One type of writing I rarely engage with is fanfiction. Even before I had my extensive reading list, when I was more inclined to immerse myself in an extensive series, explore all the works by a single author, and sought out the kinds of stories that had that long-running immersivity, I never really explored fan works. The few times I’ve tried, I’ve found it too difficult to parse the worthwhile pieces from the dross, and since my imagination for what might happen off-page inevitably differs from what others imagine, I was generally disappointed. Nor have I often been tempted to write my own fanfiction – I write to explore my own stories, not someone else’s, and most of what I read does not lend itself, in my opinion, to fanfiction. The notable exceptions would be Star Wars and Star Trek. The latter I find does not lend itself well to the written word. As for Star Wars, well, the idea for Origins arose from discussing Star Wars worldbuilding and story ideas, but it rapidly evolved into something quite distinct.
However, I acknowledge that fanfiction is a significant corpus in which a great many people participate; it has proliferated hugely with the rise of the internet, although attempts to place the origin of fanfiction in the mid-twentieth century neglect a vast literature, possibly including Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I once heard described as “Biblical fanfiction” (and it immediately became one of my favorite sayings). Between the expansion of fanfiction in recent years, and the dominance of remakes, sequels, series, and spinoffs in mainstream content, an old discussion is new again, which is appropriate to the discussion’s theme. Not the age-old “are there new stories to tell” argument, which we have addressed before, but a variation thereon: do people more enjoy stories that are new, or stories that are familiar?
The general consensus, historically, is that readers and viewers tend to prefer a mixture of the familiar and the original, a kind of iterative approach to cultural innovation. Indeed, the notion of culture is arguably meaningless without a certain amount of stability, and the natural human aversion to uncertainty, and the importance of managing expectations, help reinforce a desire for convention. Most analyses of the matter are rooted in mainstream approaches, however, which makes isolating a single factor all but impossible. Studying these matters causally might be impossible, but a recent paper, “Sameness Entices, but Novelty Enchants in Fanfiction Online,” explores a correlational relationship between the enjoyment of a work and the work’s originality through a data analysis of an online fanfiction archive, purporting to prove that, under the listed assumptions and caveats, fanfiction works that are familiar tend to be more popular, but those that are more novel tend to be more thoroughly enjoyed.
As always when examining concepts as nebulous as “enjoyment” and “novelty” in a scientific, data-driven way, there are a number of arguments to be made, including how these terms are defined, how they are measured, and what is actually be reported, but the largest note of caution which I would sound on this paper in particular is the selection bias implicit in examining fanfiction. By its nature as fanfiction, it is logical that it will tend to attract people who are looking for something familiar, and therefore these findings may not be applicable to culture as a whole, only to the subset of culture that engages with fanfiction. After all, those who seek out fanfiction are intentionally seeking out something which is derived from something else, rather than pursuing something new.
Whether or not there is some optimal blend of original and recycled material, themes, and ideas which would be most generally preferable, and which could be derived from data analysis and the scientific method, all authors must wrestle with this balance between original and recycled material. Rather like our discussion of writing, or failing to write, truly alien aliens, a completely novel novel would be all but incomprehensible. Something like All of an Instant tries to edge towards that line as the author struggles to depict something even he cannot fully comprehend, but there are familiar elements, too, and ideas of family, loyalty, defense, strategy, and so forth. Eragon, on the other hand, is basically A New Hope with dragons instead of X-wings, but Paolini’s novel enjoyed massive success because it was, in many cases, an audience’s first introduction to the hero’s journey story archetype.
At the individual level, the extent to which a given person desires and/or seeks originality in storytelling doubtless derives from any number of contextual, experiential, and even neurological factors, like the relative activity of the amygdala. Normally, this would be where I emphasize the importance of treating readers as individuals, not as a group, but since culture is an emergent phenomenon, that is not as valid a warning as usual. Nonetheless, it remains the author’s role to tell the story to the reader, not to the culture, though stories can certainly speak to a culture. One of the marvelous aspects of the written word as it is consumed today is that storytelling becomes an intensely individual experience in a sense, since the story is not being told to a wide audience at once, as an oral storytelling performance might be.
All this scientific and semi-scientific effort to determine an optimal amount of novelty to include in a story is, to my mind, rather beside the point. Including that which is original, or that which is derivative or repetitious, is not done in isolation; it must serve a story purpose. There are roles and appetites for all sorts of books along the spectrum of originality, and the worst mistake an author can make in this respect is probably attempting to find a place along that spectrum deliberately. Injecting novelty for novelty’s sake, or familiarity for familiarity’s sake, will come across as gimmicky and distracting; it must be in service to the story.
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