For those of you who are not aware, I used to be an avid fanfiction writer. Those days are long gone, yet I look back on them with slightly disgusted fondness. As a way to relive this nostalgia, I decided to interview the “mysterious” writer of a Harry Potter fanfic who has been through the same trials and tribulations as myself, to reminisce about the great works our writings once were.
The Miscellany News: Where did you get most of your inspiration? Why Harry Potter?
Harry Potter Fanfic Writer: Well, okay. Um, uh, my writing style inspiration came from the authors I read at the time. Since I was very pretentious, it was George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and other authors who wrote very, very well but very, very wordy pieces that caught my fancy. Because I was a child, I emulated absolutely none of the skillful or good parts of their writings, and I just used words to try and sound really fancy. My content was just stuff that I thought sounded cool as a twelve-year-old, so I crafted all of the characters in ways that I thought would be cool for them to act. In retrospect, this made for a very accurate depiction of all these characters because I was writing them as twelve-year-olds, and I was twelve, so it worked out pretty well. That’s just how middle school was I guess. Other than that, I just thought Draco Malfoy was really hot. The way I thought to express that emotion was to kill off his character often and mercilessly bring him back to life.
Harry Potter Fanfic Writer: Okay, I know this is off-topic, but I have three fanfic accounts, and this was the first one I made, and it was literally just a list of my favorite things: My favorite Harry Potter pairing was apparently Drarry (Draco/Harry), uh, my favorite characters were Draco and Luna, and under the “random info” section of the bio the only info I had was “not a Twilight fan.”
The Misc: What was the community dynamic of these forums?
Harry Potter Fanfic Writer: The first fanfiction site I posted on was (I think) called muggle.net, which had a weirdly high standard for grammar. So, my first piece of fanfiction was sent back because I didn’t capitalize the word “Muggle.” You also had to go through and manually add in the HTML because otherwise, no italics would show up, and without italics, the story kind of got a little weird. There was also a, uh, forum attached to this particular archive in which the one way I would contribute would be to design banners to link to other works I’ve done. I made some truly bad banners using Adobe Photoshop for the iPad. Everyone was very nice though and didn’t tell me when my stuff looked like absolute garbage.
Harry Potter Fanfic Writer: Back when I started writing fanfiction, I was kind of worried it would be found by people from my future, so I would put excessive asterisks where swear words would be, and only I would know in my heart what swear words were supposed to go there. I started writing fanfictions on the notes app of my iPod touch 3, so any time I think about my first work I see it in that first notes app font with the yellow and the lines.
The Misc: What is your favorite excerpt of fanfiction you’ve ever written?Harry Potter Fanfic Writer: The name of this fanfiction in this notes app was “HPFFGHS-PGT/T” because I decided that I had to live my life in code words and assign my fanfiction a movie rating. This one in particular was PG-13 because I never got around to writing the salacious bits because I was too scared. Oh my God, let me read you this line of dialogue, it’s literally how I thought middle schoolers should act as a middle schooler. “Hey Malfoy,” Jenny put in, “No one here likes you, so why do even show up? If it’s just to make fun of our clothes and stuff, that’s just, like, idiotic. Just like, go away!” Oh! Another good one would be, “Tatiana scrunched closer to the train wall as Pansy carved letters onto the tabletop.
‘The Darke Is Rising Hide Or Run Or You Die.’ Just because I stick my tongue down your throat every other day doesn’t give you any right to know anything I’m doing!” Draco’s face was screwed up in anger. I can’t remember if the last quote is a euphemism for making out or something else, not sure if I want to know.