rosa_acicularis | the real jamie would slap your face. or not, because he's fictional too.

Your result for The Fan Fiction Personality Test...

The Mindgamer

Everything is possible, nothing is ever really over.

Fanfiction is a creative outlet for you. You don't intentionally write it, it just happens. You find inspiration in several fandoms, but are not obsessed with only one.

You like to explore "what if" situations. What if this character had never made this very choice? What if this event had taken place sooner, never, elsewhere? What if these people had never met?

You are likely to write Alternative Universes, fan seasons or sequels and just follow your (sometimes pretty strange) plot bunnies.

Take The Fan Fiction Personality Test at OkCupid

Doesn't sound like me at all. Except for the parts that sort of do.

Also, speaking of fic -- I've been thinking a lot about this Diana Gabaldon kerfuffle, and I admit that it's been bothering me a bit. Now, the only fandoms I've ever written anything at all for are Who (obviously), West Wing, Star Trek, and Merlin, and of those West Wing is the only text that isn't pretty much a form of fan fiction itself. And while I can't really imagine Russell T. Davies waking up one morning and announcing that fic writers are perverts who need to get their dirty pervert hands off his precious creations (who are, of course, like his children, despite the fact that they are fictional and thus, you know, not really like that at all) I still find all this a bit troubling.

I love fan fic -- I love reading it, and I love writing it. And when I read that Gabaldon post, and the George R.R. Martin one that followed it, I immediately felt the need to defend this world of fandom and fan fiction which has become such a part of my formation as a writer. Then I read Michael Chabon's essay about Sherlock Holmes in his book Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, and decided to just point to it and say, THIS. THIS IS WHY THE WRONG LADY IS WRONG. He wrote:

All enduring popular literature has this open-ended quality, and extends this invitation to the reader to continue, on his or her own, with the adventure. Through a combination of trompe l'oeil allusions, of imaginative persistence of vision, it creates a sense of an infinite horizon of play, an endless game board; it spawns, without trying, a thousand sequels, diagrams, and Web sites...

And yet there is a degree to which, just as all criticism is in essence Sherlockian, all literature, highbrow or low, from the Aeneid onward, is fan fiction. That is why Harold Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence has always rung so hollow to me. Through parody and pastiche, allusion and homage, retelling and reimagining the stories that were told before us and that we have come of age loving -- amateurs -- we proceed, seeking out the blank places in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers -- should we be lucky enough to find any -- some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken in the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

Ha. Suck on that, Bloom.

Also, Ms. Gabaldon: it's immature, but it has to be said -- I don't think people should be writing fic for your books either. They're pretty lame.