Fic Quotes

“Irritated fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

“Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever. Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Before the modern era of copyright and intellectual property, stories were things held in common, to be passed from hand to hand and narrator to narrator.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“There are several reasons why fans of BBC's Sherlock are utterly mad, incurably creative, and horny as hell.
First and foremost, they are hungry. Devotees of American TV dramas get twenty-two episodes a year. Fans of most British drams enjoy six, eight, maybe a dozen.
The Sherlock fandom gets three. The Sherlock fandom gets three television episodes every 18-24 months. The Sherlock fandom is deeply, abidingly, and very inventively starving.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

“Fan writers call it “playing in someone else’s sandbox” or “borrowing someone’s toys.” I call it “writing.” Opponents call it “stealing”—and I call that bullshit.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Like Wide Sargasso Sea and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, fanfiction asserts the rights of storytellers to take possession of characters and settings from other people’s narratives and tell their own tales about them—to expand and build upon the original, and, when they deem it necessary, to tweak it and optimize it for their own purposes.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Espenson reflects on parallels between the fic-writing and television-writing processes:        To get a job as a writer in Hollywood—you write episodes of television shows [someone else has created]. And actually, the eventual job you get in television is writing for characters you didn’t create. I write fanfiction every day when I sit down to write something for the characters of Once Upon a Time in a way because I’m writing for characters that I didn’t create. I’m putting myself in Adam and Eddy’s shows and writing in as close to their voice as I can do. And that’s the same thing that fanfiction writers do.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“You play with our stories with toys, which you pay for. Writers play with our stories on paper, which you also pay for. But don’t you play with our stories on paper, because that would be stealing.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Asking whether fic stands on its own is “interrogating the text from the wrong perspective”—to put a famous quote by the well-known fic-opponent Anne Rice to a use she would likely hate. Fic can be uncomfortable for writers who believe they create autonomously in a void.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Fans, it often seemed, were paying more attention and saying smarter things than my Ivy League students”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take on that role.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“when an American actor named William Gillette wrote a stage play about Holmes, he contacted Arthur Conan Doyle asking for permission to marry Holmes off. Doyle replied, accommodatingly enough, “You may marry him or murder him or do whatever you like with him.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“One reason slash is appealing as a genre is that an equal relationship between a man and a woman is not possible in the patriarchal society in which we live, and slash between men enables writers to examine relationships between characters who are equals. Whether the same is true for femslash depends on who you ask. Academics Lamb and Veith55 argue that women are not equals in a patriarchal society, even if they may be equals in a lesbian relationship.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“About those gender binaries that still govern the world most of us live in: it’s important that in fanfiction, women are largely running the show. Where else is that true? Today, less than 30 percent of television writers are women;2 in film, that figure is below 20 percent.3 Oscar-nominated women directors? Four. In 2012, women comprised roughly 30 percent of the writers reviewed by the combined forces of the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review.4 Women dominate in romance writing (sometimes, even in the romances themselves)—only to have their accomplishments derided or ignored by the broader literary culture whose efforts their profits nonetheless help underwrite. In sum, those numbers mean there’s a lot of variously talented women we haven’t been hearing from. A great many of these women are writing fic.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Rice claims that for her, “novel writing is a virtuoso performance. It is not a collaborative art.” Someone should let Bram Stoker and John Polidori know).”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Fanfiction also responds to—and even helps bring about—very specific shifts in technology and culture, and it does so more quickly, nimbly, and radically than anyone who benefits from the commercial status quo is ever likely to.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“It’s what David Foster Wallace was getting at in his famous speech, “This is Water”: “Learning how to think . . . means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” Fanfiction is about exercising this choice. It helps us not to get hosed.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“The people who ship writing/difficulty and writing/revolution don’t talk to the people who ship writing/entertainment or writing/romance. The writing/money shippers have an uneasy détente with the writing/literature folks in the prose fandom, but almost none of them talk to the poetry people because how could you even? The writing/YA folks have a strong community or are cliquish, depending on who you ask, and everyone knows not to invite the writing/genre people to the same party as writing/literary folks because it just ends up in a shouting match.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Fandom is really fandoms, plural—an always diverse and contentious sphere. Mass media representations of fanfiction and fan culture present it at best as a “wacky world,” or more typically as a bastion of the physically, socially, and literarily inept. Academic accounts of fandom overcompensate, often presenting overly utopian pictures of sisterly collaboration and feminist critique. Utopias and dystopias, though, are not parallel but rather intersecting universes. This is surely one of the great lessons of Star Trek—and of its fandom.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Older fans sometimes welcome the new influx of fans each incarnation brings, but can also treat them with suspicion, even derision. The early Star Trek fandom faced similar rejection by the broader sci-fi fan culture, as “literary fans” of print-based SF decried the supposed superficiality of “media fans,” who were also dismissed on account of their (often female) gender.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Literary avant-gardes tend to attract and be discovered by those who already evince a marked distaste for both the literary and commercial entertainment status quo. Fanwriting communities enjoy and consume commercial culture voraciously, celebrate it, even as they challenge and transform its products for their own sometimes radical purposes.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Monet was a radical before he was a calendar.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

“Well pass the lube, Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World