So when I was 10 years old,
I was a lonely, geeky girl;
a first-generation Latina growing up
in a small Midwestern town
where hardly anyone else
had parents who spoke with thick accents.
But then I came across
Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy,
“The Lord of the Rings,”
and I fell in love.
(Applause)
What a cool world of elves,
orcs
and small but heroic hobbits
fighting against impossible odds
to defeat a powerful enemy.
Kind of like life.
But one thing bothered me.
There weren’t enough
female characters in this book.
The adventurers accompanying
the protagonists were all male.
It made me feel left out,
like I did in school when --
you’re not going to believe this --
when my 7th grade teacher told me,
“Why are you working so hard in math?
You should be getting a boyfriend!”
(Audience boos)
But worse, it offended
my sense of fairness.
Surely girls could have adventures too.
So what could I do?
I sat down with my spiral notebook
and I rewrote the story.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I regendered a couple
of the main characters,
and I added new scenes,
like one where a female hobbit
devised a clever plan
to foil the Balrog,
a monster who caused the death
of one of my favorite characters.
By reimagining Tolkien’s fantasy world,
I was creating a place
where someone like me could feel at home.
Writing my story gave me comfort.
But it also taught me a lot
about how to write.
I never shared that spiral
notebook with anyone.
But what I didn’t realize then
was I was writing something
called fanfiction --
(Laughter)
a story based on characters
or settings from another’s work ...
and that I was not alone.
It was an experience I never forgot.
And many years later,
after I became a data science professor
at the University of Washington
in 2013,
I met another professor named Katie Davis,
and we sat down over lunch
and discussed a recent news story
that claimed “kids today can’t write,
all they produce
is misspelled short texts.”
Katie and I didn’t believe it.
We both knew kids whose writing abilities
defied these stereotypes.
What’s more, the talented young people
we happened to know
all had heavy involvement
in fanfiction reading and writing.
So this apparent contradiction
sparked our exploration
into one of my most enduring
research projects:
a deep data dive
into the vast world of fanfiction
to study the impact
that writing these stories
could have on the writers themselves,
and whether writing fanfiction
could actually teach kids
to become stronger writers.
And what we found surpassed
anything I could have imagined.
So let me set the stage.
For those of you who haven’t
heard the term before,
fanfiction,
sometimes known
as transformative literature,
is said by some to go back centuries.
After all, in the 1600s,
John Milton wrote “Paradise Lost”
using characters from the Bible.
(Laughter)
But today, scholars generally feel
that modern fanfiction
traces its origins to typewritten zines
written by “Star Trek” fans
in the ‘60s and’ 70s.
And with the growth of the internet,
barriers to sharing
have been lowered further.
Millions of people are writing
and sharing fan fiction
on a variety of websites
around existing plots like “Harry Potter,”
“Twilight,”
“Naruto,”
“My Little Pony” --
(Laughter)
and “Pokémon”
and many others.
You probably have
a teenage relative or neighbor
who reads or writes fanfiction.
These stories are wildly diverse
and may be creative,
thoughtful or hilarious.
You might find titles like,
“When Harry Potter
Accidentally Started a Cult.”
(Laughter)
Or, “Five Times Hermione Snogged Harry --
(Laughter)
And One Time She Didn’t.”
(Laughter)
The sheer quantity of fanfiction
that’s been produced is astonishing.
In the past 20 years alone,
over 60 billion words of fanfiction
have been written
and posted on a single online site:
fanfiction.net,
which is only one
of many fanfiction hubs.
Now compare that with the amount
of fiction written in the English language
that’s been traditionally published
in all of human history ...
80 billion.
So this is an incredible
outpouring of creativity.
And on this site, it's written
primarily by young people.
This site’s 15 million members
write in 44 different languages,
and their median age is 15 and a half.
Most of the authors are between 13 and 21,
and most are teenage girls.
73 percent identify as female,
and interestingly,
more fanfiction authors identify
as gender nonconforming than male.
Authors we interviewed
told us they wrote fan fiction
because they love
the characters and worlds.
And over and over again,
they told us how much
they learned about writing
from participating in these communities.
Here’s an example.
One author told us she started writing
fanfiction at age 13
when she had this intense crush
on a fictional character.
(Sighs)
It led her to write fanfiction
with phrases like
“gorgeous cerulean orbs”, or
(Laughter)
“manly hunks of muscle.”
(Laughter)
Kind of embarrassing.
(Laughter)
And she told us,
“But reviewers were kind enough
to be positive about
my amateurish fangirl postings,
mostly because they also
like this character.
But they also pointed out
my uses of clichés and overwriting.
As a result, I learned to be sensitive
to these types of bad writing.
Today, I publish original fiction,
and no one has ever called me out
on a florid writing style.”
She concluded with,
“I think if a teacher had simply
red-pencilied my childish scribbles,
I might have been so discouraged
as to never write again.”
Another author,
who later became our student,
told us that she learned about spelling
and grammar while writing fan fiction.
But she also told us,
“When I started writing
fanfiction at age 13,
I was a queer, autistic middle-schooler
who hadn’t yet realized
I was either of these things.
I had difficulty with social situations.
Fanfiction communities
were a vital social and learning outlet.”
Today she’s done something
that few undergraduates ever have.
She’s published a first author
academic paper in a top-rated venue.
(Applause)
After studying many individual
writers’ stories over time,
we came to see that these personal stories
were consistent with the data,
The young writers’ use of words
grew more diverse
as they received more reviews.
So how did these kids learn
and from whom?
To find out,
we did a deeper dive into mentoring
in fanfiction communities.
Now, we expected to find traditional
mentor-mentee pairs,
older or more experienced authors
mentoring younger
or less experienced ones.
But what we found
was completely different.
We found millions of authors
and readers communicating
via multiple channels
and reviewing each other’s work
regardless of experience level.
People of all ages listening to
and reviewing each other’s stories.
This was so cool we had to give it a name,
so we call it “distributed mentoring”.
You can also think of it
as nanomentoring.
Each piece of mentoring
is tiny on its own,
but the combination of all of it
is much greater than the sum of its parts.
A key attribute of distributed
mentoring is its abundance.
One author we interviewed,
who wrote both traditionally
published fiction and fan fiction,
told us that she received
more feedback in a single week
on her fanfiction
than she did in two years
on her published novel.
It’s a difference not only of degree
but also of kind.
By itself, a single comment
on a story such as, “loved it,”
is relatively meaningless,
but hundreds or thousands
provide valuable feedback.
Like ...
“I like the ambiguity of your ending --
it leaves me feeling hopeful,”
and others like these.
Reviewers build on
and reference each other’s comments.
This enables authors to piece together
an overall view of their writing
that’s supportive as well as constructive.
We found only one percent of comments
constituted bullying.
And these are anonymous.
This is a surprisingly low number,
as anybody who has read comments
on an internet platform knows.
What’s more,
we found the supportive nature
of most of these comments was critical
in writing development.
One author, who was Black,
made all the characters
from a popular TV show Black.
She got comments filled
with readers’ sense of freedom
and delight from reading her story.
It not only encouraged her
to keep writing,
it gave her the conviction
that what she was doing was worthwhile.
And so through this research,
Katie and I found ourselves
not only believing
that, yes, kids can be good writers,
but also that fanfiction
and distributed mentoring
could be used in formal education.
A report from the National Assessment
of Educational Progress
found that a whopping
73 percent of US students
in grades eight and 12
lack proficiency in writing.
Research has shown
that adolescence is a wonderful time
to improve your writing skills,
and the popularity of fanfiction
in this age group shows
what an opportunity there is
to use it as a learning tool.
So here's how I'm imagining it.
Students with similar interests
from school districts across the country
could be connected with one another
to get and give anonymous feedback
on their writing.
It must be anonymous.
I know this from personal experience.
Teachers could moderate the channels
to make sure feedback was constructive,
as well as helping students learn from it.
If this work grew burdensome for teachers,
hierarchical moderation could help,
which is a system where members
themselves can report negative
or abusive comments,
and volunteer moderators
from among the students could decide
which ones to delete,
with teachers weighing in
only when necessary.
This technique is used
in many large, online communities,
and lots of adolescents
are familiar with it.
Fanfiction is a private universe
that’s become a welcoming community,
particularly for those
from marginalized groups.
This vast and vibrant resource
for kids who have something to say
is especially meaningful to me
when I contrast it
with the isolation I encountered
growing up Latina in the US.
And sometimes
I wonder what would have been
different in my own life,
and maybe in many other people’s lives,
if only we could have access
to this supportive community
of millions of young people
and their distributing mentoring
as kids.
Thank you.
(Applause and cheers)