PAY ATTENTION TO THE STRUCTURE. That’s
one of the first things they teach you when you start
writing for television. If you want to tell a decent story,
you have to be sure of its shape. You have to be deft and
dexterous enough to thread together all the “beats” of the
narrative, weaving character development through plot,
building the tension toward an ending that feels earned.
It’s harder than you might think. It’s also infinitely eas-
ier than trying to impose a meaningful structure on the
frantic tangle of real life.
This is a story about stories—and the way technol-
ogy is changing the scope and structure of the stories
we tell. Right now, in untelevised reality, we are in the
middle of an epic, multiseason struggle over the terri-
tory of the human imagination, over whose stories mat-
ter and why. For me, itstarted with fandom. And if I had
to tell you how fan culture and technology and politics
have threaded together the strands of my small, stained
corner of the 21st-century tapestry, if I had to pick an
opening scene, it would be this:
BEAT ONE
SPRING 1999
A small, dark room at the back of a big, old house. A
door swings shut on the sound of adults shouting, and
an ancient modem wheezes to life. A blue screen illu-
minates the face of a 13-year-old nerd swaddled in
self-important self-loathing and a giant black hoodie.
She looks back to check that nobody’s coming before
she loads up the page she’s looking for. Something pri-
vate, and sweet, and just a little bit filthy.
As an anxious, fidgety, bullied prepubescent, I spent
most of my time reading or watching films. In the ’90s,
though, pop culture was limited. Gay and queer charac-
ters barely existed outside of Will and Grace; girl hobbits
stayed at home in the Shire. So I started to write my own
stories, most of which featured a small, anxious, fidgety,
tragically misunderstood heroine with exciting super-
powers and—most daring of all—friends. Sometimes I’d
make up my own characters; sometimes I’d set stories
in the worlds of my favorite books and shows. The Lord
of the Rings. Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Harry Potter, of course. I didn’t have a word, at first, for
that type of writing. It felt vaguely distasteful, almost
shameful, as if I were tampering where I didn’t belong.
When the internet finally arrived in our house in the
south of England, I discovered I wasn’t the only one
sneaking about in other people’s copyrighted works.
Somewhere out there were people like me, scribbling
passive-aggressive notes in the margins of the scripts
they’d been given for their lives. They had a name for it
too. They called it fan fiction.
Fan fiction is, in a way,as old as literature itself. Para-
dise Lost was biblical fanfic; Dante’s Inferno may well be
the first self-insert fan story to make it into the Western
canon. The Baker Street Irregulars, the original Sher-
lock Holmes fan society, was established in New York
85 years ago. The first real “slash fiction”—the frenzied
cult of homoerotic Kirk/Spock smut—emerged from Star