The fan fiction phenomena: what Faust, Hamlet, and Xena the Warrior Princess have in common.

• Author: Young, Cathy

BY NOW MANY people outside the peculiar world of fandom know there exists something called fan fiction--that there are reams of reader-generated stories floating around the Internet based on characters from TV, movies, and books. Fanfic has been around for a long time, but it has attracted an unusual amount of media attention in the last three or four years. Several major papers, including The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, have devoted articles to the phenomenon--though no one seems sure whether to treat it as a literary genre or a quaintly amusing hobby.

Fanfic's stigma seems to be receding: Some fan writers have snagged lucrative contracts, either for original works or for books based on older literary classics not protected by copyright. At least one well-known mainstream author has "come out" as a fan writer: Meg Cabot (The Princess Diaries) has disclosed that as a college student she wrote stories based on Anne McCaffrey's fantasy novels. Still, fanfic remains a bastard child in the literary family, its very right to exist still in dispute in some quarters.

For the last six years, I have both read and written stories set in the Xena: Warrior Princess universe, and I have read fiction generated by other fandoms as well. This influences my reaction when people dismiss fanfic as akin to scribbling in a coloring book, as the fantasy writer Robin Hobb did in an anti-fanfic diatribe posted on her website in 2005.

Hobb's indictment made the standard charges against fan fiction, from intellectual theft to intellectual laziness. Deriding the idea of fanfic as good training for writers, Hobb wrote, "Fan fiction allows the writer to pretend to be creating a story, while using someone else's world, characters, and plot.... The first step to becoming a writer is to have your own idea. Not to take someone else's idea, put a dent in it, and claim it as your own."

There are, to be sure, fan stories that do little more than "fix" a particular scene to the fan's liking. Yet Hobb's sweeping generalization is wrong. Fan writers may borrow others' characters--though often adding new secondary characters, or fleshing out a character who makes only a brief walk-on in the "canon"--but they certainly create their own plots.

Take Solo for the Living by Tanya Golubchik (a 27-year-old Australian molecular biologist who writes as "Tango"), a work in progress that is currently a hit in the Phantom of the Opera community. A...