Musings from a Retired Fanfiction Writer
At thirteen years old, I was at my literary prime. Weekly, I found myself situated in the living room, small body on a large, faux-leather IKEA chair and eyes fixated on the bright family-computer screen. It was Thursday and the update to my story was due this weekend, which meant I desperately needed to get some writing done. With a thesaurus tab acting as my only steady source of companionship, I would sit there for hours on end, writing the chapter of my latest work of fanfiction.
After concluding the week’s chapter with an author’s note (always something like: omg soooo sorry for the late update you guys! i had so much homework to do so this probably sucks. but i hope u like it!), some edits here and there, glances to the back to make sure that none of my family’s prying eyes would capture a glimpse of what I had been up to, my mouse would hover over the ‘publish’ button before clicking it. It would only be a matter of seconds until my notification bar is hoarded with updates: thousands of likes, comments, and reads come into view. I would lean back against the faux-leather, examining the analytics carefully.
I was thirteen years old when I hit 6.4 million reads on this particular work of fanfiction—a 5 Seconds of Summer slice-of-life type tale—with my competition being the likes of the 5SOS fic Fall or the infamous Harry Styles fic After (which were arguably far more socially relevant, but companions in the literary sphere nevertheless). I was receiving thousands of messages a day from individuals who thought my work was mind-blowing, who wanted to translate it into their native languages, or who wanted to start fan clubs and host meet and greets, all in celebration of the story I had written. I even got a few comments from people asking me to step on their necks or run them over with a truck—arguably the only true measure of success in the world and culture of celebrity reverence. I was thirteen, bright-eyed, and felt capable of absolutely everything.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
This is not to say that I had logged onto Wattpad one day and amassed thousands of admirers; my very first story on the site was published at least a year before and had garnered a meager 73 reads, most of which from close friends I had coerced into reading. Another portion came from the dozens of fake accounts I was making, masking myself as a reader; I was so committed to my roles in these fake accounts, I would even leave myself hate comments just to avoid any suspicion. I wrote story after story, edited day in and day out, and made bonds with writers from all sorts of fandoms and backgrounds until slowly, I attained some kind of mainstream success on the site.
Retrospectively, I think about the bizarre nature of being thirteen and surrounded by a buzz with a magnitude I have never come close to ever since, one I never fully comprehended at the time. As far as I knew, it was just me and the lagging Mac against the tides of the world—the buzz of 6.4 million felt like a mere illusion, a distant image from a different reality. Perhaps it was because my priorities were solely concentrated towards the act of storytelling or perhaps it was my teenage naivety (or was it wisdom?), but the expectations of millions did little to sway my writing or direction. Even with an audience of that size, my process of writing was as intimate as it could be. I was writing my boyband fanfictions for no one else but me.
The paradox inherent to writing for yourself with the spectating digital gaze of millions about the dazzling orbs and bewitching smiles of the boys I stanned is magnified even further by the fact that I was vigorously dedicated to being totally anonymous. Other than a handful of details—my name and where I was from—I obsessively shrouded everything about myself. My relationship with privacy had been planted on my behalf for all my life—to be an Arab girl is to be private, to hide, to make sure nothing pokes out. Shame is your perpetual birthright, and it extends to every aspect of your being. In an attempt to mitigate the possibility of this contaminating my writing sphere, I was anonymous. And I thrived in this privacy, in this creation of a self that was vibrant and spirited, that garnered the attention of millions and wasn’t shaken. Everything about my veiled online existence heightened the intimacy of my experience on that website—I was as deliciously self-indulgent as I could be because no one knew that my stories emerged from my small body.
My promising fanfiction career came to a halt not out of lack of inspiration or a dying readership—I was arguably at my peak when it all began to rupture—but because I was hardly as secretive or enigmatic as I hoped to be. On a bright day in the schoolyard, I was seated on a bench instead of my leather chair with two classmates. The subject of fanfiction was brought up for reasons I can’t remember but in retrospect, most likely as bait, and the girl facing me, pig-tailed and bespectacled, asked if we read any. I shrugged and kept mostly to myself until she asked me about the fanfic that she, and what seemed like the entire school, knew I was writing. I remember being so horrified, the first thing I did when I came home was delete the fanfic from the website, desperately hoping to eviscerate any evidence or memory of my digital persona.
A month after deleting the story, I regretted it so deeply that I wrote an extensive email to Wattpad asking if they could somehow bring it back. They answered in less than a week and magically dug it out of their extensive databases. The story was brought back to the site with its stats maintained like nothing had happened, like nothing was destroyed. I continued publishing chapters but it never felt quite the same anymore; the thrill that consumed me on that too-big leather chair dissipated by the day. With each letter I wrote on the screen, all I could think of was how it was going to be received by people who knew me in the physical world. What had once brought me a semblance of freedom felt like just another space that could never truly be my own, another boundary that had been pushed by those around me. Eventually, weekends between updates became months until I stopped writing completely.
Eight years later, my most popular piece of literature to date is still up on the web. It’s still ranked on the site. Sometimes, I would lean over to my phone anticipating a text from a loved one when it buzzes with a notification, but would instead be greeted with a Gmail icon and the words “New comment on [fanfiction title]” displayed on my screen. Vaguely, I even remember digging through my inbox months after I stopped writing the story to find an email from Wattpad asking if I wanted to sign with them to get paid for the work I was publishing. Sometimes, I half-jokingly imagine what my world would have looked like if I had capitalized off of my Wattpad success, if I had shaped it into an attempt at a writing career at large, and—more seriously—if I hadn’t been so afraid of those around me being aware of a facet of my existence. What kind of writer would I now be? Would I still be so afraid of the prying eyes of those around me?
Words: Fatima AlJarman
