Fan fiction has always existed, most notable in my mind are the fans of Sherlock Holmes. I’d always known that when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes the fans literally took to the streets in protest and followed that up by continuing the stories on their own. What I didn’t know is that these fans had taken over the world of Holmes long before his untimely death, writing what was the pre-curser to the fan fiction we know today. Scott Brown recently wrote about the phenomenon for Wired Magazine.

“It was the dawn of fandom as we now know it – zealous, fractious, hydra-headed, and participatory. Of course these 19th-Century proto-nerds didn’t use the phrase fan fiction. The term wouldn’t enter the lexicon until the mid-60s, around the publication of the earliest fanfic journal, the Star Trek-themed Spockanalia. Sherlockians called them parodies and pastiches (they still do), and the initial ones appeared within 10 years of the first Holmes 1887 novella, A Study in Scarlet.”

Sir Arthur never embraced the fiction created around his famous character (he didn’t even like writing the novels). Today writers on the other hand purposefully create stories that fans want to engage in to such a degree, taking their worlds online and open them up to their fans in a way that allows for in depth participation. Joss Whedon, most famously known as the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not only reads the fanfiction surrounding his work, he specifically thinks about fan involvement when writing or creating any of his shows, comic books, or movies. He knows that his fans want stories that allow them to delve deeper on their own and he’s mindful of that at all times. Writers for the television show Supernatural, a TV show known for its rabid fan base and unlikely plot twists, read the fan fiction written about their show and use it as a guide for where they should take the storyline. Fans are no longer just participating within their own communities, they are actually manipulating the storyline.

While not all fans expect to have such an intimate relationship with the people creating the stories they love, nowadays people do expect to be able to participate in stories in ways that make them their own. More and more successful storytellers are able to do that by creating alternate worlds for their work online, telling their stories through multiple platforms. People don’t just want to read a book, watch a show, or play a game. They want to immerse themselves in a manner that allows the story to continue beyond it’s traditional boundaries. While epic examples of multimedia storytelling like The Matrix are often referenced, there are stories of lesser magnitude that continue online. Fans of the television show The Office, for example, can fully embrace the storyline online through the show’s social networking site dundermifflininfinity.com. On the website fans create their own office character, join a branch, and then compete with other “workers” and “branches” for sales. While I’m left wondering what type of person comes home from work only to spend their time pretend working in a cyber office spun off from a show about working in a terrible office, I think it exemplifies the lengths people are willing to go to become involved in the stories they love.

There are those that embrace the new, more involved methods of storytelling and those that don’t. While writers (and producers) of television, movies, and videogames seem to have had an easier time embracing the new needs of their fans book authors, and even more so their publishing companies, seem to have had the greatest challenges breaking down the barriers to their form of storytelling. There’s just a greater gap between traditional methods of story consumption and creation and the new multimedia collaborative method people have come to expect. However not all are hesitant. Neil Gaiman is an author who, like Whedon, encourages fans to continue writing about his characters online and has also explored with alternative forms of storytelling himself. In 2009 he participated in a project with BBC Audiobooks where after using his Twitter account to deliver the opening lines of a story, his followers were invited to finish the story by responding to his tweet. BBC Audiobooks then pieced together the most comprehensive storyline from the thousands of tweets and recorded it as an actual audiobook.

The publishing house Penguin UK has also been exploring new ways of telling stories tradintionally confined to books as they begin to explore digital fiction. Starting with a rather unsuccessful Wikinovel they then moved on to a project called We Tell Stories.

“Starting on 18th March, Penguin UK is launching its most ambitious digital writing project to date. In collaboration with fêted alternate reality game designers Six to Start, Penguin has challenged some of its top authors to create new forms of story – designed specially for the internet.”

Penguin views the project as a step towards what they see as the future of traditional storytelling: An interactive experience that specifically appeals to a generation participating in stories primarily through videogames. The six stories involved in the series include a spy story told through Google Maps, a horror story that took place over two blogs and a twitter feed, a hidden story that requires readers to find clues in order to locate it, and a choose-your-own- adventure-type story where readers navigated a dungeon map finding pieces of the story as they went. Each digital story was based on a traditional one, previously only told on paper. While not all of the stories were a success and some weren’t technically interactive it still exemplifies the forward thinking of an industry that’s so far only looked at new forms of storytelling as threatening.

We no longer just want to read the story, we want the opportunity to contribute to it and to experience it in a way that just isn’t possible when simply told in a traditional format. We no longer require the linear, in fact we relish it when stories are not. We are no longer satisfied simply with what the writer has to give us, we want it to last forever. In response to this need the field of options for telling a story is only growing, and growing fast. While books, TV, and movies will not cease to exist in their traditional formats any time soon the storytellers who will thrive in this new multimedia environment are the ones who are embracing the new level of involvement their fans require.