Barb Cummings can't remember why she didn't start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it first aired. But after three years, friends who had been pestering her to tune in brought over some tapes and forced her to sit through them. She was immediately hooked. Now, four years later, she finds herself in the midst of her second novel based on the show, and is widely recognized as one of Buffy's best fan authors.
Fan authors? To many people, the idea that someone would spend between seven and 15 hours a week producing a book based on someone else's characters -- a book sure to be denounced by publishers and ignored by the entertainment industry -- seems preposterous. The stigma associated with being a fan, especially a science fiction or fantasy fan, aids and abets this notion. Fans are often caricatured as raving lunatics who live in an alternate universe, stalking the stars of their favorite show, or as losers who spend all day in front of the television. But like people who spend hours tinkering with their imaginary line-ups in fantasy baseball leagues, or linguists who try to derive grammatical rules for J.R.R. Tolkein's made-up languages, this form of fiction suggests that fans aren't merely passive recipients of whatever mass culture has to throw at them.
It's impossible to know when exactly the first fan story was written. People reportedly wrote their own Sherlock Holmes mysteries and chapters to Charles Dickens' novels in the late 19th century, but Star Trek is considered the beginning of the current phenomenon. Roughly a year after the show premiered in 1966, the first story written by a fan -- set in the show's universe and using its characters -- appeared. It was the first of many. Authored primarily by straight women and notorious for their depiction of explicit romantic scenarios between Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock, the Star Trek fan stories were distributed through photocopied zines, which were mailed out or given away at conventions.
Barb Cummings first encountered fan fiction in a book about Star Trek in the late 1970s, and even wrote some in the early 1980s (based on the comic book, Elf Quest). By the late 1980s, fans were writing stories set in the worlds of such diverse shows as Battlestar Galactica, Miami Vice and Starsky and Hutch. Today, fan fiction has spread to all facets of popular culture and has drawn on Jane Austen, Harry Potter and The Backstreet Boys, among others. But TV -- and particularly science fiction and fantasy shows -- remains its ground zero.
With the birth of the Internet in the early 1990s, fan fiction moved primarily to the Web. A Google search reveals 148 X-Files fan fiction archives, 70 Buffy archives and 75 Star Trek archives, some of them containing thousands of stories. The world comes complete with online writers' workshops, awards and guides to the best stories. All in all, fan fiction runs the gamut, from stories written through the eyes of a character invented by the writer, to stories that combine the universes of different shows (sometimes as extreme as merging Friends and The X-Files), to stories that might as well be episodes for the show in question.
There tends to be a lot of similarity among fan fictions, no matter which shows they're actually about. (One recurring theme is sexual tension, be it between Kirk and Spock, the X-Files' Agents Mulder and Scully, or Buffy's titular heroine and Spike). When it comes to prose, fan fiction also tends to be straightforward and plot-driven, without a lot of flash or unnecessary frills. In general, it reads a lot more like the work of Michael Crichton than that of Charles Dickens.
For Cummings, the decision to write fan fiction was simple: She wanted episodes faster than the creators could put them out. Plus, she says, the Buffy character Spike "invaded my brain, started talking and wouldn't shut up." Cummings started her first Buffy novel, A Raising in the Sun, in 2001, during the summer hiatus between the show's fifth and sixth seasons. In the fifth season's finale, Buffy had died saving her sister's life. With this cliffhanger ending to fuel her imagination, Cummings thought to herself, "If I were going to bring Buffy back from the dead, how would I do it?" The answer came 119 pages later. The show's creators also brought Buffy back from the dead at the beginning of the sixth season, but Cummings found their version dull and unconvincing. Thus she began her second novel, Necessary Evils, to pick up where the first left off, and she has currently completed and posted 27 out of an estimated 32 chapters of it. So far it's approximately 300 pages long.
Cummings' work is compelling, but a little overwhelming. In Necessary Evil, for instance, she developed major subplots for each of the 10 primary and supporting characters. The plot is thus unnecessarily complex, and it's difficult to keep track of the central plot's elaborate twists and turns, let alone the various story arcs for the characters. The narrative is at times repetitious. Buffy agonizes over her decision to date Spike throughout the entire novel, and it feels as if the reader is privy to details of her every internal debate, though in reality each debate is hardly different from the last.
Cummings uses the show as a jumping-off point, allowing it to guide her and push her toward issues she needs to address in her novels. For instance, when Buffy returns from the dead she faces monetary problems (both on the show and in Cummings' novel). The show had Buffy bouncing between dead-end jobs, trying to make ends meet. Cummings, however, found this approach boring and created a subplot that involves Buffy entering into a showdown with the Council (a group that monitors vampire activity and oversees the slayer), demanding that she get paid for her slaying.
The aspect of Cummings' work that most deviates from the show, however, is her treatment of the relationship between Spike and Buffy. Cummings finds the idea that Buffy could love Spike, despite the fact that he is a vampire who has killed thousands of people, more interesting and truer to character than the show's producers' handling of the relationship (which involved Buffy summarily dismissing the notion of falling in love with Spike because it was morally wrong).
On one level, it may be easy to dismiss fan fiction as the work of creepy and obsessive fans who are unable to function without their favorite television show, and many fan fiction stories can validate this thought. Certainly scores of the stories -- such as the various accounts of Spike and Buffy watching a video that leads to their first kiss (the subject of "Alane's" When Spike Met Buffy) -- are mind-numbingly boring. Other stories, such as "Lucey's" Have You Ever or 1001 Reasons to Dump Riley Finn, are so poorly written that they can be excruciating to try to get through. Indeed, one reader even quipped that the key to a good fan fiction story is "spell check, spell check, spell check."
Moreover, on its face the very idea of fan fiction is lazy: using other people's characters in other people's worlds. Cummings herself admits she was only able to finish one or two of her "original" stories.
These criticisms, however, fail to see fan fiction in a larger context. Its writers are making pop culture do what they want it to do. They are turning it into Silly Putty, bending and shaping it to their desires and beliefs. If fan fiction writers don't like how a show's creators handle a plotline or develop a character, they change it. And by blurring the lines between creator and fan -- passive and active, professional and amateur -- such writers are inevitably changing what it means to be a fan.
