rederiswrites:

rederiswrites:

Without fanfiction authors, I might never have written.  I went many years without writing for my own sake, and possibly would never have acted on that personal dream at all if it weren’t for the amazing fanfic authors who made me think that maybe I could do it after all.  Without fanfic readers, especially my beautiful commenters, I doubt I would have continued to write.  And without my wonderful writing friends to chat and plot and commiserate with, I would have been stuck and lost a thousand times.  Thank you so very much to you all.

I mean it, though.  Fanfiction, and the internet communities that allow it to reach its audience, are revolutionary.  No one in my entired childhood or adolescence ever encouraged me to believe that being an author was a realistic or plausible life path for me.  I wanted it, desperately wanted it almost as soon as I really began to read, when everyone else wanted to be a firefighter or an astronaut, I wanted to be an author.  And yet I never wrote.

Why?  Because authors were these faraway idols, masters like Ursula K. Le Guin or Tad Williams or Isaac Asimov, not real people with real lives, not people I could be.  Because being an author was never portrayed as a career, but more as a self-flagellating exercise in suffering, submission after submission after submission followed by thin royalties if you were very lucky and very good and very persistent, all in one.  Because no one ever suggested that I write just because I could, to create something.  I never even conceptualized writing as a hobby until I encountered fanfiction.  

And then I found these entire worlds of people writing just for the love of the characters, love of the worlds, love of writing.  That was revolutionary to me.  And do you know how ridiculous it is that I had an audience, that actual people, complete strangers, read and enjoyed the very first story I wrote?  That through the internet and fandom, even the freshest, rawest authors can now reach a supportive audience?  That’s magic.

We’re fixing something broken.  A lot of things, really, as we transform worlds and make them fit us and make us fit into them, as we assert our right to create, as we find voices we didn’t expect in ourselves.  It’s very powerful.