When I was 10 years old, my interest in literature was limited to the scant speech texts in Manga. For my age, my composition skills were adequate and my aversion to reading books never seemed to interfere with my academic performance. Yet, there was an obvious problem: I was nearly a decade old and had read perhaps only a handful of chapter books.
Around this time, cults of Internet fans — called “fandoms” — were planting their roots in platforms ranging from YouTube to LiveJournal to deviantART. I was among the many children who registered on these websites with tacky usernames and poorly edited GIF icons because, while my love for "Naruto" may have interfered with my popularity at school, it became a way for me to engage with kids across the world who shared my interests.
Through my dedication to the fandoms I held dear, I discovered the world of fan fiction. Unlike the books I had access to at school, these fan written pieces engaged me with characters I already identified with and understood. Whenever I read fan fiction, I did not feel the same discomfort I felt when I struggled toward the 10th page of an unfamiliar story. The disconnection between my mind and the text was bridged by the accessibility of works featuring my favorite characters and genres.
Within months of discovering this outlet, the once tiresome bus ride home from school became filled with anticipation for what I would read next. And when I discovered that there were some ideas that had remained untouched, I imagined the possibilities for different character interactions, researched various settings and plot devices and started to develop my own pieces. While there is no doubt that the stories I produced were terribly written, the very act of writing every day created a critical juncture in my life where my writing and comprehension skills improved vastly.
For many, the phrase “fan fiction” calls thoughts of grammatically inaccurate short stories with egregious distortions of beloved books and TV series. To some extent, this is true. I have contributed a number of stories that fell short of decent and read many more. Even so, this does not undermine its significance as an activity. In my poorly funded elementary school, there was no wealth of teachers interested in doing more than the bare minimum, and my struggling parents had neither the time nor the money to stick me in afterschool lessons. Fan fiction, for me, was a bonafide hobby and a path to cultivating a useful talent.
Now that nearly a decade has passed, I am considerably more occupied by responsibility, but I am still an adamant consumer of fan fiction. When spare time presents itself, I anxiously seek out my favorite stories to see if the authors have updated them, and when I have a lot of spare time, I search for new ones. The content I read has changed and I hold writers to a higher standard than I did before, but every time I stumble across a dreadfully pre-pubescent Snarry smut fic, I smile and hope the author can find the same meaning in fan fiction that I once did.
