An article about Fanfiction this time, the joys and horrors... A really good read actually...
It was Christmas at Hogwarts, and Dobby the House-Elf was more excited than Harry had ever seen him. More excited, even, than when he had first been granted his freedom.
"Six socks! Six socks, Harry Potter!" Dobby piped in his loudest whisper. "Six socks, six socks!" he sang. With five long rugby socks on one foot, and three overlapping on the other, and one long dangly sock on either of his long dangly ears, Dobby capered wildly from foot to foot in the shredded remains of the wrapping paper from which the six new additions to his collection had emerged.
I settled into my chair. I was getting quite absorbed by this. What would happen next?
Eventually, excitement, and his inability to feel the floor through his thick, uneven woollen club feet, got the better of Dobby, and he pitched forward into the fire that was roaring in the dormitory hearth, scattering chestnuts everywhere.
"Waarrrgh! Dobby is on fire, Harry Potter!" he screamed. "Dobby's head is on fire, Harry Potter! Oh, Harry Potter, it hurtsithurtsithurts! Oh, help, Harry Potter! All Dobby's socks will be ruined!"
Dobby tried to lift himself out of the fire, but he tripped as the hot chestnuts underfoot rolled away, and fell face-first back in among the kindling. By now, his right ear, crisping up nicely, was starting to show through the charred tatters of the rugby sock which he had put on - needlessly, now - to keep his ears warm.
Has dear old JK Rowling discovered in herself a hitherto unimagined streak of sadism? Has The Telegraph, in defiance of the majesty of the law of copyright and the monstrous anger of Bloomsbury, obtained an extract from a closely guarded sixth book: Harry Potter and the Slaughter of the Innocents? No such luck. The above mixture of juvenility and nastiness is all my own - an early attempt at writing what aficionados call "fanfic".
Fan fiction is an internet craze probably invisible to the average adult reader of this newspaper, but which has millions of people in its grip. It's responsible for billions of words of prose, poems and plays - some of which, like my own, are just plain silly. Many are barely literate. A fair few are pornographic.
Others are impassioned, well-written, slow-wrought works of the imagination. So if your 16-year-old spends all day locked in his room playing on the internet, he's not necessarily surfing for pornography. That might, in fact, be a metaphor you can hear him polishing.
The idea is this: you take the characters and situations from a play, film, television series, comic or even - whisper it - book, and write your own story about them. It might be a fourth book of Lord of the Rings, a quidditch match in which Hufflepuff wins, a Buffy episode in which the Slayer falls into the Hellmouth or - if you are my brilliant colleague A N Wilson - a novel in the style of Ivy Compton-Burnett.
This is not to be mocked. What is Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys's novel about the first Mrs Rochester - but a bit of fan fiction? Fanfic isn't just an internet phenomenon, but the internet has democratised it.
And how. The Big Read might have encouraged people to watch telly and, a few of them, to read fiction. But fan fiction must be considered a self-starting, celebrity-free Big Write. And not only are these people writing imaginative stories, they are also encouraging each other to post reviews of their work alongside them on the net. The standard review takes the form of a few lines - i.e.: "I really enjoyed this: when will you be posting the next chapter?"
Well, why not, I thought, when I first heard about the phenomenon from a colleague whose 14-year-old daughter has written a Harry Potter novel and posted it online. I always wanted to be a writer - here's my chance.
The set-up is simple. You visit one of the sites that hosts fan fiction (I went to www.fanfiction.net). You sign up, giving yourself a nom de plume (in honour of a friend who writes for The Spectator, I chose "The Questing Vole") and a password. And then you start uploading your stories and hoping for reviews. Readers can browse an enormous archive of stories, many of them the size of a long book.
Even on Christmas day, when I last checked the "Just In" board, the fictioneers weren't taking a break. There was Kashiichan's "Not Just A Massage", a Digimon fanfic. There were some seasonal jollies at South Park. There was Oriana47's romance story based on the sitcom That 70s Show. And a smattering of the flavours of the month - Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
Fanfiction.net is essentially self-policing and includes a set of sensible guidelines: you're expected to give your work a certificate, and nothing X-rated is allowed. You're asked, quite firmly, to do your readers the courtesy of spell-checking your work, and so on. The members of this sprawling literary community seem, in the main, to observe the rules with some seriousness.
Of course, the characters and settings for almost all fan fiction remain in copyright. The site, therefore, carries prominent disclaimers. In most cases, this seems to suffice
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