your work is for someone

what writing fanfic in elementary school taught me about audiences

Hullo friends 💖🍵

One of the recurring themes you’ll find in this newsletter is how being a fanfic writer shaped not only my writing style, but also my habits and approach to the work. For example: fanfic taught me to write for a public audience from before I knew how to spell properly.

I did not deserve that audience. They did not need to be subjected to my run-on sentences or my bad punctuation (“ I used to punctuate dialogue like this. I inexplicably found it ugly for the quotation marks to be next to the words. ”) Nevertheless…those readers were there. I’ve been writing in fandom for more than two decades now (!), so it has absolutely shaped my view on readers and being read. Fanfic taught me fundamentally that there were people out there for my stories—which, to a schoolgirl in Manila who had no idea about trad publishing (“books are made probably somewhere in America?”) was an amazing concept.

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I posted my first story on the internet when I was eight. Eight.

That was the year Disney’s Mulan came out. Something about the ending where she gets together with Shang didn’t sit well with me—I thought Mulan was too cool for him. (Funnily enough, I quite like Shang now. At least the part where he falls for Ping.) So of course my solution was to make a story where Mulan is just blatantly uninterested in Shang—I feel like that’s where the fanfic impulse starts for a lot of people: a desire to revise so that the story’s more to your liking. I did not have any level of craft then that could remotely tell this much-improved version of Mulan’s story, but I wrote something, found a website to upload it to, and did just that.

I cannot remember if there was a commenting function on that website. The internet was pretty small then so I imagine it found some eyeballs, but for me the act of posting was the point.

Two years passed before I wrote another fanfic, which was an epically long retelling of an anime. I didn’t like the shoujo-manga protagonist, so I decided to switch her out for a protagonist I much preferred, who kicked the shit out of bad guys and was incredibly uncouth. (There was a lot of “b*tch” in that manuscript, as I wanted to write a badass, but couldn’t bring myself to curse yet. Ah youth.)

I got a number of chapters in and then stopped for several months, because I was bored. But then I discovered FF.Net, and started posting chapters out of curiosity, and found that two people…had started to leave reviews. For my shitty story.

This was beyond motivating. That unfinished multichapter fic is still the longest thing I’ve ever written. I did that embarrassing thing where I would leave copious author’s notes at the beginning and end of the story, thanking people for reading, especially those two dedicated dear hearts who would show up every freaking chapter to say something. The story wasn’t good, by any means, but those readers saw something there. It led me to think: oh, if I finish something, maybe I should share it. I got into the habit of posting my fanfics whenever I finished them, instead of letting them languish on my hard drive like I used to. I was still writing primarily for my own amusement, but in the back of my mind I’d realized something important: maybe someone out there could enjoy this too?

This is a mural by artist Matzu (Tomokazu Matsuyama) from the Wynwood Walls at Art Basel Miami, where I was lucky enough to visit last December. I thought there was something really enchanting about the Walls, how people visit each year to admire them. They do get rotated out, but it got me thinking about making art to last, and at such a scale to be received by the public.

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I’ve changed fandom handles twice since then, and will take those ancient fic handles to my grave. I’ve been writing as one consistent fandom identity for about half my life now, though. I recently got curious about which story of mine has the most kudos (to non-fandom people, that’s the archiveofourown equivalent of a Twitter like). To my shock, it was a 2006 fanfic for a relatively small fandom. And that one was originally posted on FF.Net, so the actual hit count is far higher than what’s on AO3.

This led to two relevant thoughts:

(1) You never know when someone might enjoy your story, temporally. I’ve gotten comments on this story as recently as 2020, 14 whole years after it was written. When you wrote it doesn’t matter to readers. They’re still happy to read it. In the same way that a lot of our favorite books probably aren’t necessarily the ones which have been published most recently.

I feel like this is important to stress because when a story of mine gets published, either pro or in fandom, and nothing seems to happen—well, I feel pretty bad. I get discouraged. Because: I wrote the thing. For pro work I even managed to sell it. And yet, if it drops like a stone without any ripples (my brain poetically muses, in a total Dick Move)…I basically feel like it did nothing. Sometimes I extrapolate that to “gee, that work failed.”

But just because it doesn’t connect with readers at the point of publication doesn’t mean it never will. Someone years later could find joy or beauty in it. Someone could encounter it at a time when they need it most. Maybe someone who isn’t even born yet! I’m always late coming to fandoms these days and so quite a lot of my fanfic reading is for stories that are years old, but to me they’re like new, and I’m just happy and grateful they’ve been written.

(2) Probably way more people read a thing than you ever know. This most-Kudosed story of mine has some 700 kudos. But that’s only 10% of the hits—impressions, eyeballs, clicks—that the story actually received. And the comment count is less than 20.

I’m not counting the FF.Net data for this story so the real numbers are significantly different; plus I definitely think Ao3 as a platform reduced comment counts by introducing “Kudos” as an alternative. Still, the math checks out such:

• 7000 people read the thing

• 10% of these folks hit a little heart button to express appreciation for the story

• 0.2% of the them took the time to say at least a few words about what they specifically liked.

I’m not complaining about people not leaving reviews or Kudos; I know fanfic authors should never demand these things. (You can, however, leave a little wibbly note saying how much you appreciate the feedback. I do think that actually encourages people to leave them.) But it did make me conscious about how often I read a story, and actually like it or enjoy it…but then I don’t ever tell the author. I’m in the habit of always giving a kudos if the story at least did something for me, and I try to leave comments for things I genuinely liked a lot, but sometimes I just…don’t. It doesn’t occur to me, or I feel I don’t have much to say, or for one reason or another I can only do the kudos.

But I did like the story.

How many people feel this way? How many people do that—read a thing but never indicate that they have? Especially for professionally published work?

I’m lucky (or unlucky?) that I can see the hits on my story on Ao3; I can’t see the same for my original stories. But is it possible that actually many more people are reading them than I think? And that some % of those people like those stories—but I’ll never know?

I think so. It’s extremely rare, but sometimes I’ll get an email from someone expressing that they liked a story of mine. If they didn’t go through that effort of letting me know I’d have no idea. What if that’s just a small percent of people who encounter the work? That means I’m actually reaching many more people than I think.

I don’t know if these concepts are painfully obvious to everyone else; I feel like I need to keep making myself aware of them. Someone could encounter my work at any time, once it’s published; when it’s published does matter, but that doesn’t preclude it from finding its readers eventually. And there are so many readers out there that we are not (cannot?) be aware of, because we just have no sense of how are stories are faring or who they’re being sent along to, once they’re out in the world.

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You might be thinking: well—that’s cool and all, Isa. But I don’t really write fanfiction.

And/or: I’ve not been able to publish original fiction.

So like. You can talk to me about having an audience. But the fact is that I literally don’t have any, because my work is not out there.

I get this. And it’s true. If you don’t share your work with others, well, then you don’t have an audience.

First off, I don’t think that means the work is any lesser. An audience of one—yourself—is amazing. I believe cultivating and hanging onto that audience even as your writing world starts to broaden is incredibly important. Sometimes it’s the hardest thing, to remember that you ought to love and enjoy what you yourself write.

However, I suspect a lot of you would love an audience and may be hurting that you don’t have one, or feel like you don’t. I’m not particularly on a crusade to get everyone to write fanfiction, but I think that’s one great place to test your own writing. If you post a fanfic online, you might be surprised at how many people actually do read and encounter it. Even my oldest, most obscure, and “worst performing” fanfics have at least 100 hits at this point. That’s still one hundred eyeballs. (Admittedly, some of them were likely mine, checking for typos.)

If you’re like nah to the idea of fanfic, then I’m going to tell you to just trust the fact that there are readers out there. Whatever you write, however good or bad you think your craft is, whether you are constantly berating yourself for shortcomings or sometimes give the stage to that voice in you that goes well fuck, I do think some of this is pretty good!—trust me. There are readers for you. If my barely-readable teenage fanfics did, then surely—surely—the work you’ve been lovingly cultivating and working on does, too.

I hope you can hold onto that thought. That your work is for someone. That it could wake up something in them, hurt their heart or rearrange their world in specific ways—just like your favorite books or stories have done for you.

There’s something bittersweet but also fair in the fact that you may never know this. Think about your top ten favorite pieces of writing. How many of them are from authors that are still living? Have you reached out to any of those authors to let them know what their story has done for you? If the answer is no, that’s okay—that’s the vast majority of readers, I think! All your love for that piece of writing might not make it through to the author.

That’s why, when the roles are flipped and we’re on the author side—we just have to trust, on some level, that our readers are there. And to do our work diligently and as well as we can, because the only way for that connection to exist at all is for us to get our work out there, in all different ways.

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Reccs and things

• I love The Reading, a newsletter by the poet Yan Yi. Try this post on drafting: “Your imagination does not belong to your will. Let it move as it truly wishes.”

• “When all’s said and done, ‘to become an artist’ means nothing: whereas to become alive, or one’s self, means everything.” - ee cummings on agony

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