Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey (29 page)

“The Submissive” was the well-known BDSM romance that rose in popularity before MotU was first posted. Edward is an emotionally damaged, wildly successful, piano-playing
corporate executive Dom; Bella is a librarian and a willing, eager, but inexperienced sub. They have secrets: the secrets are feelings. Can a Domward love Subbella and continue to pursue the lifestyle they both want? Can BDSM, a relationship based on trust and honesty, fail to hurt in the decidedly wrong way when partners hide their true feelings and motivations? Can Bella help heal damaged Domward to love? And, crucially, can she overcome his anxiety about her diet for long enough to seduce him by brushing against him while cooking? Of course it all sounds familiar. It’s
fanfiction
.

When
I
started reading MotU, I immediately recognized elements of Stephenie Meyer’s Edward-point-of-view
Midnight Sun
fragment (posted on her website)
and
of the parody “Midnight Desire” by Twilightzoner, in which Edward’s shocking monster is nothing more than a healthy teenage boy’s libido—which nonetheless soon takes on a life of its own as a character, cheering complete with pom-poms when it seems that Edward might finally get laid. MotU had reversed the dynamics so that Bella, rather than Edward, was arguing with her inner monster, or her “inner goddess,” a more adventurous (if strangely detachable) sex drive than she could acknowledge as fully a part of her. When seen as a gender reversal of teen Edward’s lack of sexual self-awareness, Bella’s naiveté takes on a different tone. In their fanfiction context, the “inner goddess” dialogues worked well as a parody of two distinct, known quantities, the kind of inside joke with which fanfiction rewards dedicated “inside” readers.

It wasn’t just plot points, settings, or scenes from other fanfiction that Snowqueens Icedragon built on. It was also strategy. By many accounts, for example, “The Office” was one of the stories to really spur Twific’s departure from “canon” characterizations and story lines. Angstgoddess’ “Wide Awake” (Snowqueens Icedragon claims to have spent sixty pounds sterling downloading it to her phone in Spain) was another—likely still the most universally admired story in the fandom. There, both characters have suffered childhood traumas, and will go to any measures
to avoid sleep and its nightmares, a reimagining of canon-Edward’s vampiric sleeplessness. In “The Office,” however, the narrative was driven by the (all human, nonsparkling, sexually voracious and adventurous) characters’ sex lives. Sex wasn’t an embellishment or endgame; it
was
the story. On the other hand, there
was
still a story; it wasn’t what fandom calls “PWP” (“Porn without Plot” or “Plot? What Plot?”). Before “The Office,” Twilight fan writing had often explored the Twilight characters’ sex lives, following the well-established “missing scenes” or “continuation” fanfiction tradition. After “The Office” (and a few other stories that were subsequently published by the fandom-derived Omnific publishing venture), canon and vampire stories experienced a drop-off in popularity. Twilight itself soon contributed little more than a paradigm for some of the most popular fanfictions, offering a basic plot trajectory and characterizations along with a ready-made cast to be manipulated onto porn images, transformed into electronic banners and icons, or montaged onto videos. These evolutions in Twilight fanfiction paved the way for both MotU and its reframing as “original,” by which, here, I mean copyrightable.

It was quickly clear to my students that most of the fanfiction we read was at least as “original” as much published work, and very often more so. Yes, certain characterizations and outcomes were given, but their paths could be extremely varied, more full of surprises than traditional novelistic structure allows. Nonetheless, most of the fan writers we talked with assumed that their work, however different from its source, could not stand on its own. It appeared, after all, on a Twilight fanfiction board, usually with a disclaimer and a firm statement of its amateur, nonprofit status. It was not original by definition.

Many of these writers also understood the work’s nonautonomy as key to another way writing fanfiction differs from the “original” model of a writer alone with a blank page (or screen). Jane Austen read aloud to her family in the evenings, of course; the Brontës shared with each other. But an audience of friends,
family, even editors, is not quite the same as an anonymous target audience of thousands of active, and interactive, readers.

In fanfiction, this interaction can get quite elaborate. On some sites—including Twilighted, one fanfiction archive where MotU was hosted—authors hold court after publishing a chapter, engaging and chatting with fans, taking suggestions, sharing jokes, and, in the case of Snowqueens Icedragon, virtual Oyster Bay Chardonnay. I was taken with her sometimes funny and desperate pleas about narrative pacing:
How do I move time forward?
On other social media platforms, fan authors answer questions—sometimes as their characters. Also, many stories have editors (betas)—Twilighted had its own team of (volunteer) editors, and authors given permission to post there were required to use them, although big stories that drove traffic to the site (MotU was one) could choose to ignore their suggestions.

Even with a good critique group, no novelist gets a cheering squad quite like this while the work is in progress. And it’s not just cheers or even jeers: it’s illustrations, contests where fans can campaign and vote for stories, promotional videos, posts on review and recommendation sites—all in exchange for stories given freely. Most fan writers will tell you that this kind of interaction is what fanfiction is about. Writing a novel, on the other hand, is largely a lonely business.

Then, too, it’s not just the writing that’s collective, it’s the reading. My students and I read ten different Bellas, ten different Edwards, all the same and all different, encountering ten different iterations of the same problems and issues—distinctive, but not quite distinct. It was a big narrative conversation. The authors talked to us—they were happy to! And then the
names
. How much does it change things that these related characters all have the same names and undergo such similar trajectories? No matter how many times you read
Pride and Prejudice
, Darcy’s still Darcy, and very different from Mr. Knightley in
Emma
. It would be weird to talk about “that Darcy” from “the one where Elizabeth’s father was sickly.” It would be strange to think of
Mr. Woodhouse as a revision of the caustic Mr. Bennet. Names mattered more than we thought, going in. For the most part, E. L. James just changed the names to create Fifty Shades, and it does, indeed, make for a very different reading experience.

In terms of our initial course questions, students found that Twific operated as genre in the broad sense: a category or kind of romance narrative, an obsessive love story that evolves across a literalized power gradient. At times, however, it seemed Twifics were at once too similar (the names, the plot structure) and too disparate (so many different settings! So many different traumas!) to function as genre in exactly the way genre fiction traditionally has, although reading so many fics in close succession felt closer to reading extensively in a single genre than any other reading experience we could think of. More broadly, though, my students also felt that fanfiction puts a kind of microscope to the way fiction works—genre fiction certainly, but not only genre fiction. Our studies served as a reminder that novels and characters are always in conversation with one another. Read in its context, among systems of stories, fanfiction “lays bare the device,” as Russian formalists aspired to do to literature, revealing narrative and character as a cobbled-together patchworks of preceding traits, stories, and styles. Our notions of originality and autonomy in fact are relatively recent, tied to the ability to profit from our writerly labor, which is tied, in turn, to the rise of mass literacy and the technology of print. Fanfiction muddies the system by offering labor and its products freely given—but to a mass audience. Fanfiction is fiction with its seams showing, its threads becoming “original” only when authors successfully lay claim to them, as E. L. James has, in print.

MARC SHAPIRO

O
KAY. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. E. L. James is indeed all that.

She’s literature’s White Knight. Her Excalibur is called Fifty Shades. Her books,
Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker
, and
Fifty Shades Freed
get people hot and bothered. The exploits of Christian and Anastasia are all in our faces. Those enticing book covers are everywhere we look.

And on just about everything.

Because
Fifty Shades of Grey
is pop culture personified. You don’t fight it as much as you ride it out until the next big thing comes along. In literature, we’ve seen it before: J.K. Rowling, Stephenie Meyer. They’ve had their day and, while far from dead and buried, they’ve gone the way of
what have you done for me lately?

Now it’s E. L. James’ turn.

And as expected, there’s a lot to go around, because Fifty Shades and E. L. James are like blood in the water for people who live and die by the next big thing. The interest is not so much about the relative merits of Fifty Shades’ odyssey as it is about what that odyssey means. And the pundits are having a field day with the notion of the books as a lightning rod for the new erotica and the middle-aged woman who’s gotta have it. You can almost hear the heavy breathing coming from the enterprising journalist who coined the phrase “mommy porn.”

Not too far behind is the breathless examination of the dollars and cents of it all and what E. L. James means to an industry that has, admittedly, seen better days. The skinny is that the formerly bastard stepchild known as fanfiction has suddenly taken on an air of respectability, and the marginal world of e-book erotica is the new minor leagues for the major league publishers beating the bushes for a proven track record to bring up to the bigs.

But on a deeper, personal, and ultimately more important level—women of all ages are talking openly about sex. Many are blushing but they are definitely talking.

However, what is being studiously avoided in the rush to canonize E. L. James is that Fifty Shades has become a cash cow. You can find the brand just about anywhere and in any form. Take the books for example.

If you’re an erotic reader of a certain age, you’re well aware of what were known in the trade as “fuck books” whose heyday ran from the ’50s to the ’70s. Simple line drawing covers, crude and rude titles, pages upon pages of hard-core and extremely raw sex buttressed by a simpleton story. Traveling salesman knocks on the door. Woman lets him in, they have rough sex for what seems like an eternity. It was the
War and Peace
of its day for the genre. You could find them in most book and magazine shops on both the good and bad sides of town. The key to this kingdom was that you had to be twenty-one to go into the section with the “dirty books.”

But society has put lipstick on the Fifty Shades brand and that respectability has translated into point of purchase targeting where these mommies live. Walk into any supermarket or warehouse store whose name is ten letters or less and you won’t have to look far for a stack of Fifty Shades, rising phallic out of the floor on aisle four, a mere spitting distance from the creamed corn. Go in for steak and come out with the sizzle. It’s all too spot on and perfect.

Booksellers who, in the old days, would walk on the other side of the street to avoid acknowledging the form are now courting erotica as if it were the second coming. Those coveted front-of-the-store tables and end-of-the-aisle endcaps, primarily reserved for the latest offerings by “branded” bestselling authors or the hot “serious literature,” are now stacked to overflowing with the Fifty Shades trilogy. And who’s to blame booksellers for changing their tune? There are light bills to pay and doors to keep open at a time when, sadly, brick-and-mortar bookstores are dropping like flies. In the immortal words of the bard, “Money talks.”

Librarians have raised the expected stink and a few have made token attempts at banning the books outright. But patron demand soon had them falling in line.

So much for the source material. Here come the moneybags that are inevitably late for the dance. Movie rights? No biggie there. You knew that was coming. Hell, there’s already a soundtrack of Christian Grey’s favorite tunes to spice up the aural centers. Notice I said aural and not … well, you get the picture. Been to a mall department store lately? It’s like a journey into Christian Grey’s Red Room of Pain. The lingerie, Christian Grey–style boxers, T-shirts with pithy come-hither slogans, caps, journals … don’t forget the pink furry handcuffs. They’re all emblazoned with a variation on the Fifty Shades logo.

And this is just the authorized stuff that lawyers signed off on, where major money was exchanged.

Further down the evolutionary trail of cashing in is the fringe market. Unofficial Fifty Shades books (lifestyle guides that will
spend 50,000 words telling you what you already know) and graphic novels, knock-off erotic novels reconfigured to reflect the Fifty Shades lifestyle. Adult shops catering to the hardware of kinky sex are noticing an increase in the sales of whips, handcuffs, and restraints. Some enterprising erotic outlets are reporting big attendance at hastily formed couples therapy/sex workshops.

You get the picture. Who knew that a pop culture phenomenon, chopped and channeled for mass consumption, could be so laughable? But this is what happens when one writer sits down and comes up with the most brilliant idea on the planet. At least for the moment.

Because the ball is now in E. L. James’ court. Continue to write the books that are making millions of women sing and you’re locked in for the hall of fame. Rest on your laurels and pocketbook? You, too, could be a trivia question of the future.

Mercenary? More likely just good business. Cynical? Sure.
Fifty Shades of Grey
is not only literature but an immensely important cog in the pop culture cycle. But there is an upside to all this mass marketing. People are once again reading in a very big way.

Thank you, E. L. James. You’re the stuff Pulitzers are made of.