Many academics in defense of fanfiction have already agreed that most - if not all - writings taught as “literature” could fall under the “fanfiction” label, often called “transformative fiction.” Transformative fiction is a piece of writing that is “written in response to or adapting a specific source text i.” This definition could be applied to any writer from Virgil to Shakespeare to James Joyce. The cultural studies of fandom are abundant with looks into fanfiction as a literary practice. With the practice being more commonplace (or, at least, talked about more openly by writers of fanfiction) and with the study of fandoms now a more legitimized endeavor, it is increasingly clear that one-day fanfiction could (and, perhaps, should) be welcomed at the creative writer’s workshop table. Search the word “fanfiction” on JSTOR, a commonly used academic database, and it will return with just over four hundred books and articles from all fields of study. Due to this growth, fandoms and the fanworks they produce have also become a popular topic to study.
However, in the last decade or so, writing what we normally think of as “fanfiction” has become a popular hobby.įrom the humble beginnings of a Kirk/Spock story hidden away in a Star Trek fanzine, writing fanfiction is now something most fans dabble in, publishing beloved pairings in “coffee shop AU”s online to sites like Archive Of Our Own and. It is a hush-hush sort of thing: write it under pseudonyms and do not bring it up at a creative writing workshop. Writing fanfiction can still be seen as a juvenile hobby, and fanfiction writers are often dismissed as not real writers. It is no real secret: the practice of writing fanfiction is still frowned upon at large by creative writers who make a living in the field. How Fanfiction Could Be Used In An Academic Workshop.