What is the longest single piece of published fiction in history?
You’d be forgiven for immediately answering that question with Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace, or with another classic. Perhaps The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Ulysses by James Joyce. But you’d be wrong with all of these guesses. The title of “longest single piece of published fiction” isn’t being fought over by traditionally published writers; it’s being fought over by fan creators. Right now, a fanfiction inspired by the Nickelodeon cartoon The Loud House, which sits at around thirty-one million words, is the longest known piece of fiction. That fic actually broke Fanfiction.net, the site it’s posted on: Fanfiction.net uses a 24-bit integer system, which means it has a hard cap on how much it can actually count. In fact, it caps out at 16,77,215 words, which is where the word count stayed for The Loud House: Revamped, despite consistent growth in the content of the fic itself.
The Loud House: Revamped also isn’t the first fanfiction to hold this title. Previously, the record has been held by several other fanfictions, including a Mass Effect fanfic and a Super Smash Bros fanfic. And this is all completely free, available across multiple sites online.
Now, this isn’t to suggest that length is conducive to quality – video games are evidence that isn’t the case. But surely there must be something there; some depth, some reason to write this much. Where do people even start?
“I’ve been reading fanfiction since I was in middle school, maybe around fourteen years old,” GreenCowboy (name changed for anonymity purposes) tells me. She, like several others, found herself starting in the weirdest of places.“I’m pretty sure I got started on Hetalia, which is embarrassing. The weird gay theatre kids (affectionate) turned me on to it, of course.”
“I didn’t start writing until very recently, though. Honestly, I mainly did it because I’d just moved and retired from the sport I played religiously for years, so I needed to find a new hobby. And I’m so glad I decided to give it a go.”
Even people entrenched in video game journalism, people published on this very site, have roots that can be traced back to fanfiction, roots that are so deep that they’ve informed the way they work today.
“I got my start writing fanfiction quite innocently,” Kris ‘Delfeir’ Cornelisse tells me. “Through conversations with a friend over Pokémon Red, way back in 1999. We both found the idea of exploring the world with a variety of weird and wonderful critters to be compelling, so we came up with original characters and sent them off on their own Pokémon journey. Many a phone call or lunch break at school was spent jotting down notes and coming up with ideas for what might happen over time. An actual coherent manuscript for this didn’t get far, but it was a fun experiment, and it planted the seed. I’d eventually start digging into other stories that people had written, and from there the hobby was born.”
“Nowadays, very little of my writing is fanfiction, but I still retain that soft spot for the fandoms I cut my teeth on,” he continues. “I’ll still come up with the occasional story about the MMO characters of my friends and myself, though! Tabletop RPGs that I’ve DM’d have occasionally started into fanfiction territory, too. Sometimes it’s just fun to explore these other settings in my fiction for a little while.”
The writing process is also rather fascinating — multiple tonally dissident pieces of literature on the go at the same time is typical, not an outlier, and it’s common for authors to write a piece of fiction that people really respond to, but then leave it because it just no longer appeals to them. The only thing you’re losing is time spent, and if you think that you’ve given people joy, then the time wasn’t actually lost. But do writers tend to actually intend to finish something before life gets in the way? The answer, it turns out, varies from person to person.
“Until recently, I can proudly say that I’ve finished everything I started, but I literally just put up a story I don’t necessarily intend on finishing. Just lost interest — it happens! I really do intend to finish everything I start, though, and I can’t imagine abandoning works that often… You lose a lot of time already put in when you do that. In terms of process, for longer stuff I’ve been outlining, for shorter stuff just throwing myself in. And usually I won’t start something new until I’m at least at a stopping point in what I’m already working on,” GreenCowboy says.
Kris has a different point of view. “If I never started writing unless I was committed to seeing it through, I’d never write a damn thing. I’ve got countless notebooks and documents buried on ancient hard drives that are filled with notes, drafts, and idle musings on potential scenes and stories that will never see the light of day. Some are even completed or finished, but I ultimately decided they weren’t up to snuff or grew dissatisfied with the results and scrapped the idea.”
As a direct result of this, Kris explains that his writing process morphs and changes as he’s writing.
“I start with an idea, and usually set a couple of set objectives for a scene to serve as guideposts. Scene starts with Red [the main characters of Pokémon Red are named after the colors of the game] in a dungeon. At some point, Red finds and frees Blue, and there’s a confrontation between Red and Blue against Green to clear the exit. Then I write and see where the characters lead me in the moment. Sometimes they don’t behave as I might expect, and so I have to adapt things on the fly or change the goals of the scene. I’ll write until the scene is completed, or has changed so thoroughly that I’m best off putting the draft aside and starting from scratch.”
“Once it’s finally actionable,” Kris concludes. “I’ll give it a little time before re-reading and editing it, and determining if I’m still happy with the end results. Rinse and repeat until a full chapter is formed, then again until a story is completed or I hit a milestone I’m satisfied with.”
Different fandoms require different approaches. What works in, say, Halo isn’t always going to work in fanfiction about the game show Taskmaster (yes, it’s real. Yes, it’s what you think it is. Yes, some of it is weirdly detailed). But are writers throttled by the tone and setting of whatever they’re adapting, or is that seen as more of a guideline than anything else? How do they decide what tropes to use?
“I like tropes that delve into the psychology of the character,” Lawrence M tells me. “Stuff that lets you expand on a character and their relationship with the world around them. That’s the type of stuff that I love diving into the most. I also like the challenge of writing fight scenes due to the choreography involved in that. I find fight scenes incredibly fun to write because of how they’d work out in my head regarding how the moves flow, who gets the win, and how.”
Speaking to GreenCowboy about her current fandom that she’s writing for — the Showtime Original Yellowjackets, a show about the depravity of humanity — she raises an interesting point. That point being that fanfiction means that the restraints of television do not confine you. Consistency in tone and setting is merely a recommendation – you can do whatever you want to do.
“The fun of fanfiction is that you’re not really confined by things like the tone of the actual piece of media — you absolutely can choose to play within those bounds, but you also have complete creative freedom to not do that. To set the tone. To do a whole new alternate universe. To create original characters. Personally, I like to lean more into the comedic aspect of Yellowjackets… As much as it is dark, it’s also a genuinely very funny show. And while I do like to stick closer to the canon universe myself, and that involves exploring some of the darker stuff, I tend to focus most on the characters’ relationships and not get into the horror side of things.”
“To me, fanfiction is mostly about having fun,” GreenCowboy concludes. Indeed, the wide variety of tropes covered within fandom is incredible – there’s the usual, such as alternate universes where the characters are in college (or happy, as is the case with Yellowjackets), but then there’s weirder stuff – what if I put characters from a relatively grounded and realistic world into a science fiction setting? How does that change the way they develop? What are the cascading effects, and can I still make it recognizable as something that spun off from the world that inspired it? These are all questions that writers in fandom strive to answer, sometimes to inspiring results – a fanfiction inspired by Back to the Future is the Yellowjackets‘ third most ‘kudosed’ (an alternative to liking something) fic on the entirety of popular site Archive of Our Own. It’s a piece that could very easily have stood alone on its own as original fiction, yet it is something that the author felt was particularly tied to one fandom. And that’s what it’s all about – taking characters you love and putting them in situations that you’ll never see them face in their original medium.
Fanfiction is often a daunting prospect – either you’re writing for a fandom that already has an established scene, which means that you need to figure out how to stand out among a crowd of dozens of people who all want to do the same thing, or you’re writing for a nascent fandom, in which case you’re the one actually setting the standard here. Is there any advice for people who want to start writing but don’t know where to start?
“My advice would be to start small,” Lawrence says. “Fanfiction or any writing doesn’t have to be a long, multi-chapter story, nor does it have to be something you even have to share with someone. It could be as simple as two chapters that you write for yourself or even a short bit of poetry that you compose as practice.
A common way of finding people with shared interests is actually platforms such as Reddit, in which ‘fic exchanges take place’ – these amount to sharing your work with a stranger, but without the fear that somebody you might run into on the street has read it. But Lawrence suggests sharing it within your friend group as an alternative.
“If you’re nervous about an audience, consider sharing it within your friend group if you happen to share the same fandom or interest,” he concludes.
“Just start! Just try it! Literally nothing bad can happen. It’s been an entirely positive experience for me – there’s really no way to do it wrong. Plus, one of the best parts is looking back on things you wrote earlier to see improvement,” GreenCowboy advises. “So even if you feel like what you’re writing is truly terrible, if you stick with it, you will get better, which is such a great feeling. And I guarantee that at least a few people will like it.”
“There are only two ways to fail,” says Kris, “and neither of them is by starting. You can only fail by not taking what you make and then learning from it, one step at a time. But far easier is to simply never start at all. That’s the truest failure, but it’s also the easiest to overcome. So just do it.”
