I decided to take a break from my serious research for this post and share my experiences with Fanfiction to take a shot at analyzing digital mediations. For those of you unfamiliar with Fanfiction, it's a website where you can post your own writing that you based on other books, plays, movies, TV shows, or even comics. Generally, you post in sections, or chapters, and other readers can leave reviews with helpful criticism or encouragement. There are thousands of writers on this site, and so you can imagine exactly how many reviews and new stories are being posted every day. Just as an example, the Harry Potter section has over 500,000 stories. These range from short stories, poetry, and even epics that literally take years to write.
When in middle school and high school, I have to admit that I was pretty obsessed with Fanfiction. I would spend hours reading other's stories, and then eventually writing my own. This was a major part of why I wanted to be a English major and then go on to be an editor or writer. It was amazing to be able to write and get feedback, as well as help others improve their own writing.
I decided that although I usually spent most of my time in the Harry Potter or Ella Enchanted sections (dorky, I know, but I loved it), I wanted to see what Fanfiction could offer fans of Shakespeare. I followed the links from Plays to Shakespeare, where the Bard has a respectable following of 1,762 stories (this is in comparison to Les Mis, 121, and Oedipus the King, 4). Just glancing through the first page of stories, I saw some really interesting ideas for creatively imitating Shakespeare. For example, one author puts a pirate theme on a female version on Hamlet:
Her father dead, her uncle takes the title of Pirate King aboard the ship the Denmark. But when she finds out how her father really died, revenge fills her heart and mind.
Although this writer probably isn't the next Shakespeare, it's clear that she is very familiar with the text of Hamlet, and has creatively changed the setting and plot to make it her own. Fanfiction is awesome!
This has really inspired me to try and fulfill one of my other learning outcomes, literary imitation. In the next couple weeks, I'm going to write a short story about one of Shakespeare's characters, possibly from a unique point of view, and then post it on Fanfiction and see what kind of response I get. I think this will be a really fun way to creatively engage Shakespeare while also sharing my work with people outside our class. I know that lots of people in this class are doing some sort of literary imitation, and I think this would be an extremely effective way to share besides on our blogs.
