seventeenth century letters and essays that dealt with this very subject. Alarm! Girls of that tender age, just before marriage, are devouring novels! Oh noes, it’s the end of the world! Girls are also writing reams of letters to their friends about same novels. Charlotte Lennox wrote her Female Quixote to make a statement about this very danger, but it ends up too preachy for most modern readers to enjoy. Jane Austen did a far better job in the first half of Northanger Abbey when she depicts two young women reading and talking passionately about novels–and then comes that brilliant discussion of novels, why they are unjustly (and hypocritically) condemned.
I’ve caught echoes of this same subject a hundred years earlier than that, in translated and second-hand alarms about how middle class girls were devouring the novels of Madame Scudery. In that instance, the horreurs were mostly about how rich daughters of traders were devouring the novels in order to learn how one behaves at court. Of course they would use that novel for purposes of evil: to rise above their station! Because I read French so badly, my delving further has been prevented by access to good translations of period primary sources.
My exploration into these materials, limited as it is, has led me to conclude that with the rise of literacy young women especially were reading, dreaming, writing to one another as they found like-minded companions, writing their own poetry and novels (and fan fiction), in an effort not just to satisfy those emotional and spiritual cravings, but to better their lives. Everyone wanted a better life, for whatever definition of ‘better’ fit. The reading and writing of letters and stories was a way of trying out the ideas, inventing scenarios, in a pleasurable way. Certainly more pleasurable than sitting with one’s hands folded and back straight, listening to long hectoring sermons about Female Duty.
It was then, and it is now. In fact, I find it interesting that young women now, with perhaps more liberties than ever before, are still reading. Are they reading for the same reasons as their foremothers did?
The article goes on about teen boys reading, with one person saying, …Those men end up joining the bourgeoisie in two ways: law school and untouched home libraries full of leather-bound Shakespeare, which I think says more about the speaker than about teen boys who read angsty and angry poetry, or listen to same in musical form.
The angry and angsty poetry has a long-established place in Western Lit; most people with a brush of humanities studies now will at least recognize Werther, as in Sorrows of Young, and how the influence of that novel caused a lot of sensitive young fellows to languish about snuffing roses and quoting Klopstock’s effusive poetry. Unfortunately, a few suicides, too, but I suspect that the influence there–like rock music now—is that already severely depressed youngsters found corroboration for a decision that they had already made, rather than the art leading them to self-destruction. Byron’s poetry spoke to young men as well as causing young women to flutter and swoon. Who else has had that success rate with both sexes?
And back to the larger question, is fan fiction a way for that vast sea of young women to play out emotional and philosophical scenarios, using storyforms as template?
Any young person who seeks possibility beyond what is offered by the life in front of them, and who is not hindered by lack of opportunity or disability, is likely to turn to stories to explore in relative safety. It may be that in the past–and I include our generation–girls being more limited, needed the exploration more? The boys I know are readers, but although they gladly read fiction, they read more non.
Rain in the forecast this afternoon? Hoping . . .
Yes . . . the one downside of being retired is that I’m not seeing what all the kids are reading. I have to resort to places like Goodreads to find that out. Rain? I doubt it–but clouds might bring the temps down a tad. Blarg.
There are times when I think mere agency (especially when engaged in by low status people, but not limited to them) is apt to be viewed with alarm. If anyone is doing anything, someone– very likely a bunch of someones– will get upset about it.
Good point, especially about low-status people.
Being fairly heavily involved with fanfic (as an audience, that is, and technically a publisher) I can say with absolutely no hesitation that there is a phenomenal amount of exploration at (at least) one remove going on in it.
Even if it is only exploration of how different pairings play off one another than the ones in canon. But usually it goes at least somewhat beyond that. Explorations of the varying possibilities of the created universe is a major factor. Sometimes even beyond the draw of the favorite viewpoint characters. And people, particularly young people, have probably *always* engaged in some form of fanfic. Even in days of pre-literacy when it tended to seem out as variants of widely-known folktales. In the age of the internet, when mere posting=publishing it all simply becomes a lot more obvious and harder to miss.
However, there is an additional factor involved which relates to the degree of personal involvement in such fic which is worth examining. That is the degree to which it is acceptable to personally claim the story.
A related side trip: there is a story form which many of us got exposed to as early as elementary school, generally referred to as something like the “American Tall Tale”. Where some unlikely story is told in 1st person by the storyteller who claims to have been there. I gather that this form was extremely popular at some point of other.
I never particularly warmed to this particular form, for I had been brought up to believe that it was unseemly behavior to boast, and the whole point of this form is to boast. I also early developed a tendancy to disapprove of liars — which is another point of this form of story.
Well, inserting oneself into one’s story is something that a number of people seem to regard askance. Taking on the mask of a known character, or identifying oneself as a person native to the fictional world is generally accepted. But readers of fanfic are highly suspicious of self-insertion. Not without reason, for it is usually done very badly in the hands of inexperienced storytellers.
However, it leads to a certain degree of “fleeing when none pursueth” when self-editing draws an author to force their story to be about the characters that readers already know rather than the original character that the story really deserves.
Or for that matter, maybe there is some degree of “pursueth” involved, for there are any number of fanfic readers who state that they flatly refuse to read stories about original characters, because they are convinced that every original character is the dreaded “Mary Sue”. Which very often they are, but hardly always. A good character is a good character, whether the canon author thought to include them or not.
Interesting thoughts, here. My forays into fanfiction have shown that readers recognize canon (characters behaving like the characters they recognize, though that can distort pretty amazingly in some pairings) as opposed to alternate universes, say. But the wide range of experimentation is fascinating.
Yes there is a wide range of experimentation. To some extent it depends on the fandom. In some fandoms the whole draw is the characters, in a rather generic background which isn’t particularly developed at all (i.e., the Old West). A lot of media-based fandoms fit into this model. And in those cases, so long as you can keep the characters recognizable rather a lot of other shifts will pass under the radar. In others, the background world is every bit as engaging as the characters if not more so. So you have to not only extrapolate recognizable characters, you have to make the world feel familiar as well — or weave in plausible reasons for why your world operated as it does, even if the source material lacks any plausible explanations whatsoever. With those fandoms, the world is so muh an element that you would expect OCs to be more accepted, but I suspect you would be wrong.
Plus there is always the fact that; to make a story, almost any world has to be tweaked enough for the story to fit. If you are playing a “what-if” where a basic premise has been changed, you can state that at the outset and most people will accept it. But if you don’t point out that there *have been* changes you will get reviewers who do nothing but carp that the canon story didn’t follow the story arc that you are giving them.
I think it’s more that it violates the rules of the game. To some extent fanfiction is for yourself, but the fact that it is public and the fact that getting comments brings such joy, makes you want to conform. I haven’t gotten criticism for the OCs I’ve written, and I also wrote pretty much nothing but crossovers for years, and though I’ve heard a lot of people shy away from them, the ones that take the risk tend to like them. But writing crossovers and writing OCs will ward off nervous readers. The readers like to read in the fandoms that they know. They’re there for a certain type of experience (often of the ‘zeitgeist fandom’ of a particular !ship) and an OC interfering in their image of the fandom or a crossover with something they don’t know that well can ruin the experience. For me, someone who is pretty much word-centric and rarely has any experience of a fandom before I start reading the fic, I can’t stand the stories that rely on the reader already having invested in the characters. I don’t mind OCs and crossovers, if they’re well developed (AUs are the best!), but if the author treats an OC like they were an established character (in a PWP, perhaps) it’s unsalvageable.
It is a truth not universally acknowleged, that fanfiction is predominantly a social activity. In the age of the internet, it is more blatantly so than it was back when I was growing up (although kids who wrote it did generally share it with their friends, even in the absence of a convenient forum for them to throw it out to the world at large).
But it is only very rarely written only for oneself. The sheer popularity of fanfic exchanges, and “big bangs” and various other varieties of “fests” online makes it very clear that people are doing this as a form of social intercourse.
And some of the participants are very good at it, indeed. But only a fraction even make the slightest attempt at profesional publication. Most have quite enough payoff from the egoboo of getting reviews posted on their fics.
Oh yes–look at the tremendous swell of enthusiasm building up for Yuletide, which is all about tiny fandoms.
I have a teenage boy. Who is friends with a number of teenage boys. I also have a teenage (2 more days)(no, one, now) daughter with friends. I think part of whether boys read fiction is a function of their social status in the peer group. My sons group are definitely outliers. My daughter is also not the “in” crowd, but some of her friends are, and they still read more than “in” boys. Perhaps because status among boys still runs so heavily to being good at sports.
One thing that I find fascinating is the shared world stories both my kids write with their friends. Art, writing, and reading have all become social activities by these Internet natives. I have never been invited to see most of this, but they run the gamut from shared fanfics to original universe round robin or braided novels. Some are quite long and ongoing. My daughter sells some of her art of other peoples characters, even. (I made it quite clear she was never allowed to sell pictures of the characters in manga or anime.)
Wow, that is fascinating–what creative kids!
I’m glad you put those artistic limits on your daughter–I once saw a chibi anime Sweeney Todd and it was Wrong.
Oh, wait, I misread–yes, the manga or anime character re-dos are probably bad form, and not fair to the original artists.
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