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I make my living as a writer, and I do love to write, but I fully admit I enjoy the benefits of money and public attention and esteem I receive for my work. The thing many laypeople don’t understand about fanfiction is its writers’ depth of commitment: fanfiction writers will write hundreds of thousands of words that they put out into the world for free, often under the complete anonymity of a username. And what is Dante’s Inferno but the ultimate self-insert fanfic in which the author gets to spend three books hanging out with his favorite celebrity?) Wide Sargsasso Sea imagines the secret life of Jane Eyre’s mad wife in the attic. Literary darling Ian McEwan’s 14th novel Nutshell is Shakespeare’s Hamlet retold as though Hamlet were an unborn child. (Ironically, as soon as a work reaches a certain level of unimpeachable literary importance, “borrowing” its characters becomes entirely accepted.
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But the strange relationship among Rowell’s books (not to mention their explicitly fanfic-centric plots) force light onto the all-too-fine line that exists between metafiction, so often exalted as high art, and fanfiction, so often dismissed as high art’s downfall. In the literary community, fanfiction is almost uniformly dismissed as frivolous, associated a certain unseriousness that misogynists love to ascribe to teenage girls. And no doubt acquiescing to the character’s popular Jeff Goldblum portrayal in the film adaptation of Jurassic Park, Ian Malcom reappears as a character in Michael Creighton’s The Lost World even though the character had ostensibly died at the end of the previous novel. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle rescued Sherlock Holmes from death (classic fanfiction move) after fan outcry when he moved to retire the character. In short: it’s fanfiction.Īuthors writing fanfiction-esque versions of their own characters isn’t without precedent. It’s Rowell taking the characters that already exist and writing a story using them exactly as she herself wants to tell it. The book isn’t presented as though it was written by Cath, or by Gemma T.
CARRY ON RAINBOW ROWELL ART FULL VERSION
Both begin in media res, as Simon is returning to the Watford School of Magicks for his final year, and both center around a same-sex enemies-to-lovers romance, a favorite among online writers impatient with waiting for mainstream publishing to catch up with the kinds of “shipping” they want.īut Rowell’s Carry On isn’t the full version of the fanfic her character, Cath, wrote. Carry On, the book, does share certain (indelibly “fan-fiction-y”) qualities with Carry On, the fanfiction.