summary from What Fan Fictiont Teaches That the Classroom doesn't

What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t

Everyone leaves feedback and reviews for one another, leading to a sprawling, communal learning environment.

Julie Beck Oct 1, 2019

 

 
N. K. Jemisin, the only author to win the prestigious Hugo Award for best science-fiction or fantasy novel three years in a row, partly credits fan fiction for her ability to draw in readers.

Jemisin started writing fan fiction, in which authors imagine new stories based on preexisting fictional works, while in grad school for counseling. “I was miserable and lonely. I didn’t have a lot of friends, or stress relief,” she told me. “Around then was when I became internetted, and one of the first communities I discovered was a fan-fic community.” Through talking  with other authors and writing her own stories about Dragon Ball Z (among other things), she found friends, got feedback, and, as she put it, “blew the cobwebs off writing abilities I hadn’t used since college.”
 For instance, this writing helped her hone her ability to hold readers’ interest. “Fan fiction tends to have a built-in hook because it’s written in a world you’re a fan of; you’re predisposed to like it,” she said. “You have to find a way to make it not just the world that people are tuning in to read, so they are interested in your story.” To this day, Jemisin said, she still writes fan fiction, and treats it as a way to try out new genres and skills, such as using the second person, which she does in the Broken Earth trilogy, which earned her the three Hugos.
 It’s common for contributors to fan-fiction websites to see their skills develop like this. In these online communities, writers of all ages and skill levels—from adolescents still refining their grammar to professional adult authors such as Jemisin—are learning and teaching others how to write, and write well.

A fan-fiction site is a uniquely energetic learning environment. Unlike in the classroom, where a writing prompt is as likely to be met with groans as with enthusiasm, writers on fan-fiction websites are thrilled to be there, excited to write, and passionate about the material—because it’s based on a book, TV show, movie, video game, or something else they already love. “It’s really clear that if you have a genuine interest and a personal identification with the topic that you’re learning about, your learning is going to be more engaging and, as a result, more successful,” says Katie Davis, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School and a co-founder of its Digital Youth Lab.
Davis, along with her University of Washington colleague Cecilia Aragon, recently spent nine months studying a couple of fan-fiction websites, focusing mostly on young authors writing on fanfiction.net. (Older, more experienced fan-fiction authors tend to prefer the website Archive of Our Own.) They published their observations in a new book called Writers in the Secret Garden, and described their theory that people on these websites are actually teaching one another to write through a kind of sprawling, communal learning that Aragon and Davis call “distributed mentorship.”
Though writers may develop traditional two-person mentor/mentee relationships on fan-fiction websites, the researchers posit that much more often, people are being diffusely mentored by the entire community. An author frequently receives many small pieces of feedback in the form of reviews (sometimes thousands on one story) that are in conversation with one another and that “are cumulatively much greater than the sum of their parts,” Aragon told me.
One example from their book is how commenters responded to a writer’s question about portraying Princess Luna, a villain from the show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. One person wrote: “From the limited amount of stories that I have read, Luna is usually portrayed as a gamer or somewhat out of touch with modern culture.” Then another offered their take on that advice: “While I’m picky about the kind of technology that I would introduce into a story, Luna being behind the times is right on the money.”
These communities also “allow for a lot of different forms of expertise,” says Rebecca Black, an informatics professor at the University of California at Irvine who has studied fan fiction (but who wasn’t involved in Davis and Aragon’s project). “Even if you aren’t the best writer, you might know everything there is to know about a certain character in the series.” People can switch between the roles of teacher and student, depending on their strengths and weaknesses.

Generally, fan-fiction writers’ strengths are effusively celebrated, and any feedback on their weaknesses is very gently conveyed. Reviews of fan fiction are overwhelmingly positive—Aragon and Davis found that out of a sample of 4,500 reviews on fanfiction.net, only 1 percent were what they called “non-constructive negative” reviews, or “flames” (such as: “I never thought that human spawn could create such a horrible piece of crap”).
Tamsyn Muir, a science-fiction writer from New Zealand and the author of the new novel Gideon the Ninth, remembers the reviews on her early fan-fiction stories (parodies of Animorphs and long, gritty tales based on the Final Fantasy video games) as almost entirely positive. “You didn’t have to do that well to get a lot of positive feedback,” she told me. In fact, in her early days of writing and posting fan fiction online, she said, she got only one actual critique. “Somebody had said, ‘I think this story is okay, but it feels a bit template. It just feels like a very generic story.’ I was so angry, because it was the first piece of really constructive criticism.” The anonymous review turned out to be from her brother—after he watched her fume all day, he fessed up. “He was like, ‘I don’t want you getting complacent,’” Muir said.
While it probably takes more than unalloyed positivity to strengthen one’s writing, hearing what readers respond well to is useful for writers, and an outpouring of encouragement may well motivate writers to keep writing, which can only improve their skills. “People often discount the positive feedback, but for a lot of struggling writers and English learners, those copious amounts of positive feedback were really important,” says Black, who has studied how fan fiction helps English learners grow as writers in their new language.
Still, constructive criticism (or “concrit”) is a welcome and integral part of fan-fiction websites (although some writers or communities may specify that they’re not looking for concrit). When fan-fiction reviewers offer a specific critique, they often present it in the middle of a “compliment sandwich,” according to Muir and Black, slipping negative feedback between the bread of effusive praise, and often adding a self-deprecating comment such as “But what do I know?” to soften the blow.
 Aragon and Davis’s research also found that the communal tutoring happening on fan-fiction websites leads to a quantifiable improvement in people’s writing, at least by one metric. They analyzed 61.5 billion words of fan-fiction stories and 6 billion words of reviews from fanfiction.net, tracking the “lexical diversity,” or complexity of vocabulary, of users over time. They discovered that for every 650 reviews writers received, their vocabulary improved as much as if they had aged one year. (The average age of authors in this sample was just under 17, so this may not hold true for older writers—even if they are honing other, more advanced, less measurable skills, such as story structure, pacing, or character development.)

 Summary:
N. K. Jemisin is the only writer to win the prestigious Hugo Award for complementary science fiction or fantasy novel. Jemisin began writing fan fiction, in which the author of a new story is based on existing fiction. "I am miserable and lonely. I don't have many friends, or stress, "he told me. "Around that time my compilation was internetted, and one of the first communities I found was the fan community." Through talking with other writers and writing their own stories about Dragon Ball Z (among other things). "To this day, said Jemisin, he still writes fan fiction, and regards it as a way to try new genres and skills, such as using a second person, which he does in the Broken Earth trilogy, which seeks three Hugos. The fan-fiction site is a learning environment which is energetic and unique.
Katie Davis, a professor at the University of Washington School of Information and co-owner of her Digital Youth Lab. Davis, along with his colleague at the University of Washington, Cecilia Aragon. The writers at Secret Garden, and explaining their theories about the people on this website, communicate with one another. write through a kind of extensive communal learning which Aragon and Davis refer to as "distributed mentors."
Aragon and Davis's research also found communal tutoring that took place on their website. They analyzed 61.5 billion words from fan fiction stories and 6 billion reviewer words from fanfiction.net, searching "lexical diversity," or word complexity, from users over time. . 650,000 received by the author, their vocabulary is higher than the one they received a year.
Anne Jamison, a language professor at the University of Utah who has held fan fiction, sometimes tries to lend lessons when discussing them, both in college and in the compilation she works with younger students. For example, with elementary school students, he found fan fiction to be a way to get them interested in writing.
"The writers we interviewed unanimously and unequivocally communicated their belief that fanfiction had helped them hone their skills," Aragon and Davis wrote in Writers at Secret Garden. Some who support fan fiction have taught them things they couldn't fix at school. And Aragon and Davis think about the distributed facilitation community that exists in fan fiction that is not only useful for increasing comfort. They called DeviantArt (online community for visual artists) and Ravelry (knit website) as a place where supported mentoring could also be developed. "If you have a learning base that is driven by this interest in a supportive community," Davis said, "that collects evolution for everyone."