The Door

So you've come across this little corner of mine, which means somebody, somewhere, has said the word "fanfiction" to you and you've nodded along politely while having absolutely no idea what they meant. Don't worry. I didn't know either, once. Then I fell down a hole, and now I'm on the other side, and I'm going to tell you everything you need to know about this enormous, weird, slightly alarming world — because I promise you, you've been sharing a planet with these people your whole life and you've never once noticed.

Let me give you the map, because it's much simpler than it looks, and it all comes down to two completely different kinds of people that everyone keeps muddling up.

First, there are the writers. The authors. And every single one of them has their own reasons for being on the road. Some of them are lonely. Some of them are genuinely, dazzlingly talented. Some of them are both, and don't know how to speak to a real person, so they speak to characters instead. Some of them are just, plainly, horny. Some of them want to be loved. Some of them are trying to fix a story that ended the wrong way and has haunted them ever since. And some of them are writing for the one single person who will ever truly understand them — a person they'll never meet — and they keep going anyway, because the writing is the only place they feel real. These are the writers. They are not doing it for you. They are doing it for themselves. That's the first law of this world: a writer is never on the road for the passengers.

And then there are the readers. The fans. And this is the tribe I'm actually interested in, because this is where it gets delicious.

The readers are not writing anything. They are not creating anything. They are not even on the road. They are hitching a ride. They climb aboard a journey somebody else built, somebody else is driving, somebody else is fuelling with their own heart, and they sit in the back. And here's the beautiful, absurd part — there are hundreds of buses, all going hundreds of different places, and the reader gets to choose. They pick the bus. They pick the route. They pick exactly how far down the road they want to go. They get on the bus marked "two people who despise each other, slowly, agonisingly falling in love over two hundred chapters," and they ride it for as long as it pleases them. They get off. They get on another one, headed for "everyone ends up happy and nothing bad ever happens," and they sit on that one for a while. They are the most entitled commuters in the world, because they choose the whole journey and never once have to touch the steering wheel.

The writers are the drivers, with their own engines and their own reasons and their own private destinations. The readers are the passengers, and they got on board because a driver managed to reach something in them — a need, a want, a little tingle of something they've been carrying around and never knew where to put. The driver knew how to touch it. The reader felt it. And now the reader is hooked — and the passenger will never, ever admit they're just along for the ride. They have opinions. They have requirements. They have a full checklist for a journey they're not even driving. They ride a bus they don't own, and they behave like they own the company.

And the drivers — the lonely, gifted, slightly unhinged people who built the whole thing — they sit up front, pouring their hearts into the road, and every so often a voice from the back pipes up: "hmm, I think you should have gone left there." And they love it, because they're lonely, so they take the notes.

I've gathered some voices for you. Over the coming pages they're going to take this tribe apart, one by one, each of them trying to outdo the last. That's the nature of a suite like this. They're going to be rather less gentle with me than I'm being now.

But for now, you know who's driving, and you know who's along for the ride.

We're going to take the passengers apart, piece by piece. And I'm going to enjoy every second of it.