I’ve always loved to read, whether it’s in-flight airline safety cards to the Sherlock Holmes collection I accidentally left onboard the airplane. Works of classical literature, like The Count of Monte Cristo sit in my room alongside a vast array of Garfield comic books. Reading, no matter what it is, has always been a passion of mine. As a child, I often went too and from the library, stacks of books in my backpack. But, with the advent of the internet–or, more so my gaining access to it via a Kindle (as I’m certainly not old enough to have lived in a time without the World Wide Web and the like)–I discovered something that has remained, to me, special.

In certain recesses of the internet, there is a sea of stories. Stories that are unpolished, unprofessional, flawed in many ways. Despite that, there’s a charm to the amateur; an appeal to the authors whose work is inspired so directly by the work of others. Such is the nature of fan fiction. A genre, community, way of interacting with stories, and many more things besides that I have loved ever since I first discovered it. Fan fiction is the first thing I seriously wrote stories for, though looking back on my old work is quite painful, to say the least. To this day, I still write fan fiction in my free time (and often in my not free time), and still consider it my favorite type of literature.

I still remember how I first stumbled across fan fiction, using the clunky internet search functionality of a third generation Kindle Keyboard, when I was about ten or eleven.

I had finished catching up to the latest chapter of Toaru Majutsu no Index on Baka-Tsuki, a Japanese light novel (Basically a serialized novel, something that has fallen out of style in the west, especially when compared to countries like Korea, China, and Japan.), and wanted more of the world. The characters. Their stories. And so I found Fanfiction.net. And on it, Mr. Question Mark’s A Certain Unknown Level 0.

It was truly one of the best things I’ve ever read. Not from a literary perspective–the language was above average, but nothing special. It didn’t stir the soul with profound musings upon the human condition or anything like that. The word choice was commonplace, and fairly simplistic. But the way it depicted characters that I was familiar with, and a world which I had grown to adore, was so close to the original that I couldn’t help but love it. I read more fan fiction and grew more and more intrigued by the lawless lands of fan fiction. Familiar stories, told in very, very unfamiliar ways. Characters fleshed out beyond what they were in canon, twisted into parodies of themselves, or placed under the microscope of character studies that gave perspectives not seen in canon.

Of course, all of that is mixed in with an ocean of garbage. Poor spelling skills, bad narrative decisions, complete inconsistencies built upon headcanon, stories left unfinished and abandoned. Still, there’s a reason why every TvTropes page for fan fiction recommendations reminds you that the remaining 10% of fan fiction is worth reading, by which it means that the other 90% is crap–a comedic reference to Sturgeon’s Law.

But ignore that. Ignore the bad writing, bad stories, copy-pasted tropes, and over-reliance on in-jokes. Consider reading some fan fiction once in a while. Maybe you’ll get lucky and find the 10% that’s actually worth it. The 10% of fan fiction that, to me, counts as real literature.

Written words are safe bubbles for scared children like I always was.

Especially since there are few escapes for frightened people other than stories. I have been one of them. To us, opening a book has the calculated instability of the ocean’s tide. A sisterly instability, not one filled with harmful chaos. They are similar to the tide in their power- books swell slowly. They will begin and end.

<3

For a person who has never been sure of anything (ever), it’s helpful to know at least this. If you had asked what I wanted to be when I grow up, at age 5 I would’ve said I am going to be a firefighter. At 7 I would definitely be a chef, at 10 obviously a zoologist, at 15 of course a marine biologist, at 19 probably a surgeon. Nothing stayed the same throughout all these years, but if you asked me what I loved I always had the same answer- to create and observe.

Despite many changes in my life plans, it took me a while to digest that I wanted to help, and I wanted to give. I wanted to listen. To squeeze these desires together, I knew that nothing is more human than storytelling. It nurtures what our souls need. To sew together words, and in my case, pray that someone might feel less alone from seeing them.

You gain power on a page. You are heard without shouting. You are understood without explaining.

As a little kid, my parents used to read to me at bedtime every night. I would listen with eager ears as they regaled me with tales of Sam I Am’s enthusiasm for oddly colored foodstuffs and the Goodnight Moon bunny’s adorable bedtime rituals. I memorized every part of the books I was read and would recite them aloud over and over again.

Fast forward a couple of years, and my young imagination was dancing with so many ideas that I just had to write them down. My handwriting was barely legible chicken-scratch so I enlisted the help of my mom, who has beautiful penmanship, and I would dictate to her the contents of my mind. Owing to my obsession with collecting discarded found objects, I built a universe around an anthropomorphic string named Talula that eventually stretched over five very short books.

Next, I discovered poetry. My mom would take me to poetry readings hosted by her many interesting friends and they took me in and mentored me as I tried to write poems for myself. Occasionally, I would read them myself in front of crowded rooms of adults.

I would write as much as I could, about the real and the imaginary and sometimes both blended in very interesting ways. A lot of what ended up on paper was inspired by situations I found myself in. I was ambitious enough to start writing whole books, but none ever got beyond four or five chapters. Most died after one page and were buried in the back of my mind somewhere hidden.

Nowadays, I am trying to master being brief. Gone is the ambition of writing a novel; now is the time for poems and short stories.