Fan fiction

• 1. Introduction

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  Fan fiction is a form of writing that begins with someone else's world. A fan reads a novel, watches a show, follows a band, and thinks: what happens next? Or: what if it had gone differently? Then they sit down and write their own version. No contract, no commission, no permission from the original creator.

  The term itself has been in print since 1938, when it described amateur science fiction as opposed to what writers of the time called "pro fiction". A 1944 reference work called the Fancyclopedia defined it as fiction about fans, or fiction that brought in famous characters from science fiction stories. The label already carried a slight unruliness to it. These were stories that existed because someone cared enough to keep writing after the official story ended.

  Today, one estimate puts fan fiction at one-third of all book-related content on the Internet. Tens of thousands of Harry Potter stories alone existed on the web by 2014. A Twilight fan fiction became the Fifty Shades trilogy, one of the best-selling novel series of the century. A One Direction fan fiction became a book and film deal. The creative tradition that began in amateur science fiction magazines mailed to a handful of readers has become, by any measure, a major literary phenomenon. The questions worth asking are how it got here, who drives it, what rules govern it, and what it does for the people who write and read it.

• 2. Before the Rules Existed

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  Shakespeare borrowed plots freely. Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale were all based on works by other authors writing at roughly the same time. In an era before copyright in the modern sense, using an existing character or story was simply part of how literature worked.

  In 1614, a Spanish writer named Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda published a sequel to Don Quixote while Miguel de Cervantes was still writing his own second volume. Cervantes had not finished and had not given permission. Avellaneda did it anyway. Within the fan fiction community today, there is a genuine debate about whether Dante Alighieri's Inferno counts as self-insert fan fiction of the Bible, with Dante himself as the narrator traveling through established sacred geography.

  The 19th century produced its own wave of unauthorized extensions and adaptations. Bram Stoker's Dracula was adapted without authorization into a work called Powers of Darkness. Jane Austen's characters were extended in a notable work called Old Friends and New Fancies. J. M. Barrie, who would later create Peter Pan, wrote a Sherlock Holmes story called The Adventure of the Two Collaborators, one of many unauthorized Holmes tales. H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds inspired The Space Machine, and The Time Machine inspired Morlock Night. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre was reworked into Wide Sargasso Sea. The line between homage and appropriation was porous long before lawyers drew it formally.

• 3. Star Trek and the Fanzine Era

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  The modern shape of fan fiction as organized fandom activity traces directly to Star Trek and a publication called Spockanalia, first produced in 1967. It contained fan fiction, and others followed its example. These fanzines were printed using offset printing and mimeography, then mailed to other fans or sold at science fiction conventions for a small fee to cover production costs.

  What stands out from that era is who was writing. By 1970-83% of Star Trek fan fiction authors were female. By 1973, that figure had risen to 90%. One scholar described the appeal as meeting the needs of a mostly female audience for stories that pushed beyond what was offered on television and film screens. Fan fiction, from its organized beginning, was a space where women were not the audience but the creators.

  The term Mary Sue, which has since entered general use as a description of an idealized or overpowered character lacking in flaws, originated in Star Trek fan fiction. A common plot in early stories featured a minor crew member of the USS Enterprise saving the life of Kirk or Spock. The term came from a parody of stories in that wish fulfillment genre. It has since traveled so far from its origins that many people who use it have no idea it started on the pages of a mimeographed fanzine.

• 4. The Internet Opens the Archive

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  FanFiction.Net launched in 1998 as a non-profit site that let anyone upload writing in any fandom. The earlier model had required insider knowledge, hand-tended archives specific to a single fandom, or membership in a mailing list. FanFiction.Net removed all of that. Anyone could publish. Readers could leave reviews directly on the site, and the site would notify authors when new feedback arrived.

  By 2010, a study of the site's account holders found that 57% of accounts originated from the United States, with 9.2% from the United Kingdom, 5.6% from Canada, and 4% from Australia. A 2020 study focused on Harry Potter fan fiction writers on Archive of Our Own found that 59.7% of surveyed writers were in North America, with notable populations in Great Britain, Mainland Europe, and Oceania. The same study found that 50.4% of writers who disclosed their gender identified as female or femme-leaning, and that 21% identified as nonbinary, genderfluid, or genderqueer. The majority of writers fell in their early to mid-20s, with 56.7% being university students or young adults.

  On the 22nd of May 2013, Amazon launched Kindle Worlds, a publishing service that let fan fiction of certain licensed properties be sold in the Kindle Store. Authors of works over 10,000 words would receive 35% of net sales; shorter works between 5,000 and 10,000 words would earn 20%. The service came with restrictions on content and formatting. Amazon shut it down in August 2018. The experiment suggested that commercializing fan fiction within a corporate structure was harder than it looked.

• 5. From Fan Fiction to Bestseller

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  E. L. James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey as fan fiction for the Twilight series, using Twilight's Bella and Edward as her starting characters. To move toward publication and sidestep copyright concerns, she changed the characters' names to Ana and Christian. That practice has a name within fan fiction communities: pulling-to-publish. The Fifty Shades trilogy had originated under the pen name Snowqueen's Icedragon and was originally titled Master of the Universe, published in episodes on fan fiction websites.

  Anna Todd's After, published in 2013, began as fan fiction about the boy band One Direction. The central character was drawn from One Direction member Harry Styles. The work secured a book deal and a movie deal in 2014, again with renamed characters, and a film adaptation was released on the 12th of April 2019.

  Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series had inspired the Fifty Shades trilogy, put links to fan fiction sites about her characters directly on her own website. J. K. Rowling said she was flattered that people wanted to write stories based on her characters. Those public endorsements stood alongside a more complicated record. In 2003, a law firm representing Rowling and Warner Bros. sent letters to webmasters requesting the removal of adult Harry Potter fan fiction from prominent hosting sites, citing concern that children might encounter it. The webmasters of several sites responded by asserting fair use and non-professional status.

• 6. Authors Against and For

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  George R. R. Martin has been consistently opposed to fan fiction, viewing it as copyright infringement and arguing it represents poor practice for writers hoping to develop their craft. Anne Rice enforced her objections aggressively. She opposed fan fiction based on any of her characters, including those from Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Chronicles, and asked FanFiction.Net to remove stories related to her work. Anne McCaffrey held a similar position, though her son Todd McCaffrey changed that stance after her death. Raymond Feist likewise asked for fiction related to his series to be removed from FanFiction.Net.

  Sharon Lee, co-creator of the Liaden universe alongside Steve Miller, articulated her opposition in direct terms: "Nobody else is going to get it right. This may sound rude and elitist, but honestly, it's not easy for us to get it right sometimes, and we've been living with these characters... for a very long time."

  Orson Scott Card, best known for the Ender's Game series, traced a full reversal. He once wrote on his website that using his characters without invitation was morally equivalent to moving into his house and throwing out his family. He later told the Wall Street Journal that every piece of fan fiction functioned as an advertisement for his books, and described himself as an "idiot" if he would want that to disappear. He went so far as to assist fan fiction contests. The shift from moral outrage to promotional thinking captures a tension most authors navigate without ever fully resolving.

• 7. Copyright and the Law

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  In 1981, Lucasfilm Ltd. sent a letter to fanzine publishers asserting copyright over all Star Wars characters and prohibiting pornography. The letter mentioned possible legal action. It was an early attempt by a major rights holder to draw explicit lines around what fan creativity could and could not do.

  The legal status of fan fiction remains genuinely unsettled. In 2009, United States District Court Judge Deborah Batts permanently prohibited publication in the United States of a book by Swedish writer Fredrik Colting, writing under the name John David California. The book featured a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. The judge rejected the argument that the work constituted parody, calling those claims "post-hoc rationalizations employed through vague generalizations about the alleged naivety of the original."

  The Organization for Transformative Works takes the opposite position, arguing that non-profit fan fiction falls under fair use as a creative and transformative act. The site Archive of Our Own, which the Organization for Transformative Works runs, codifies the distinction: it prohibits verbatim copying, audio narrations, translations, and conversions that make only minor modifications, but allows work it considers transformative. Scholars Jamar and Bloom noted in 2014 that fan fiction varies enormously in what it borrows, from works that merely rewrite endings to those building entire new stories in existing universes. Klapper, writing in 2025, argued that even works borrowing only the setting of a fictional world are likely using a significant qualitative portion of the original. The Harry Potter Lexicon case, in which J. K. Rowling and her publishers sued website creator Steven Vander Ark, ultimately found in Vander Ark's favor, though on the narrow ground that the Lexicon copied too much of the source material without sufficiently transforming it.

• 8. Why People Write It

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  Researchers have identified several distinct reasons why people are drawn to fan fiction, both as readers and writers. One is the simple desire to continue. When a story ends in a way a reader finds unsatisfying, or leaves certain characters unexplored, fan fiction offers a way to extend the experience. Fix-it stories specifically revise canonical events, giving alternate outcomes to deaths, unresolved relationships, or plot elements the original author left incomplete.

  For adolescent writers in particular, fan fiction has been described as a form of identity rehearsal. Fictional characters provide a means of exploring possible selves, relationships, and futures within a setting that feels safe precisely because it is imaginary. Researchers have framed this as happening in a conceptual third space, situated between internal psychological experience and the shared cultural object of the original work.

  Fandom communities around fan fiction tend to operate through what researchers have called a gift economy. Writers produce work and receive feedback, commentary, and recognition in return. Archive of Our Own has formalized a warning system requiring authors to disclose or explicitly decline to disclose whether their work contains graphic violence, major character death, rape, or underage sex. The platform's core tags make the community's norms legible to newcomers. Fan fiction has also been linked to improvements in literacy, with the wider audience and direct review systems encouraging writers to develop their craft. The feedback loop that began with mimeographed zines mailed between strangers in the late 1960s continues, now operating at a scale the original Spockanalia contributors could not have anticipated.