I think every fanfic writer has been there. You want to write something, but you don’t know where to start, and the creative juices just aren’t flowing enough.
So you turn to the characters you know and love, hoping that they light a little fire in your brain.
That’s what I love about fanfiction. It’s a chance to create a brand-new world and story on your own terms. Surprisingly, there are some people in the traditionally published world that share the same optimism as me and everyone who works on this magazine.
Lev Grossman, 56, is a New York Times bestselling author whose most successful books have been his own twists on well-known stories, such as King Arthur. But that success didn’t come to him easily.
“I always wanted to be a fiction writer. The trouble was that I was really unsuccessful at it for about the first 15 years,” he says.
“I was a staff writer for Time for 16 years. I learned a lot about writing from it, but I never stopped wanting to write fiction.”
After years of trying and failing, Lev’s breakthrough happened at 35, through his fantasy book ‘The Magicians’, which has often been described as Harry Potter for adults.
Explaining his idea for the book, he said: “What if Harry Potter was American? And what if, after he graduated Hogwarts, he and his friends went to Narnia? And that was the beginning of really my first successful fiction writing.”
Although it took him 5 years to complete the novel, he really came into his own whilst writing it.
“I was thinking, ‘I can take this story that exists and do it my own way’,” he says. “ That was incredibly energising.”
“It came as a surprise to me that when I really found my voice, it was about people casting spells and going to other worlds and fighting monsters. It wasn’t what I expected at all.”
Now, when you hear that description of The Magicians trilogy, it does sound a bit like a crossover fanfic. A great time, but fanfic-esque nonetheless.
And this was a concern when the novel was getting published.
Was the story he’d created original enough?
“I had a real hard time believing that I could take this story about a young person who goes to a school for magic and tell it my way, and have it be different, and have it be a story that nobody else could have told,” he says.
“The internal lawyers at my publisher said, ‘No, we can’t publish this because we’ll get sued by either J. K. Rowling or the CS Lewis estate or both at the same time’.”
After some lengthy negotiations, Lev chose to listen to the legal team and made slight changes to the story to avoid potential lawsuits. But ultimately, he stuck by his story, and the trilogy has been extremely successful, even being adapted into a TV show that ran for 5 series.
However, he acknowledges the same dilemma around originality and creativity as part of the complexity of fan fiction in general.
He says, “Everybody has to pretend that they’re the first person to tell this story, and that no one has ever written a character like what they’ve written before, which is silly and kind of hypocritical.
“It’s a funny balance you have to strike between originality and this great shared storytelling tradition we have as human beings.”
Another key dilemma is around reworking fanfics to publish them as ‘new’ books. The upcoming novel ‘Wolf Boy’ and the ‘All The Young Dudes’ rework are creating lots of discourse within the fanfiction community right now.
The main feeling around them is often betrayal that something we had access to for free is now being stripped away from us, and now we have to pay (in this economy, by the way). This was something that Lev also considered when publishing his own stories.
“I always thought, this is something that I can sell, and I feel a little conflicted about that in a way because I love the ethos of fanfiction, of writing it for free, [and] giving it away,” he says.
“When you write it, you don’t have to call your hero Quentin Coldwater, you can call him Harry Potter, and that’s not something that I could do.”
Ultimately, Lev is a huge supporter of writers doing whatever is best for them – whether that be writing fanfiction or getting professionally published.
And he had one last thing to say to any struggling fanfic writers.
“If you really love a character, just take that character and their story, and know that when you tell it, it’s going to be different from how anybody else tells it. The world really wants to hear it.”