Episode 153: The Productive Fan
In Episode 153, “The Productive Fan,” Elizabeth and Flourish respond to a listener letter about some fic authors’ tendencies to see themselves as ‘bad’ if they aren’t producing written work. Topics covered include the perils of prescriptive writing advice, the Protestant work ethic, Flourish and Elizabeth’s personal writing habits, and the impact of professional authors’ conversations on fanfic authors’ discourse.
Show Notes
[00:00:00] As always, our intro music is “Awel” by stefsax, used under a CC BY 3.0 license. This episode, “Awel” is our outro music as well.
[00:04:49] We spoke with Rainbow Rowell in Episode 112.
[00:13:42] If you aren't familiar with NaNoWriMo, their official site has much more detail.
[00:17:44] “fanfic speedrun: write the scene you want to write and skip the rest of the fic”
[00:22:24] Alas, the very best BSG/WW crossover fic—“Habeas Corpus” by projectcyborg—is no longer online. (It was Laura Roslin femslash!! Alas.)
[00:28:14] Flourish is referring to “Rome, Sweet Rome,” which is just one of several writing projects that have sprung from Reddit threads. Some examples of commercially published fiction along related lines are 1632 and related novels by Eric Flint, and Island in the Sea of Time by S.M. Stirling. Warning: extremely masc fiction ahead.
[00:30:54] Flourish’s Phantom of the Opera fanfic, “Madame O.G.” Brace yourself for some terrible Gaston Leroux pastiche. (Gaston Leroux is already terrible to begin with.)
[00:34:28]
[00:41:30] If you aren’t familiar with Toast’s fandom stats, you have a treat ahead of you!
[00:47:52] Another post from AO3 Comment of the Day: Writing 100-word stories is absolutely writing!
[00:54:51]
Transcript
[Intro music]
Flourish Klink: Hi, Elizabeth!
Elizabeth Minkel: Hi, Flourish!
FK: And welcome to Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom!
ELM: This is Episode #153, “The Productive Fan.”
FK: Gettin’ right into that Protestant work ethic! Just in time for the dog days of summer when no one wants to do any work at all!
ELM: All right, there’s so much that just happened in that sentence. [FK laughs] Start to finish.
FK: Admittedly, it’s not summer everywhere, sorry to our southern hemisphere brethren.
ELM: That wasn’t even the most ridiculous part of the sentence! [FK laughs] We’re not even a minute in and you’re already talking about Protestant work ethic! OK. So, we got a very interesting ask that has to do with fic writing in particular. You know, we called this “The Productive Fan,” but it’s really because “The Productive Fanfiction Writer” didn’t have the same wring to it.
FK: Not to say that everybody doesn’t have their own hangups around productivity and fandom and so forth which I’m sure will be relevant, but we’re gonna focus, I think.
ELM: Yes, absolutely.
FK: Try to focus, anyway.
ELM: Yeah! So do you want to be the one to read this message?
FK: Sure thing! This comes from mathclasswarfare, who says:
“Hi Fansplaining! First, I want to say how much I love the podcast, it’s been a real source of joy and insight during the last couple of years, when I’ve really needed that. Thank you for all you do!” Thank you, mathclasswarfare! Aww! All right. Back to the ask.
“OK, I wish I was coming into your askbox for the first time because I was happy about something, but instead, I am here because I was annoyed by a writing-related meme I saw this morning. It reminded me of several other writing memes, or just things people say on Tumblr about writing fanfiction, that boils down to this sentiment which I loathe: OP is a bad fic writer because they spend lots of time thinking about the characters/daydreaming scenes and not ‘writing.’
“This puts me into an unreasonable rage because daydreaming or thinking about stories is part of writing (and the most important part of the writing process for me, personally). There is a similar flavor of self-deprecating writing talk I see going around about coming up with new ideas rather than working on existing WIPs. All of this gives me the same feeling as food commercials from the ’90s about women being ‘bad’ for wanting to eat chocolate or something (I know this wasn’t just commercials).
“My thoughts on this are: it’s all creativity and it’s all for fun! Unless you have some responsibility or obligation with a real deadline, it’s not bad or wrong to write what you want at whatever pace you want, and everyone’s creative process is going to be different. The messages about writing that float around on Tumblr often feel more prescriptive than formal writing classes or books, and it seems like there are a lot of writers feeling needlessly guilty.
“Anyway, I can’t remember if this subject came up in your writing-focused episode or another time you all were discussing writing, so I apologize if this is already well-trod ground. But if not, I’d love to know what you think about this phenomenon of so many fic writers thinking they should be doing things a particular way and then beating themselves up for not doing that. (And I’d also love to know if you agree with me that these memes are the worst.)”
And that’s from mathclasswarfare.
ELM: Mathclasswarfare, thank you very much. This is such an interesting ask.
FK: Extremely, and also very relevant to I think maybe both of our lives.
ELM: You think it’s relevant to my life, Flourish?
FK: [laughs] I don’t know! Sometimes. Maybe not this moment.
ELM: I would say, for a little bit of context too, I don’t know if we’ve talked about it very much in the last few months, but I think both you and I have been talking more recently directly to each other about the things we want to do and are doing slash not doing when it comes to fanfiction, right?
FK: Right, yes.
ELM: To the point where, you know, we’re actively bouncing ideas off each other. Which I don’t think had been really a part of our relationship, necessarily. Particularly before you had ever read any of my fanfiction but you were too scared to ask me about that.
FK: [laughs] Yeah, yeah, that’s I think a fair assessment of what was going on. I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to intrude.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: I felt like you would share when you felt comfortable, and it turned out that what had to happen was I had to be like, “Pleeeease!”
ELM: No, what had to happen—rewriting history—is Rainbow Rowell came on our podcast [FK laughs] and act like a freaking couples counselor being like “Flourish, it sounds like Elizabeth is saying you just need to ask!” That may be a direct quote and I think I got the intonation right.
FK: That does sound like Rainbow. That sounds like Rainbow very much. [ELM laughs] Yeah. Well, anyway, no, yeah, so I think that perhaps this is targeted at me, because I had been—I had been thinking about this, what if I had written it would have been a very big long Shadow and Bone fic. And I got really into thinking about it and plotting it and all this stuff, and I came up against some stuff that was like—that ultimately made me realize, partway through the process: maybe what I really just wanted to do was think about this and it’s not gonna be a good piece of writing. Not that I couldn’t write it, but it wasn’t gonna be the piece of writing that I wanted it to be, or it didn’t have the thing in it that was gonna result in that.
I gotta say, I didn’t feel guilty about that in any way, but it was interesting because I think this is the first time that I have had an idea like that and really consciously like, workshopped it with someone else, and then been like “Yeah, no, I think I got out of that what I wanted to get out of it,” you know?
ELM: Incredible! Are you saying that I was a part of this?
FK: You were a part of this, and also shoutout to one of my co-workers who is also into this stuff and who I will not name, but who is great, who also heard this.
ELM: Oh, it wasn’t just me, that’s fine. Well, OK, I wanna talk about that, but I think I kinda want to contextualize some of what mathclasswarfare is talking about first in the broader discourse about writing on social media.
FK: Good idea!
ELM: So this is not a unique sentiment or a rhetorical framing to fandom or to Tumblr. Obviously my Twitter feed is majority writers, many of whom are professional writers, but I should say that what “professional writer” means varies so wildly and what the actual monetary compensation is for folks varies so widely… [FK laughs]
You know, it’s just like, it’s very interesting to me. There was a kind of a transparency reckoning after the Black Lives Matter stuff last June amongst publishing folks, talking about how much they got for their advance, so you could show that women of color in particular and people of color in general were like—who you think of as wildly successful, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: Had to like, fight for the most basic thing and they were finding these random white writers who got like $800,000 advances or whatever.
FK: Right.
ELM: But it was fascinating to me. So many people I follow who I think of as like, this is their job, full-time writing—they were talking about their advances for books, and they were like four figures, you know?
FK: Ohh.
ELM: And I was like, “You must be doing something else!” Or I think a lot of them have spouses. And it is what it is, and I like it when people are really transparent about that, right? But like…so obviously for some folks, “I’m not writing right now,” that meme which is very popular on Twitter amongst writing people—“being a writer is just like, staring at your screen and then refreshing Twitter and getting some coffee,” and blah blah blah.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Which I gotta say also having, if you read diaries of writers in the pre-internet era, you definitely see people talking about this kind of thing too, right?
FK: Oh yes yes. “Writing is staring at the birds! And then—”
ELM: “Got up, got a glass of whiskey!”
FK: “—talking to my neighbor over the fence and then thinking about how I should be writing right now—”
ELM: Exactly.
FK: “—then sitting at my typewriter and staring at it.” [laughs]
ELM: But I bring up the pay discrepancies and also the monetary needs of folks to say that like, that totally varies too, and it’s one thing that always bothers me about this stuff, because it’s like: I know a lot of people who need to make a full-time salary from writing. They’re more often journalists, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: In some capacity. Or they do other kinds of writing that are extremely unglamorous, like technical writing.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: Content. Copywriting or whatever.
FK: I know a lot of them! [laughs]
ELM: Because they need to make a minimum amount of salary to actually be able to pay their rent, that kind of thing, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So like, it’s a big range, and I don’t know, some of this talk can get pretty cutesy, and it’s like sometimes you’re just like: “OK, actually writing is just, just do it. Because you have to pay the bills. It’s not like a fun meme about how you’re a procrastinator, and it sucks to feel like you’re blocked and feel like you’re procrastinating,” you know what I mean, “but…”
FK: But also ultimately you—no matter how bad a job is, if I have to do the job, I’m going to sit down and do the job. And what I produce may be bad, but I’m gonna produce something, right?
ELM: That’s extremely, that tracks. Knowing you.
FK: I’m just saying, if I really have to do it, I’m gonna sit down and do it! And what I produce might be bad, but I’m not going to like, refresh Twitter.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: If I actually have to do the job in order to, like, make my rent or something. You know what I mean? Like…
ELM: Sure, right, exactly. So I think that’s some of the context in the professional world. I think that this gets a bit more fuzzy when you have people who potentially are, haven’t made much if any money from writing but would like to make money from writing.
FK: Right.
ELM: Because then it becomes a little more abstract, right? Presumably you have another source of income, you have another job, right? You know. Like, so you feel guilty because you’re not able to spend as much time working on this thing that you hope will someday have monetary success. So that’s like moving along the spectrum.
FK: Right, and there’s also in that context people who feel like writing is a discipline or something—that they’re aspiring to be like a real writer, and if they do that, then they must do X, Y and Z thing.
ELM: Right.
FK: I see that language a lot from people who are aspiring to be professional writers, or have made one or two sales but have not you know, really…
ELM: Also, side note: the most, probably the most tedious part of writing advice social media is—to speak to mathclasswarfare talking about the prescriptivism—on Twitter, that often prescriptivism is about writing habits?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Or like, sharing famous writers’ routines or whatever? It’s like, “cool!”
FK: The routine obsession is just another great way to procrastinate, I gotta say. It’s like making a bullet journal: good on you if it works, but also, if you’re spending many many hours drawing shit in your bullet journal, then accept that that is something you value doing for itself, you know?
ELM: Yeah, yeah! Exactly. And it’s always so decontextualized. It’s like, cool, OK, this person who lived in 1953 in New York City whose rent was $67 a month [FK laughs] got up and wrote for three hours and then drank a bunch of gin. Congrats, you know? That’s fun to imagine, I like to imagine that writer having that life, but that’s not advice for anyone, you know? Like…
FK: Although some people do take some of this—I will say that all of the film, like, scriptwriters that I know definitely go to the desert and like, lock themselves in rooms with a bottle of whiskey for long, like, two or three days, a weekend, when they have to finish a script. So some of that is still alive and well in Hollywood.
ELM: Yeah, I, that…deeply unsurprising to me.
FK: I’m just tellin’ you! [laughs]
ELM: So anyway, that’s kind of moving along the spectrum from like—
FK: Right, from—
ELM: —from the sheer monetized space of writing, people whose world of writing is about making money for their livelihood…
FK: “I am a technical writer, I have to do this, then I will get my rent and then I’ll be…”
ELM: Into like an aspiring space, and then moving along towards the other end of the spectrum is fandom, all the way to the—wherever you fall on the fandom spectrum from “maybe someday you would like to monetize your writing” all the way to like, “the point of writing for me is to do a pleasurable non-monetized fannish practice,” right? And so I think that all of these things kind of jumble together, and I think some of the like, shame or embarrassment or whatever behind some of these fandom posts about not writing is in conversation with or maybe influenced by those conversations in the writing sphere.
FK: Oh yeah.
ELM: Because it’s not like you’re just one thing or the other, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: You might be a fanfiction writer who never wants to make any money from fanfiction because you value that part of it, but you also are an aspiring YA novelist or whatever, right?
FK: Right.
ELM: I mean, that’s tons of people. So these conversations are not siloed and I think they really influence each other. But I think that introduces a level of, the monetized anxieties kind of coming over into what’s ostensibly meant to be a non-monetized space.
FK: Right. It’s also interesting because I sometimes don’t know what people’s goals are, and I don’t know that everybody has considered their own goals for their writing and what they want to do. And there’s nothing wrong with having any one of a variety of goals in this space, but when you’re doing fanfic writing in particular, it’s like, you really do have to—you really do have to think about “what is the purpose of this in my life?”
I guess I’m thinking about like: I’ve done NaNoWriMo a jillion times, right?
ELM: A jillion!
FK: I’ve done at least five or six times and won it. “Won it.” Finished it.
ELM: I hate this language so much!
FK: I know! This is exactly, this is exactly why I was bringing it up!
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Is that like, one of the reasons that I stopped doing it was I realized, like—
ELM: Hold on, let’s define this.
FK: Let’s talk about what NaNoWriMo is?
ELM: I’m sure most people know what it is, but just in case. The like, “winning” language.
FK: Right. National Novel Writing Month is the month of November, and people sign up to write a 50,000 word novel/novella in a month. In that month.
ELM: And you’re like, there’s hashtags and there’s local chapters. The one year I tried it, which sadly was November 2016, so that ended on November 8th…
FK: Ooh. Yeah. There’s local chapters, people get together. There’s people who give advice. There’s a forum which is really great because, I mean I do like this aspect of the forum, which is that people offer all of their advice from every profession and every thing ever.
ELM: Mm, that’s interesting!
FK: So if you ever want to find out about, I don’t know, what a dog neurosurgeon does every day [ELM laughs] go on the NaNoWriMo forums and say “I’m looking for a dog neurosurgeon” and you will find five, you know?
ELM: Wow, wow.
FK: So that’s really convenient. But there is a framing around, on the forums and so forth, there’s a little thermometer and there’s framing around “winning” NaNoWriMo, the idea being that if you get to the end and you write a 50,000 word novel, you’ve won.
And you know, I mean, I think that for many people NaNoWriMo can be a big benefit, especially if they have trouble getting out of their own head and obsessing about, you know, making something perfect? It can be helpful to have…
ELM: Sure. Shitty first draft, right? You just literally churn it out.
FK: Shitty first draft idea. And the problem is that I realized that I have no trouble writing shitty first drafts at all, so NaNoWriMo was not very helpful to me ultimately, because, you know.
ELM: That’s funny.
FK: I was just gonna succeed in doing it, you know.
ELM: You need NaNoEdMo.
FK: There is such a thing as NaNoEdMo and it’s supposed to be the month after National Novel Writing Month, in which you edit your novel that you wrote for National Novel Writing Month. But it’s never really caught on the same way.
ELM: That is the worst month! It’s, it should be January when things are chill.
FK: When things are chill and you’ve also just made your, you know, New Year’s resolution—
ELM: Yeah, exactly!
FK: —which maybe is “I’m gonna edit my shitty first draft”!
ELM: Clean up those words, yeah!
FK: But anyway, I think the thing about NaNoWriMo is, right, I think a lot of people I see who do it don’t seem to have a strong understanding of why they’re doing it. I certainly didn’t when I started. It was just like, would I like to have written a novel? I would like to have written a novel! This seems like a way to have written a novel, you know?
ELM: Yeah! That’s one of the biggest, that’s one of the long-standing critiques of NaNoWriMo is it’s just the idea of having written a novel. You see people say “Why don’t you spend the month reading a novel?” Which obviously some people also do. But then it’s just like you just want to churn something out into the world, right?
FK: Right. But you know, there’s some benefits to it. I really don’t want to suggest that it’s bad because I think that it can be good, but like you said, this is a critique. And I think that any writing practice, any group of people saying to do something about writing—it’s not one size fits all, right?
ELM: Right.
FK: And especially it’s not one size fits all when you’re talking about something like fandom, which is non-monetizable or anyway not as monetizable as writing…well, I don’t know if writing some kinds of original fiction is actually that monetizable either, but let it pass, let it pass. In theory you could monetize.
ELM: Sure. So, yeah. I think that this goals thing is really important and I think this is what we should dig into. Because I think that also brings it back to our personal experiences. It’s complicated because you can have goals for why you’re writing fic that—maybe you’ve read a lot of long, beautifully plotted fic and you would like to do that too. And that’s your goal. But maybe you’re not that good at writing long plotty fic, or you, you know, just for whatever reason that’s not really achievable for you. And that’s gonna suck! Right?
And I don’t wanna say that like, the advice which I’ve seen a bunch recently—which I appreciate!—is like, you know, you don’t have to write something big and beautiful and polished, you can write ficlets and drabbles or you can just write a scene, in medias res, where you just kinda drop into it in the middle, you know? That kind of thing. Or a series of vignettes. There’s a post going around that I thought was very nice which was just like, “You don’t know how to connect those scenes? Don’t! Who cares!” Right? And tons of people will love that. How many stories have you read where you loved the characters, and it was a series of scenes, and it felt really right.
FK: Sure!
ELM: I’ve certainly loved stories like that.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That being said, if your goal—and it’s a true earnest goal and not an externalized pressure thing—is to write that big plotty kind of knotty, tight sort of fic, and you’re finding that unachievable, it’s absolutely valid to feel shitty about that. Cause that’s what you want to do, you know what I mean?
FK: Sure, sure!
ELM: Just to say “just write a bunch of scenes,” I don’t think that helps anyone. Right?
FK: Right.
ELM: So I think that’s complicated, because I totally get why folks would wanna do that, right? And would feel that if they just wrote the disconnected scenes or the ficlets or whatever that was a failure, that was not real writing. Because also, those are the kinds of writing that there aren’t really professional analogous forms for, right? The big plotty, self-contained novel fic resembles things that we see in the rest of the writing world.
FK: Yeah, and yet, you know, I gotta say…maybe it’s easy for me to say this because I have written a few plotty, long, self-contained novel fics, but one of the things that I came to understanding—not just in this last fic that I didn’t end up writing, but also in the fic before that, which I had started to write, which was a Game of Thrones fic that I petered out on: it’s never going to be finished!
ELM: I cannot believe you left a WIP on the AO3.
FK: I did! I left it there.
ELM: You should be ashamed, Flourish. Did you do an “update: abandoned” note?
FK: I did! I did do that, and I apologized to people, because there were a bunch of people who were like “I would really love it if you continued the story,” and I was like, “I know, but the reality is—I don’t have anything to prove anymore about my ability to write long plotty complicated fics, and I would like to, but it turns out that this idea was not that. This idea was a feeling I wanted to get out.” And maybe I shouldn’t have started writing it as though it were going to be plotty and complicated, maybe I should’ve just written a short story or something, but I didn’t. Because my mode is, I’ve always written long stuff, and my mode was “I’m going to write a long thing,” and then it didn’t work.
So you know, I’m not doing this for pay, and I’m doing this for my pleasure, and I got a lot of pleasure out of the writing that I did on it and the thinking about it that I did—to mathclasswarfare’s point—and it’s OK. It can be done. I do feel a little bad for the people who had started reading it. I don’t think I ever promised that it was going to be a rose garden, you know. I came in saying—most of the time I try to be very transparent when I write fic about either, I have this completed, or I have this completely sketched out and I know where it’s going, or I don’t know where I’m going with this, good luck! You know?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And you know, so I don’t feel like I promised anything, and I do feel a little bad for people who read it and then didn’t get the end. But I guess what I’m trying to get at here–I don’t mean to get too much into myself—what I’m trying to get at here is I think that for some people, it’s not just like, “I feel like a failure because I didn’t write long plotty fic,” I think it’s like, “anybody’s a failure who doesn’t write the long plotty fic,” you know what I mean? I think it’s like “the point of writing is to produce, to create, to finish, to update every week, to do whatever, and I feel bad when I don’t do that, and that’s a bad writing habit.”
ELM: Right.
FK: And it’s like—I don’t know about that!
ELM: Well, but I think that goes back to what I was saying about recognizable forms of completeness, right? And it’s a little weird, because we both have been reading fic for…pretty soon we’re going to have to start saying 25 years.
FK: Oh my God.
ELM: We passed the two decades—I was like “two decades! Shit!” and now I’ve gotta start saying that, right? I have read, I gotta say, people’s tastes vary. I don’t like short fic, even if it feels self-contained, it’s just not me. I read it and I’m like, “OK.” [FK laughs] Even if I feel like they got them perfectly, it just does not do it for me. But that’s me personally.
I think that it seems, based on lots and lots of kudos and stuff that people get when they write these shorter things, that tons and tons of people love this stuff, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: But we’ve both been around the fandom block long enough to see that these various different forms and these different shapes of stories—that’s one of the best things about fanfiction!
FK: And look, hey, I’m gonna go far enough to say, I’m gonna say: I don’t even mind some eternally unfinished abandoned works in progress! I’ve enjoyed some of them very much.
ELM: I haven’t. They’re all dead to me.
FK: Are you ready for something that’s like very of its time for me to say?
ELM: Of what time?
FK: Well, you’re gonna know what time when I say it. There is a Battlestar Galactica/The West Wing crossover fic—
ELM: Wow. That’s a specific moment in history.
FK: Right? It’s a very specific moment in history. And it was a great idea, it was like an eternally unfinished work in progress, and it lives rent-free in my head and I’m not even mad, because I’m just thrilled that they brought those ideas into my being, you know? No, actually I’m less thrilled now because I can’t think about The West Wing without feeling very sad, politically, any more.
ELM: [laughs] Oh! I was like, “what?”
FK: Not that BSG is unproblematic either, by the way, but you know, at the time it was thrilling and you know, I still am glad that I read that! I got a lot of pleasure from it back in the day.
ELM: Nope, this is not me. I remember there was one Harry Potter fic that I read in 2001 or whatever and it was like 15 out of 16 chapters.
FK: No. OK, that’s rough.
ELM: It was not a coda. It was like the 16th chapter was going to be the resolution. It was some kind of like, they did some spell and they had a mindmeld or stuck together or something, you know those, right?
FK: Oh yeah, yeah.
ELM: The story needs to end with the spell breaking, with them making the active choice to continue, right?
FK: Clearly! That’s how that story has to end. But they couldn’t do it?
ELM: And, uh, we didn’t get there.
FK: No! That’s frustrating.
ELM: And I’ll never let it go. That’s 20 years ago and I haven’t let it go yet, so it’s fine. And Harry Potter’s dead to me, but I’m still mad about a Harry Potter fic, so.
FK: Great, great. Well, different strokes.
ELM: Maybe they finished it after I moved on from that ship! I have no idea. So. But I think that this is a fair point though. I think abandoning—posting in progress, abandoning WIPs, I think that is a time-honored and integral part [FK laughs] of the vast body of fanworks.
FK: The tapestry of our lives. It is part of it! If you’re gonna post while you’re in progress, you may fall in there, and you know, don’t—it is what it is. Everyone knew!
ELM: And these are all within the expectations of what fic is. It’s all, it encompasses all of these things, and these aren’t exceptions. There are huge massive numbers of short fics, little scenes, that kind of thing, huge massive numbers of WIPs that are never gonna get finished. So it’s like, I don’t know. I feel like some of the dynamics that mathclasswarfare is describing are like…they really feel like they’ve grown in the last couple of years to me.
FK: Huh.
ELM: And I wanna piece why I feel like that, kind of pick apart why I feel that way. Do you…you also don’t spend very much time on Tumblr these days.
FK: That’s true, I don’t spend very much time on Tumblr. I feel like I experienced this a lot more in the past around, like, maybe it was just cause I was younger and the people I was hanging out with, though? I feel that I have a very, I probably have a pretty blinkered view on this. So I’m interested in hearing what you’re gonna say.
ELM: Wait, hold on. I want to know what you have to say! We’re both interested in hearing what the other has to say!
FK: I just feel like I personally heard more of this when I was younger and I was writing on fanfiction.net, even, back in the bad old days, and—
ELM: OK.
FK: And on FictionAlley, things like this, in the 2000s. And then I saw it again when I was on Wattpad.
ELM: Wait, what are we describing here? What are you saying you saw?
FK: Exactly what mathclasswarfare is talking about.
ELM: OK, all right.
FK: People beating themselves up about, like too many plot bunnies. The term “plot bunnies,” for that matter. People stressing themselves out because of their…
ELM: Flourish, my plot bunnies keep multiplying!
FK: Exactly, exactly. People stressing out about the fact that they’ve just been daydreaming or thinking about the characters and they haven’t been progressing their fic, you know.
ELM: I feel like that the kind of Tumblr posts that both mathclasswarfare and I are seeing, they just feel larger. They have like 100,000 notes or whatever and you’re like “right, I get it.”
FK: That’s fair! That’s much bigger than… [laughs]
ELM: You know? Because I think that, I was in a writing group for a few years, we all tried to produce stuff, we were all kind of in very different stages in our life, and writing in different genres and different mediums actually too, so that was a little weird, cause we were on pretty different pages. And like, you know, that’s certainly something you talk about with other people, if you’re feeling frustrated or stuck or whatever.
FK: Sure!
ELM: That’s a very normal part of these processes.
FK: Or if you have one thing that you think you should be working on and you’ve got a bunch of other ideas, and you’re like “what am I doing.” Sure! That’s normal.
ELM: Exactly. But I do think the plot bunny thing is extremely fandom. Because, you know, I definitely see people who are in the pro writing space say they’re getting new ideas, but it’s not really the same thing. It’s like, a huge part of fannish practice is talking to—well, not for everyone, but if you do talk to other people, talking about plot bunnies, right? Or like…
FK: Right.
ELM: Or the kink meme or whatever. Spinning up prompts and saying “What would happen if this?” Right?
FK: Right. “What if?” “Yes and!”
ELM: “I’d like to see if he was this, but this way!” That kind of thing, right? Yeah, exactly. And so it’s like, that’s one of the communal pleasures is kind of spinning up ideas, and tossing out ideas at other people.
FK: Right, in a way that I don’t see in non-fanfic writing communities as much, right?
ELM: Well, yeah.
FK: Not that it doesn’t ever happen, but it just doesn’t feel the same as like—there’s not the same like, yeah, tossing back and forth the football kind of feel of it.
ELM: Right, and I think that the non-monetized element is really key here. Because if you get a great idea, are you gonna say “who’s taking this one?” on Twitter, like, “here’s the setup,” right? If you think it’s a great idea, and you think there’s ever a chance you’ll write it, you’re keeping that future IP to yourself.
FK: You know the place that I see this as happening differently is on Reddit.
ELM: Interesting!
FK: On Reddit I see people, like, throwing out ideas, and I see people who are not themselves writers throwing out ideas, and being like “if somebody wrote this it would be amazing.” And then someone picks it up. There was one, I was thinking of one in particular from awhile back which was a guy who was like, it was just a totally bog-standard what-if modern military people traveled back in time to fight the Ancient Romans or something. I’m not sure it was exactly that, but it was something like that.
ELM: Hilarious!
FK: Which, by the way—
ELM: The misunderstandings that would ensue!
FK: There’s already a good military sci-fi time travel version of this. There’s several of them. So just, if you want that it’s already been professionally written. But this was, you know, this was clearly a dude who had never—if I recall correctly it was out of some people having a conversation and then some guy jumped in and was like “I could write that!” and started writing it! And it was pretty good and he kept going, you know?
ELM: That’s interesting.
FK: And all these people were really into it. Which felt, that felt very fanfictiony to me, even though of course no one involved in it would say that that was related to fanfiction at all.
ELM: I think it’s related to fanfiction iin—
FK: It is historical fanfiction.
ELM: In a modal—
FK: If you wanted to put it that way.
ELM: Sure! And in a mode sort of way. There are a few prompt accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, but I see it more on Tumblr because there’s more space to write something in the reblogs, where it’s like micro SFF prompt kind of thing, right? And it’ll be a couple sentences, you know, an idea. And then the way I’ll usually encounter it is someone will have written a thousand-word ficlet…not a ficlet, though, because it’s original, right?
FK: Right, right right.
ELM: A set-up for an idea. And I’m not saying that the pro writing world is not, is totally disconnected from this kind of thing. And I’ve certainly seen, especially I’ve seen at live events authors take ideas and run with it, right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah.
ELM: But I think it feels different putting it down in writing and putting it on social media for a lot of people, because then it does kind of feel like you’re committing something. And potentially not something you want to give away, if it’s something that you wanna develop further. So.
OK, but right, we’re talking about ideas, though. I wanna really kind of get at the daydreaming, headcanon element of mathclasswarfare’s ask.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Because I’m really interested in kind of interrogating you here about what just happened with the idea that you had. And for context, my read on the situation is like, you had an extremely id-based reaction to Ben Barnes in particular.
FK: Absolutely!!
ELM: And I like that you really understand that about yourself.
FK: My id was into it!
ELM: And cause you’re not going to write this I feel like we can say a little bit more about it, but you were kind of writing an OFC/the Ben Barnes character. And that was fascinating to me.
FK: Yeah, it was like I was trying to, I was trying to do…huh. So one of the fanfics, all right, one of the fanfics that I still get the most comments on of anything I’ve ever written was The Phantom of the Opera but if Christine wasn’t a total fucking idiot.
ELM: The third Erik! Can I just say? The weakest part of the Erik triumvirate—that’s Magneto and Erik Killmonger and that dude.
FK: That’s the, that’s the—
ELM: Erik with a K, to be clear.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, OK. So anyway, that’s, I’m not sure that it’s a very good fanfic but I sure get a lot of comments on it from a lot of people over many years.
ELM: Very interesting.
FK: And that was just purely like, I am purposely going to write Christine out of character because I want her to be a different person, and what would this be like if she was? And it’s probably not a better story, but it certainly was the kind of thing that you—it is an id thing, right? It’s a thing that you daydream about. “Ugh, why did you do that?!” You know what I mean?
ELM: Right.
FK: And I was having a similar reaction to tons of stuff in Shadow and Bone, because I really don’t actually like our darling protagonist that much. So I was like, “All right.” But the thing is that I didn’t want to write the story unless it actually hung together, you know what I mean?
ELM: Right, right.
FK: So after awhile, trying to figure out different ways…it also, like, I had some time travel ideas that were in there and that I really, some sort of mechanics that I’d been itching to use in a story, and it just turned out that it didn’t all hang together.
ELM: Right, right.
FK: Which then meant that I wasn’t going to write the long, plotty, finished story that I’d like to produce if I’m going to produce a fanfic.
ELM: Yeah, and I remember at the time—and this was before we got this ask—I said to you, when it seemed like this wasn’t happening, I was like “Why don’t you—if you like a dynamic—write a scene?” Right?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Write that scene that you wanna write, you know? Who cares? Who cares if you even ever publish it cause you wanna explore the dynamic. But just do it and stop worrying about all these structures and the way that one scene would fit in with the rest, right?
FK: And I think that the thing for me is, for me the sweet spot of fanfic is when I find something that is like, id candy and also lets me do the plotty thing that I like doing, right? So for me, I don’t have—when I was younger I had more of a pleasure in writing disconnected scenes that were emotional or whatever. And not to say that I wouldn’t do that here; in fact, I started writing a little bit of one of the scenes from this story and then I put it down after a little while and was like, “OK, I think I got it out of my system,” right?
ELM: Yeah.
FK: But for me the thing that was really fun about that—and I did enjoy the process of doing this—was the daydreaming. And I think for the first time I fully recognized that that daydreaming is a completely legitimate fannish practice that no one should make you feel bad about doing. It’s not like it’s worse than anything else fans do! It’s not like it’s morally bad to just think about, I don’t know, whatever your id’s into, and daydream about it. Why not? Who cares!
ELM: Right! And also like, I think that thinking a lot about the thing that you like is an extremely normal and in fact one of the only universal things across all kinds of fandom communities.
FK: [laughs] Well, that’s true. That’s true.
ELM: No other words than that: just thinking about it a lot. I’m not gonna add any more qualifiers.
FK: Just the candy heart that says, “thinking about u.”
ELM: Right? And so I don’t know. I know I said I wanted to keep it really writing-focused, but I do think that some of these biases, while I do think that—I get the woman and chocolate commercial, whatever…I just got a very strong vision of a commercial with a woman in a bubble bath eating a chocolate from a box of chocolates, right? Like…
FK: I was also thinking about, I feel like there was a period of Dove ads where it implied that the chocolate was going to give you an orgasm.
ELM: Yes, I mean, that’s how those chocolates work.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Even though they’re not that great. [FK laughs] So I don’t know how it happens, but. I also thought, it made me think of Snackwell cookies.
FK: Snackwell cookies! Have I eaten many a Snackwell cookie. For younger people who may not remember this [ELM laughing] extremely bad period in American diet culture…
ELM: People from other countries.
FK: Well I think it’s not just other countries, it’s also a very particular moment in time.
ELM: Yeah, other time periods.
FK: It’s from a different time. Snackwell’s cookies were like cookies but diet.
ELM: The actual context is that in the ’90s, at least in this country, we were swept by the low-fat craze.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: Right? And so—
FK: Everything had to be low fat and low cholesterol.
ELM: Yeah. Low-fat cookies. They had these cookies, these Devil’s Food Cake cookies.
FK: Oh yeah. I can feel the like, styrofoam…
ELM: Slightly dry… [both laughing]
FK: Like dry styrofoam!
ELM: And the tiny tiny bit of marshmallow or whatever that was—
FK: Exactly.
ELM: It was like not enough. You were like “Just a little more. Just make this slightly more moist and it won’t just taste like—” Just imagine it, like, against your tongue.
FK: It was one of the worst mouthfeels ever. [ELM laughing] But my grandfather ate them, because he had had several heart attacks, and so I ate them because they were the cookies that were at my grandfather’s house because he couldn’t have regular cookies.
ELM: Oh, we bought them. We bought those, we bought brand-name—er, not brand-name. We bought store-brand Oreos for awhile.
FK: Oh sure.
ELM: It was a real treat when we got to bump it up to brand-name Oreos.
FK: Oh really? We had, we had brand-name Oreos, so you would have been jealous. They happened.
ELM: I don’t know. Sometimes I felt like my parents were buying the store-brand things for the hell of it, you know? Do we have to buy Price Chopper brand sodas? Could we buy Cokes?
FK: [laughing] I was in a soda-free household except for 7Up, which you got when you were sick.
ELM: Oh. Mine was ginger ale. Which I’ve been experiencing this past week! I had food poisoning and I drank several ginger ales. [FK groans] In fact what I mostly drank was some red Gatorades.
FK: Well, red is a good flavor of Gatorade in my opinion.
ELM: That is the only flavor I like, and it really makes me feel like I am either hungover or have food poisoning!
FK: Which is true! [both laugh] All right, but back on the topic though, women being bad for wanting to eat chocolate.
ELM: Ah, yes.
FK: Instead you should eat Snackwell’s.
ELM: So I definitely think that those gendered elements exist in these discourses, but I also think too that like, in other fan practices that we tend to think of as more male-coded or male-dominated, like—say cataloging in wikis, or that kind of thing—I do think that there’s a similar…I don’t know if these discourse points exist, but there’s definitely an idea of, I mean, just thinking about all the facts, knowing every ship model in Star Trek or whatever, is a little useless when the metric is like, “Actually contribute to the forums and contribute to the wikis,” right?
FK: This is how you get all of those Reply Guys. “Thanks, dude.”
ELM: Cause he’s like “I need to let you know that I’m not just thinking about it! I need people to know that I’m thinking about it.”
FK: “And I’m going to help you by correcting whatever you’re saying about it, I’m going to help you, I’m going to help you. I’m HELPING.”
ELM: I definitely think those things exist. And there’s this kind of idea which I think we circle around when we talk about lurkers, too, of this idea of like: well, if no one can see you doing the fandom… [FK laughs] Right? Then does it count? You know?
FK: Right.
ELM: And obviously it counts, right? And you could think a million thoughts about the thing you like, and you could write whole stories in your head, and whatever. And that counts just as much, right? But again: I get why some people have other goals that are not purely thinking. And so you could start to feel like that’s not enough.
FK: Right, but I also think that this also gets us back around to—I’m bringing it up again, are you ready for me to bring it up again?
ELM: All right, Max Weber, go ahead.
FK: The Protestant work ethic!!
ELM: That’s fine. All right. Define the Protestant work ethic for anyone who hasn’t encountered this.
FK: I mean, I’m gonna be incredibly loosey-goosey about this.
ELM: Yeah, be super reductive.
FK: The belief that basically working is good, being productive is good, and being like, lazy or doing anything that seems unproductive is bad and unvirtuous and not acceptable, and you shouldn’t even like it, right? And then that leads you into thing, that leads you to psychological places like “anything I like is bad, because obviously it means that I’m being lazy and enjoying things and dah dah dah dah too much.”
ELM: Right. And historically the Protestant part is important—written by a German—a lot of these beliefs coming from Northern Europe, from Britain, used as ways to position Northern European Protestant nations against Southern Europe’s Catholic nations.
FK: Because they’re “lazy,” yeah.
ELM: Who are super chill and decadent. And then as Europeans started to, uh, go exploring, as they say, slash colonizing—
FK: I wish everyone could see the head waggle you just gave [ELM laughs] because it was a big head waggle.
ELM: Do a little exploring out in the world! As global colonization began, too, there were ways for colonizing nations to kind of set themselves off. So obviously there are huge racialized elements of this as well, right.
FK: But I think it’s incredibly hard to divorce—if you grew up in a lot of places, it’s really hard…
ELM: Just a lot of places!
FK: Just a lot of places! I mean I don’t wanna say, this is not only an American thing. I don’t know all the different places that this has impacted and touched but I’m sure it’s much more than the Northern European countries that it originally sprang out of, right.
ELM: Yeah. I mean to, this is definitely—these are issues with the global economy, right? I feel like I’m, I listened to the Ted Radio Hour or whatever and am parroting back or whatever. But modern economics are, on a national level, are about year-over-year growth, and that is not actually about making sure that all the humans who live in your nation have all their needs met, right? It’s about showing productivity of your workers increasing and profits increasing and GDP increasing, right?
FK: And what’s funny is, we see this kind of language all the time mirrored in fandom stuff. Like, we see people talking about like—I mean, the Archive Of Our Own’s growth.
ELM: Year-over-year growth, right, yeah.
FK: We see people talking about how…
ELM: Yeah, Toast talks about fanworks production! That’s the term they use, right? Yeah! It’s all Toast’s fault. Toast, why are you doing this to us?
FK: But we also see, this is the part where it’s not just about fanfic, right? It’s also, there’s lots of parts of fandom that sort of involve us making things into jobs. Metrics-based fandom, and the idea that you’re going to help other people push something—obviously there’s a pleasure in some kinds of collective action, right? There’s a reason why historically a barnraising is a fun thing, even though you’re also all working very hard to put up a barn. In this case the barn is, I don’t know, some K-pop person’s salary. Whatever.
ELM: Yes.
FK: I’m not trying to say there’s no pleasures in effort or in work or in any of this, but when you start looking for it, you start seeing it everywhere. And I think some people get nervous about the idea of “I’m not being productive.” Nervous about the idea of “I’m just daydreaming.” Feeling like that’s not worthy.
ELM: Hold on, go back, Flourish. I think that I’m going to object to one word you used in there, which was “work.” Because I think you’re talking about output and this is something that I would like to talk about me for a moment and my fic writing practices.
FK: Yeah, let’s! Because you have a lot of work.
ELM: I do, and it’s pleasurable to me. And I’m an editor and editing, like really getting in the zone, like, editing a kind of a messy piece that needs to be—you look at it and you go “Oh, God, I gotta fix this. How am I gonna fix this?” [FK laughs] It’s like a puzzle to be solved, right? And I put on some Bach and I just go into the zone and I start fixing, fixing fixing fixing. And it feels so good and it feels like you’re solving a jigsaw puzzle, which I did for the first time in years over Christmas with my family.
FK: Was it great?
ELM: It felt so good! So many pieces! When we put those last pieces in? So good! And like, it’s not just about…actually, I think a jigsaw puzzle is not a bad analogy here, right? Or I started doing the crossword, which I hadn’t done in awhile, over the last few weeks. Yeah, I like to solve it. I like to quote-unquote solve it. I like to finish it. I like the “dah, dah da-dah da-dum, da-dat!”
FK: [laughs] We are talking here clearly about the New York Times crossword, because…
ELM: I think a lot of people here will be familiar with that little jingle!
FK: That little jingle!
ELM: Right? Obviously I love becoming the Queen Bee in the spelling bee. I like that little bee that I get!
FK: I know you do. I know you do.
ELM: But it’s also—we talk about this throughout the day. Like, I like to have it in throughout the day and slowly chip away at it and like, the fun of it is “Ooh, another one! Ooh, another one!” It’s not like “Look at my output! Look at my achievement! I’m the Queen Bee!” It’s more like, the actual practice of it is the fun part, right?
So going back to writing, like, some of this kind of solving the puzzle, methodical work of editing—I find this in writing too, and I don’t know if you know this about me, about my writing process, but I am not a shitty first drafter. I think you knew this.
FK: [laughs] I have observed this.
ELM: So if I’m stuck on a scene, it’s that thing people on Tumblr make fun of themselves all the time for: I could be stuck on that scene for a long time, right? You know? Actually, the thing that I literally just finished yesterday, I was trying to finish the section I finally finished like before Christmas. I actually wrote a whole other story in between then and now, right? Because I just, like, could not get it to work.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: It doesn’t work for me to be like, “I’ll come back to it.” I need to solve that problem now. And when I do solve it, I really feel like—I can kinda feel it clicking and feel like “Oh, it makes sense,” right? And like, my beta that I most often work with I think is a really smart reader who can tell when beats are missing, and she rarely has notes like that, because I can tell when beats are missing or when something’s not quite working, right?
FK: That’s interesting cause our processes are so different.
ELM: So like, for me a lot of that is…not exactly pleasurable, but also pretty pleasurable. You know, you’re gonna—oh my God, I was gonna quote Ron Weasley of all people, “you’re gonna suffer and you’re gonna like it.” Right? But like—I’m very sorry to repeatedly bring up fucking Harry Potter on this podcast. I hate it, I hate it.
But for me that kind of struggle of it isn’t a problem in any way, cause that’s the fun of it. And it’s not “Oh, look how many words I churned out” or beyond that “oh look at the metrics on this” or whatever, it is really about feeling like I kind of wrote what I wanted to write successfully, which means like, solving the individual problems of each scene.
FK: Right.
ELM: Feeling like it flows naturally. Hitting the beats I wanted to hit, that kind of thing. And that’s very internally driven for me. It’s not thinking about any readers, it’s just thinking about what I think works in fiction.
FK: Right. And I think that ultimately, we probably do to some extent get to the same place with our different processes. Because, like, I am definitely a shitty first drafter, and I will write a shitty version of the scene or even say like “There’s a scene here! It’s gonna do this thing. I’m gonna keep on going,” you know.
ELM: I love that for you. I hate that for myself.
FK: Yeah yeah yeah. But ultimately, like, I do—the things that I post are not shitty first drafts when they get posted.
ELM: OK, sure.
FK: I usually, most of the time I don’t do works in progress, or if I do it’s something that I have an extremely extensive outline for and done all that worrying about earlier. And I do like that jigsaw feeling, only for me it comes later when I’ve written the full shitty first draft, and I look back at it and I go, “Oh! Shit. OK. I need to move this here and do this and tear it apart here.”
ELM: Yeah, sure.
FK: But I think that what you were really trying to say there, though, right, is that there’s a lot of daydreaming and a lot of thinking about the characters that you do that’s not “productive” in the sense of words on a page but very productive in the sense of ultimately enabling words on a page, and also just giving you pleasure.
ELM: Right. I mean I think that to—I don’t know, I don’t want to overstate it, because I honestly think that writing 100 words and posting it is writing, you know? It’s not like everything needs to be big, deep, thoughtful or whatever. But like, I—it’s important to me to, one thing that I also find a lot of pleasure from is doing a ton of research and then 1% of the research that I do… [FK laughs]
I always read a bunch of books or parts of books, I [laughs] one thing that I have been experiencing recently is I keep trying to find answers to really specific questions, like “when was X thing invented,” or “what’s the history of, when did this thing evolve into this thing” or whatever. And I wind up on commercial websites. Like I was looking up something about pools, and I was trying to learn the history of pools, and I wound up on like a south Florida pool installer, and they had an “about the history of pools.” So good! And I keep finding this over and over again: the very best resources are like, the people who are trying to sell you the thing and have a history page where they explain the thing.
FK: Tell you about the history of the thing.
ELM: Obviously I’m not fact-checking that. I assume they know what they’re talking about. Whatever! It’s fanfiction. What, someone’s gonna come after me and be like “Well, actually the pool…” Whatever, right?
FK: It’s gonna be one of the reply guys who is obsessed with pools [ELM laughs] and is like, “It’s not enough for me to just think about pools all the time, I need to tell you about pools.”
ELM: Right. So like, you know, I absolutely—I really enjoy doing research, but a lot of the research is, in the same way that we talked about the fan tourism stuff, I really like kind of imagining the world in which the characters would live, and immersing myself in that, right?
FK: Yeah, yeah.
ELM: And actually, you know, a lot of that isn’t necessarily about eventually writing fic for it, it’s just feeling those vibes and that world, right?
FK: Yeah yeah yeah, completely!
ELM: So then when you go to write the fic, you feel like you’re kind of embodying them and the world in which they live, because you’ve done all this kind of background research about the period or the vibe or whatever, you know what I mean?
FK: But you also, you know—I think the thing I keep coming back to is you also don’t have to write the fic, right? Like, I think that—
ELM: Yeah!
FK: I’m not trying to say like, anything against writing fic, I love writing fic and I love people who write fic. But I think one of the things that these Tumblr memes are all assuming is that writing fic is, like, morally superior to not writing fic and it’s not. I mean, obviously it’s lovely to do, but there’s lots of lovely things in the world to do.
ELM: Well, OK, but this brings it—this is what you were getting at, I don’t know if we actually said the word “morally superior” when we were talking about the Protestant work ethic. But that’s what it is. It’s not just the work itself, but it’s the output. It’s the production. That is the superior artifact.
FK: If you’re not writing your 2,000 words a day for NaNoWriMo, then you’re not in the right, you know?
ELM: Right.
FK: If you don’t wake up at six in the morning and do your writing routine, which will enable you to get two solid hours in before you have to go to work, and you’re just drinking coffee and writing every morning without taking your fingers off the hot little keyboard, then are you really even a real writer?
ELM: Right. That being said though, all right: so you know it took me awhile to finish the thing that I was working on. It kind of bummed me out! Especially in February and March, I really felt like I was just very tired of work, and I would get to the end of the day and I’d be like “you know what, fuck it, this is fanfiction, it’s for free.” And also there was no deadline, there was no fest or whatever, and a lot of the other stuff I’ve written has been for a fest, so it kind of has a forcing function.
But this was just like, there was no deadline, and my beta wasn’t really yelling at me, you know, very—very occasionally, once every few weeks, being like “hey, are you working on that?” But not like, just shouting at me daily, which sometimes I need. But I get to the end of the day, and I had a long day of work, and 9,000 Zoom meetings so like my eyes are tired, and I would think “Oh, I should probably work more on this,” and then I’d be like “No, it’s a hobby. There’s no reason for me to—who cares?” Right? This is not for money, right, fuck it.
But then those days pile up, and a couple months pass, and you haven’t worked on it at all, and then it sucks cause you wanna finish it, right? Cause you wanna solve the puzzle, you wanna make everything work together, you wanna actually get the characters to the place you wanted to get them in the end, right? And shepherd them to that place. And so did I feel sad because I wasn’t being productive? No, but I did feel sad that I wasn’t finishing the fic because I wanted to finish it, you know? And like, how do I untangle those threads, you know?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: I certainly feel like, look: we both make a podcast and I make a newsletter on top of our full-time jobs. I think we are millennials who are guilty of side-hustling, as it were. [FK laughs] You know?
FK: Yeah!
ELM: But also, I think that we made it pretty clear—and if not, I’ll make it clear again—we derive a lot of personal value out of making this podcast, it’s not just like, right? It’s not just like, monetizin’ that hobby, or whatever.
FK: Trust me, if we were monetizing this hobby we could have much less fun and make a lot more money.
ELM: Wow, I didn’t realize what you would be doing if we were monetizing this hobby.
FK: I’m just saying! If we really wanted to monetize it, there’s like 15 things that you could do to this podcast to make it more monetizable.
ELM: You’re going to turn it into consulting on top of consulting, aren’t you.
FK: We’re not gonna do this.
ELM: Yeah. But it would be possible. But no. I think that, I remember one time we went to Wheaton College a few years ago to talk to students about stuff, and the professor who invited us, Josh Stenger, in the kind of interview event in the evening, he asked a question that I will remember for a long time, which was: if you weren’t doing this podcast…do you remember exactly how he worded it? It was something like “If you weren’t doing this podcast, what would you be doing” or something like that.
FK: Right.
ELM: And I think we were both like, “This podcast gives us an opportunity to have these conversations about something we’re interested in, and it is the reason we have those conversations.”
FK: Exactly. Like, writing meta, question mark? No, probably not that either. I don’t know.
ELM: Yeah, and I don’t know: we discuss these things plenty in Slack or whatever, we have a friends Slack, but it’s not the same as sitting down and having, like, a purposeful conversation.
FK: Yeah, conversation.
ELM: What, are we gonna go out to lunch once every two weeks and be like “So the topic this week is fanfiction…”
FK: There are people who do that! I know some people who do things like that, you know?
ELM: No. I prefer my lunches to be much more like meals on Seinfeld: just jokes, jokes about nothing, jokes about extremely mundane things. Jokes.
FK: Jokes.
ELM: Big salads.
FK: Great.
ELM: That’s a Seinfeld reference.
FK: I mean you also actually do love big salads, so there’s that.
ELM: There’s so many ways in which Elaine Benes and I are similar. [FK laughs]
FK: Not just the hair?
ELM: It’s not just the hair and the big salad, but those are two very important elements.
FK: All right.
ELM: I think I’m a better dancer.
FK: Great. I’ve seen like two episodes of Seinfeld. You’re not gonna get me to…
ELM: Oh, Flourish, you’ve seen the Elaine dancing gif.
FK: Yeah, oh yeah, I have, I’ve seen that. I’m just saying.
ELM: Yeah, she does that at an office party and she becomes a big joke, obviously.
FK: A delight.
ELM: Yeah.
FK: Yeah.
ELM: You should watch more Seinfeld. It’s a very important New York show.
FK: I’m not gonna watch more Seinfeld, Elizabeth.
ELM: You should probably watch more Seinfeld.
FK: Not gonna happen. I can guarantee you. There are few things in this life that I feel more confident about. It’s not that I hate Seinfeld, I’m just not gonna do it, and I know this. It’s like saying “I’m not suddenly gonna become a person like you who doesn’t do shitty first drafts.” I’m always gonna be a shitty first draftser, and I’m never going to watch Seinfeld more.
ELM: This is your loss.
FK: Well, maybe! I don’t know.
ELM: It truly is.
FK: Fine! Sure. I mean, I’m also not going to do a lot of things in my life. And maybe that’s part of, getting back to this thing, right—
ELM: Oh my God, wow. All right, go ahead.
FK: I’m trying to loop back!
ELM: Go ahead, go ahead.
FK: Maybe that’s part of the thing is, I don’t know, one of the things about living your life and figuring out what you wanna do is figuring out what you really wanna do and not just what you think you wanna do, right? And so when you, Elizabeth, really wanna finish a story, and you feel bad cause you’re not doing the thing you wanna do, and you’re getting in your own way: that’s great, you know? That’s totally legit. But I think that what mathclasswarfare is talking about is this sort of one-size-fits-all kind of shaming, where it’s like, “Obviously everyone has the same feelings about this, and I feel ashamed of my—”
ELM: No, hang on though. These are people, they’re not saying “you,” they’re saying “me” in these posts, right? They’re not saying “everyone feels the same way as me,” they are expressing frustration with themselves that they are spending more time daydreaming, or most of their time daydreaming, and not, and not writing the thing. And maybe they are like me, maybe the pleasure for them is writing the thing and they feel frustrated.
FK: And I hope that’s true! But like, I do understand what mathclasswarfare is saying about it feeling like ’90s diet talk. It’s a thing that people say about “me,” but is it an idea that necessarily comes from within you?
ELM: Yeah, I mean, it’s tricky! I would just be hesitant to say that every one of the…
FK: Oh, I don’t meant to be totalizing.
ELM: Yeah, no no, but I think it’s tricky. I think that’s one hard thing about these posts is they get so much engagement that it starts to feel like “Oh, wow, everyone’s beating themselves up over these kind of externalized pressures,” or whatever. But it’s also totally possible that for a lot of people it is something they find relatable and it’s an internal pressure. And obviously it’s impossible to actually separate out externalized from internal pressure.
FK: Yeah, but let that pass. Let it pass.
ELM: You know what I mean, right? So I get it. But I wish that—I think that the daydreaming element of fandom definitely doesn’t get enough credit. I agree with that element of mathclasswarfare’s letter. I mean, I don’t disagree with the letter on the whole or anything. I think that, I have found it very interesting in the last…oh, most of the time I’ve been on Tumblr, the rise of the headcanon post and the rise of the…
FK: The imagine.
ELM: Sure, or the kind of fic, the sort of what I say is like a fic summary? Kind of outline? Where it’s like “First this happens, then this!” And it’s like, sometimes I read those and I’m like “Just write the story! You have the plot!” But it’s like, maybe they can’t or they don’t want to and they’re not going to.
FK: Right.
ELM: This is what they chose to write instead, and maybe it’s not for me. Maybe, cause I don’t like shorter stuff, but it’s definitely for someone, because lots of people like it or whatever.
FK: Yeah, and this is a similar kind of pleasure to what I was talking about, about this Battlestar Galactica/West Wing crossover, right? Like, at least 50% of the pleasure was just in thinking, “Holy shit! You could cross those over.”
ELM: Right, right.
FK: And like, oh, of course I see how that would happen. And immediately having the ideas come out of that. I probably would have had just as much fun with that if it had been a fic summary kind of a thing, or even an imagine or whatever, just a prompt. So why not, right?
ELM: Yeah! That’s right.
FK: Well, we’ve gotten pretty much to the end of our time, and I do think that at the end of this conversation, I’m feeling…I wasn’t ever feeling bad about it going into this, but I’m feeling better about sort of the wide breadth of all the different ways that people engage with fic and with thinking about stuff. And maybe what I would like to do is re-orient my, even thinking about my own fannish orientation, from saying “I’m a fanfic writer” to like: “I like thinking about stories. Sometimes that means writing them, sometimes that means daydreaming about them.”
I just wanna, having that be the thing that I emphasize in the way I think of my own fannish behavior. Because I don’t know, I think that’s more accurate, maybe, for me as a person, ultimately.
ELM: Well, isn’t mathclasswarfare arguing a little bit against that and a little bit by saying that actually, like, daydreaming and mulling over is part of writing? And we were talking about with the way I do things: I read a bunch of books to write every fic, and think a lot about, you know, or we watch a few movies if it’s set in a time period or whatever.
FK: Yeah I do that too.
ELM: Right? And like, ask people questions. I don’t regret any, I have so many WIPs, obviously. So much of the fic I wrote prior to the last few years I never posted because I never finished. But I don’t consider any of that wasted. I love the concepts that I came up with. Before I left the Harry Potter fandom, I was writing this—I got 10,000 words in, so it was pretty substantial planning and starting to write—of a story where Draco Malfoy was a lawyer and I asked a good British friend to explain the entire legal system and the process by which you become a lawyer, you know what I mean?
FK: Yeah.
ELM: That wasn’t wasted! That was really interesting to kind of puzzle out, and I will never look at that fic again because I don’t want to think about Draco Malfoy again.
FK: But maybe your way into thinking about this was thinking about writing, but the pleasure was in the thinking. And it was in the writing too, I’m not saying it was only in the thinking…
ELM: I’m saying that those things aren’t disconnected for me! But…
FK: I don’t think they’re disconnected either, I’m just saying maybe the emphasis. Instead of emphasizing the productivity of the fic writing, emphasizing the process!
ELM: Right, but I’m not emphasizing the productivity in any way! I’m the one arguing against emphasizing the productivity— [laughing]
FK: I didn’t think you were—you know what, I think that we’re very vehemently agreeing with each other right now.
ELM: No!! We’re not agreeing!! No! There’s no way!! [both laughing]
FK: This is like every conversation that we have ever.
ELM: I disagree! [FK laughs] Oh my goodness.
FK: Well, certainly the people who listen to this podcast because they like to hear us bicker and have, like, that thing going on. They’re getting that in spades, guys, we didn’t intend it but here you go.
ELM: I can’t. All right. Well, OK, I think that we agree with mathclasswarfare.
FK: We do.
ELM: I do say I feel like it’s probably likely that Fansplaining has reblogged some of these posts in the past, so I don’t—
FK: Possibly.
ELM: I don’t hate them as much. And I think that if you relate to them in a jokey way without beating yourself up, you know…
FK: Yeah, that’s fine! Also, sometimes I’ve had too many plot bunnies! Where am I gonna put them? I need to build a hutch!
ELM: I hate you. It’s terrible. Just terrible. And people write like extended paragraphs where they run with the bunny metaphor. “This one wiggled his tail and hopped across my mind!” It’s like, fine. Do what you wanna do.
FK: It’s part of the great tradition of fanfiction, Elizabeth. Just embrace it.
ELM: [sighs] OK. Mathclasswarfare, extremely good ask. Really appreciate giving us the opportunity to talk about these things and for me to be able to, uh, kinda do a little post-mortem on Flourish’s aborted self-insert time travel fic.
FK: And also to think about your own process and how long it takes you to write any fic.
ELM: It takes me a huge range of times. The one that I wrote in between writing sections of the one I just finished I wrote in like two weeks, and it was like, super—it was a pretty long one-shot!
FK: Uh-huh? OK.
ELM: It is what it is! I mean it is truly deadline based, about how quickly I can do things.
FK: I was gonna say like, you will noodle forever if you don’t have anything yelling at you, so. All right, all right, all right.
ELM: I’ve been a journalist for a long time, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s just the way it works.
FK: All right, before we go we have to do our little pitch.
ELM: Yes. Well, patreon.com/fansplaining, that is the way that we make the podcast, that’s how we can pay for it. Our monetized hobby.
FK: [sing-songy] Our monetized hobby!
ELM: I don’t know what that sing-songy, that was a little scary. A little serial killer.
FK: I don’t know either. It just felt right, I’m gonna let it go.
ELM: Doesn’t feel right to me, I’m sayin’. OK. So. If you have been enjoying the podcast, and you’re not currently a patron, we always welcome new patrons, and we also welcome old ones maybe who have dropped off. I know that people’s finances have changed a lot over the last year. They may be changing again. We really appreciate anyone who has to drop off and lets us know that it’s just for financial reasons—absolutely no worry at all.
Anyway, you can pledge at a full range of amounts from a dollar to infinity dollars. [FK laughs] I’m sure that’s written into the capabilities of the website.
FK: Jeff Bezos, call us.
ELM: Don’t call us, I’m mad at you. [FK laughs] So our most popular tier is $3 a month. You get access to all of our special episodes. We are recording another one in a few days. I think that should probably be out by the time this comes out, if not shortly after. So get ready for that. And $5 a month you get a really cute enamel pin with our little fan logo. $10 a month, it’s important to say, we can announce our next collaboration with DestinationToast!
FK: Toasty stats! It’s gonna be a tiny stat zine. So it’s comin’ soon!
ELM: [laughs] Stat zine. Yeah, it’s gonna be coming I think probably sometime in the month of July if not early August. I think that we will probably give a, you know, we’ll give plenty of warning of a cut-off date when people need to pledge by, but that’s $10 a month. And it’s gonna be so cute. They always are, but you know, tiny stats! That’s pretty cute.
FK: Extra cute.
ELM: They’re pretty good stats too, I gotta say. Very interesting.
FK: Charming.
ELM: Yes, charming is the word. So we’re really excited about that. We love DestinationToast even though I invoked them in the middle of this podcast to talk about the term “fanwork production.” That’s not Toast’s fault. So yeah! That’s Patreon! So we would love any monetary support anyone can give.
FK: And, if you don’t want to or can’t afford to support us in that way, you can support us in lots of other ways such as spreading the news about the podcast or sending in questions, thoughts, concerns, comments, whatever you wanna send us that’s decent.
ELM: Gripes.
FK: Gripes! Gripes also accepted. You can do that through our askbox on Tumblr. It’s open, anon is on. We’ve also got a form on our website. You can contact us at fansplaining at gmail dot com or on various social networks on which we are “fansplaining,” or you can leave us a voicemail—which we love, to get voicemails—at 1-401-526-FANS, and if you do that, we will play your voicemail on the podcast. So you know, come be a disembodied voice for a little while. And you can be, you can be anonymous for that, too! Just don’t say your name.
ELM: Exactly.
FK: All right, that’s the pitch. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode!
ELM: All right, yeah! I hope that provoked some thoughts. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this.
FK: Absolutely.
ELM: And it seems to have given you a new lease on your headcanon life.
FK: Yeah, I’m just gonna headcanon my way around the world now.
ELM: And it reminded me that I have to go work on the next fic that I was supposed to be writing, but it’s something that brings me pleasure.
FK: Go be productive, Elizabeth.
ELM: Don’t use that word! Just go write.
FK: Talk to you later!
ELM: OK, bye!
[Outro music, thank-yous and credits]