One of my earliest fannish memories is joining a group of friends for tabletop gaming. I was the only woman present. But we were all nerds, and we'd all shared the experience of having hobbies we loved mocked by others. That particular night, my friends devoted quite a bit of time and energy to mocking something I had just recently come to do and was quickly beginning to love: writing fanfiction. (In fact, I even owned a fanfiction group, although the SWG was still in its infancy.) I remember feeling more shame than offense, and the result of that evening was that some of my favorite people at the time never knew about what quickly became a huge part of my life.

When the internet became widespread (and fanfiction did too), the popular consensus about it was not positive. If your nerdy friends putting down your hobby wasn't enough, you also got to hear authors you respected hold imaginary conversations with you where they concluded that you were a lazy, immoral, perverse thief. In this climate, I did have a defense, however: Before turning to fanfiction, I'd published a couple of short stories and worked as an editor for a couple small-press creative arts journals. I'm not proud that I made these facts known as a way of heading off criticism about my fanfiction (never read by the critic), but I did. I was already a Serious Writer^TM, the assumption went, just using fanfiction to have fun. I was not one of these fanfiction writers who could not craft her own characters and tell a story about them at the same time, like walking and chewing gum, and so had to "steal" the characters of other authors.

The relationship between fanfiction and original fiction is an interesting one. In the 2000s, fanfiction was often depicted as a sort of training exercise to write original fiction. But I was proof that it didn't always work that way, and as time went on and the shame became anger, I came to understand and defend fanfiction as simply another genre, not an entirely different class, of writing.

In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, using Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data, I consider the various ways that writers of Tolkien fanfiction push beyond the borders of Middle-earth: bending the canon, making their own original characters, writing or bringing in elements from other fandoms, and finally, writing original fiction. I wondered what connections, if any, between these various "border-crossing" activities there might be. Is there a "type" of writer, for example, who chafes at the confines of fanfiction and who pushes toward original work? I assumed there would be some connection between various survey items—that authors who write original fiction create original characters more often, for example—but I ended up quite surprised at what I found.

As always, analyzing survey data feels like it begs more questions than it answers. But you can read my first round of analysis here: Beyond Borders: Canon Deviations, Multifandoms, and Original Content.