Writers in the Secret Garden: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring

by Cecilia Aragon

An in-depth examination of the novel ways young people support and learn from each other though participation in online fanfiction communities.

Over the past twenty years, amateur fanfiction writers have published an astonishing amount of fiction in online repositories. More than 1.5 million enthusiastic fanfiction writers—primarily young people in their teens and twenties—have contributed nearly seven million stories and more than 176 million reviews to a single online site, Fanfiction.net. In this book, Cecilia Aragon and Katie Davis provide an in-depth examination of fanfiction writers and fanfiction repositories, finding that these sites are not shallow agglomerations and regurgitations of pop culture but rather online spaces for sophisticated and informal learning. Through their participation in online fanfiction communities, young people find ways to support and learn from one another.

Aragon and Davis term this novel system of interactive advice and instruction distributed mentoring, and describe its seven attributes, each of which is supported by an aspect of networked technologies: aggregation, accretion, acceleration, abundance, availability, asynchronicity, and affect. Employing an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses, they provide an in-depth ethnography, reporting on a nine-month study of three fanfiction sites, and offer a quantitative analysis of lexical diversity in the 61.5 billion words on the Fanfiction.net site. Going beyond fandom, Aragon and Davis consider how distributed mentoring could improve not only other online learning platforms but also formal writing instruction in schools.

Genres: Nonfiction, Fan Fiction, Writing, Pop Culture

166 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 26, 2019

About the author

Cecilia Aragon is an award-winning author, airshow pilot, and the first Latina full professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Winner of the 2021 Nancy Pearl Award, her memoir, FLYING FREE: My Victory over Fear to Become the First Latina Pilot on the US Aerobatic Team (Blackstone Publishing), has been described as "exhilarating, adventurous, and thoughtful." FLYING FREE lifts readers into the skies on a woman's epic journey from fearful, bullied child to champion pilot.

Her 2019 book, WRITERS IN THE SECRET GARDEN: Fanfiction, Youth, and New Forms of Mentoring (MIT Press), co-authored with Katie Davis, explores the surprising ways young people learn from each other in online fanfiction communities.

Visit Cecilia's website at http://CeciliaAragonAuthor.com
Sign up for her newsletter at http://eepurl.com/cZWElv
Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/CeciliaRAragon or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CeciliaArago...

Reviews

[Hanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

So rad to see the stats on reader feedback. 30% "positive reflection on specific aspects of the text", 22% corrective/constructive feedback, 27.6% "update encouragement"!!!! Readers providing eager peer review, and writers receiving encouragement to continue writing and improving...? That's so cool?

Awesome academic study. Would love to find more like it.

[Cassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a complimentary copy.

I think that the book requires a lot of time to really get deeply into as it includes so many excellent ideas. Just jam packed with valuable resources and the best information to really help benefit writers or really anyone who is interested in learning about the topics.

[Rae Storey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely interesting academic piece covering work done by a team at my very own University of Washington. They read loads of fan fiction and plus comments in their study of distributed mentoring.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring. Not what I expected or hoped. It was probably a paper prepared for school credit. Filled with charts and graphs and numbers and footnotes and references and numbers and repetition, repetition, repetition...filler, filler, filler. A waste of money and as a fan fiction aficionado I was majorly disappointed in the choice of fandoms, the choice of archive, the information as and how presented and all the missed opportunities. Majorly boring presentation with bafflegab language as if the writer is being paid by the word and word length.

[Anna]

A couple related articles:

Everything I Need To Know I Learned
from Fandom: How Existing Social
Norms Can Help Shape the Next
Generation of User-Generated
Content, by Casey Fiesler


An Archive of Their Own:
A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design, by Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging and impeccably researched, Aragon and Davis have explored online mentorship through the lens of fanfiction communities. The internet is a tool, and they argue that fandom has used it for good in many cases. Fanfiction writers, especially, have created a model of digital and distributed mentorship. Whether or not this is scale-able remains to be seen, but this kind of organic collaboration is enviable.

Really well done. Tagging this as Library Science too, because of the UX component. Libraries wish they could cultivate this. Or at least, this librarian does.

[Sara Strand · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was actually really fascinating and really well researched. I went into this with my original opinion about fanfiction sites and I'm coming out of this book with a completely different opinion and a greater understanding of what fanfiction sites actually are and what they can do, and I really think the ideas and information in this book could be used easily in a variety of classrooms from middle school all the way up to university level. A very interesting tool in teaching.

[Taarna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did the sort of skim reading you do when you're working on a research paper, but this book deserves me to check it out again so I can give it my full attention.

[Robin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! I learned a lot