The Stages of Fandom

So I was thinking about this whole concept of getting burned-out by fandom or alternately, getting burned by fandom. The former makes a lot of sense to me - been there, done that, still here, weirdly enough - but the second one, I've never been quite sure of. But more on these in a moment. First, the stages of fandom (with my apologies to Victoria for the second person POV :-)).

First comes the Thrill of discovery. You get on the Internet, type in "Mulder, Scully, love" and voila - you find a whole gaggle of 'shippers who are interested in these two getting together just like you are. So happiness. You read every single story in the MSR Archive, not to mention the MSM Archive. And you are happy. Very deliriously happy.

The Discovery of the Diva stage then occurs. You figure out who the big names in fandom are and you camp out at their sites. You visit multiple times a day in hopes of finding a new story to savour. You'd bring a sleeping bag if you could.

Then comes the My Turn! stage. You've been reading, maybe feedbacking, but mostly reading. You've liked the majority of the stories you've read but there's something missing. So you decide to try it yourself. You write a fic. Hopefully, your first fic is marvelously written and not at all embarassing (unlike many of us who are hoping that no one ever reads our first fics ever again). You're still new to fandom and even though you've seen the term 'beta reader' around, you're unsure of how to get one of these strange entities.

You're now at the Newbie stage. Self-explanatory. You've read your story a million times, edited it just right and it's starting to look a little better to you - but you're not entirely sure. You consider asking one of the Divas to help you out, but you figure, why would they bother with you? You've got this image of them being surrounded by a court of fawning fans (as envisioned by their Who's Who guide in their author's notes) and you decide to leave them alone and rely on your spellchecker and Bill Gates' version of grammar.

Once you've corrected your story to the best of your ability, you end up at the Nail Biting stage. Will someone read your story? Will they like it? Will they hate it? Will you get flamed? Will it get ignored? You feel like you've just left your child in the deep, dark woods. You check your email obsessively - 80 times a day - in the hopes that some redemption will show up. If you're lucky, yes, you get noticed, but the Magic Eight Balls says that all signs usually point to no.

But you decide that you like this fanfic writing thing. So you Keep At It and write more stories. Eventually, someone writes. They are helpful. You adopt them immediately as a beta reader. If you're lucky, they stick around and help you develop more coherence to your writing, generate ideas and generally provide companionship in the Big Scary World of Fandom. But you have a beta reader. That's a sign of almost beginning to make it - really. Don't y'all remember how hard it was to find a beta who would stick around for more than two paragraphs?

You're still lost in the Innocence and Bliss of fandom. Your stories generate some FB, not quite on the scale of the Divas - after all, they took years to get to where they are, didn't they? - but you're doing quite well. You have joined 30 to 40 mailing lists and you read every single story every posted and have something to say about 85 percent of them.

That's when you hit the Wall. You've been prolific, churning out 5 stories a week and all of sudden, slam! There's that wall. The muse is gone and not even chocolate can entice her back. So you read your FB, reread old stories and shudder at the mistakes, characterizations etc and compliment yourself on how much better you've gotten. You don't read as many stories now, even though you have all the good intentions to, but you realize you've gotten more discerning as a reader. However, the one good thing you've got going for you at this stage is a close circle of friends who all think along the same lines as you. You find yourself mentioned in author's notes in that same breathless manner that you once envied months ago when you were a Newbie to fandom. You wonder if you have made it.

Now, you've got two choices here, the Wall stage can turn into the Burn Out stage, where you feel that you've done all you can for this fandom and you want to leave at the top of your game or you can Mentor others into fandom. There could be other options, but these are the two I've come up with. Burnout implies that you walk away and don't come back for a while or at all. Mentor means you lurk, occasionally write, and be generally supportive of the fandom which was once so supportive of you.

From the Mentor stage, you either get back into the swing of writing again, doing the 5 stories a week thing, or you slowly fade away - either lured by the seductiveness of another fandom or the pesky interferences of Real Life. BTW, conversion to Diva can happen at any time, but is most likely to happen around the Mentor stage.

From the Burn Out stage, you either leave fanfic writing entirely, slamming the door behind you and going to eat chocolate, or you discover pretty new fandoms where you repeat all of these stages over again, ad nauseaum.

There's also a stage here that I neglected to mention - the Burned By Fandom stage. That could happen anytime between the Innocence and Bliss and the Wall. I don't know much about this stage, but apparently it happens that there are huge keruffles in fandom and everyone disperses to their separate corners to lick their wounds. I sincerely hope this doesn't happen to you. But this is an optional stage.

Did I miss any?