Inventing a Universe: Reading and Writing Internet Fan Fiction

Inventing a Universe examines the creative and critical writing of an internet fan fiction archive. First, I suggest that persistent theories of fan writing, including the influential notion of fans as "textual poachers," have not adequately made visible the work of reading and writing that goes in at such sites. I reframe internet fan fiction as the work of amateur writers drawing on composition studies work on discourse communities and student writing to offer new ways of reading these texts and textual practices. Second, analyzing the discourse conventions and texts of a particular fan fiction archive, Different Colored Pens, I argue that members of this site share an explicit collaborative project of using fan fiction to help one another improve as readers and writers. This dissertation, which is among the first academic efforts to focus on and analyze fan fiction feedback practices specifically, will contribute to the rich and growing literature on the ways that online communities of amateur writers, including fan fiction writers, collaboratively develop their writing skills

Metaphors we read by: People, process, and fan fiction

New metaphors must be adopted for the writing of fan fiction. Henry Jenkins's metaphor of the textual poacher has achieved tacit acceptance and widespread circulation, suggesting that it has become relatively fixed as a description of fan creative practices among fans as well as in scholarship. Challenges to this model and metaphor are important but have not successfully displaced the prominence of the textual poacher. One promising alternative structure is that of Brownian motion, a scientific concept that both Michel de Certeau and Constance Penley have offered as a metaphor for creativity. Whereas textual poaching offers us a vision of fans as nomads, moving through a place and collecting materials, Brownian motion offers us a vision of fan fiction as world building, a process that remakes the place itself. Metaphors such as Brownian motion do not only offer us a different framework for understanding the creative processes that characterize fan fiction writing; they also remind us to focus on those creative processes themselves, as well as on the fans who engage in them