Exploring the Land of the Lost
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WHY I WRITE FAN FICTION
By
Jeanne
Rudmann Grunert
Stolen Moments
It's
five thirty in the morning. I power up
my computer, fetch my favorite white Portuguese ceramic coffee mug, and begin writing. I'm not penning the great American novel. I'm writing a Land of the Lost fan fiction story. My fifth, actually, and what's looking to be the first full
length Land of the Lost novel.
"Why do you
bother with this junk?" my husband cries.
The show plays on the TV from a well-worn videotape. Claymation dinosaurs chase basketball
players in green diving suits. Orange
furred monkey men scatter in the forest.
I ignore his comments
and keep on writing. I'm pouring over
words that only a select few Generation
Xers scattered throughout North America are waiting to read. Why do I get up at 5:30 a.m. every morning
and write fan fiction for an hour before leaving for my demanding job as a
marketing manager? Most normal people
are snug in bed and catching the last few minutes of zzz's at this hour. They're not immersed in the jungles of
ancient Altrusia.
For those who do not
read the genre, fan fiction consists of stories written by lovers of a novel,
television show, or movie, who take the original creation and using the
characters, craft new adventures for them.
Fan fiction abounds for lovers of Star
Wars, Star Trek, the X-Files, and
Dr. Who. Star Was fans have
legitimized fan fiction with the series of George Lucas-approved novels that
are regularly best sellers; authors are hired to take Luke Skywalker, Princess
Leia, and Darth Vader through new adventures.
But for most readers,
fan fiction is the shadow side of writing.
Whereas writing is seen as a creative act akin to an haute cuisine chef
making his signature dish, fan fiction is the poor wretch who pops a TV dinner
into the microwave. Fan fiction writers
are seen as writers who couldn't, writers who just didn't, writers who can't
write. Writers who haven't outgrown
their adolescent fantasies and who really want to be Buffy, Deanna Troi, Mr.
Spock, or Holly Marshall. A jazz
connoisseur who enjoys listening to Louis Armstrong on his stereo rather than
takes up the trumpet and attempt to emulate the master does not fall under
scorn . Why, then, do we deride the fan
fiction writer as a hack? I'm not a
hack writer. Since winning a national
science fiction writing contest at the age of thirteen, I've gone on to write
over thirty articles and short stories.
Some have been anthologized; my writing has been read by several million
readers in North America.
So why, then, do I
bother writing fan fiction? Why do I
get up at 5:30 every morning to write it?
My love affair with
the subculture known as fan fiction started early, before the term fan fiction
was even coined. And the reasons I
write fan fiction are inexorably entwined with who I am as both a woman and a
writer, so that to know me is to know the reasons why I write fan fiction.
Why
I Write Fan Fiction
One
Saturday morning in September of 1974 I was watching cartoons. I was five years
old. My dad turned the dial to a new
show, and there it was: the Land of the
Lost. A program that was to change
my life and influence my imagination in untold ways.
The show follows the
trials and travails of the Marshall family: the father, Rick, a widower, his
teenage son Will, and prepubescent Holly.
On a routine expedition their raft unexpectedly and mysteriously falls
prey to an earthquake, which opens a time doorway, and plunges them "a
thousand feet below...to the Land of the Lost." They're not actually a thousand feet below the Earth, but rather
in the lost civilization of Altrusia which they dub the "land of the
lost." Here they encounter
dinosaurs, the afore-mentioned monkey men called Paku, and best of all, seven
foot tall reptilian creatures called Sleestaks.
Ah, the
Sleestaks. Ask any Generation Xer worth
his salt what a Sleestak is. They're
likely to answer you by suddenly staggered around and hissing, all the while
walking as if they had flippers on their feet. The Marshalls' nemesis, the Sleestak are actually the de-evolved
inhabitants of ancient Altrusia, a noble race represented by the friendly time
traveler Enik who is also stranded in the land with the Marshall family. Portrayed by L.A. Lakers basketball
players wearing doctored green diving suits, the Sleestaks haunted many a
childhood nightmare in the 1970's.
Although the show was a
product of the fertile and often weird imagination of Sid and Marty Krofft and
not created as a science fiction treasure, but rather as a kids show to appease
the greedy networks, Land of the Lost
was written by expert science fiction minds, include David Gerrold, Dick
Morgan, Theodore Sturgeon, and others.
Walter Koenig (a.k.a. Chekhov) of Star
Trek fame penned an episode as well.
Episodes focused on the Marshall family and their struggle for survival,
but they also addressed questions of time and space, alien technologies, and
many moral messages that shone through in the generally fine script writing and
acting.
As
a child, my mind was captured by the Land
of the Lost. Whether it was the
scenery, the hauntingly beautiful sound track that underscored the shows, or
the science fiction and fantasy elements, I'll never know. But I do know that every Saturday morning at
10:30 I was glued to the television. I
sat in front of it as I sat before the Eucharist on Sundays at Mass, my heart
enraptured, my imagination on fire with the stories unfolding before me. I became the Marshall family. I was the queen of the Sleestaks, I was lost
in Altrusia, I ran a pylon express, I dodged dinosaurs and I watched the sun
set over the white sandblasted cliffs of High Bluff.
As
I entered the first grade the show took on new meaning for me. In 1975 my mother was diagnosed with MS:
multiple sclerosis. Back then this
mysterious disease crippled the young and no known treatments were
available. My mother had been active in
our church, a class mother, and a volunteer at the local hospital while taking
excellent care of her brood of five, her crippled mother, and her husband. Now she began to stagger when she walked, to
fall down, to get relentless headaches that forced her to lie in a dark room
and command me to play quietly in the basement.
The Land of the Lost became my
refuge. 1975-76 was a hellish year for
me. I had been transferred from a
public school kindergarten of light and play to a horrific Catholic school that
focused on stern discipline and sucking the joy out of every child it
taught. Although I had a caring and fun
young nun as my teacher in first grade, the ancient school building with its
forbidding dark halls and rules of order frightened me. My creative spirit was crushed. My home life was exhausting as my mother
could no longer cook, clean or sew. My
father couldn't manage his anger at the situation and lashed out at the nearest
target: me. My brothers and sisters scattered
in their own pursuits, but I was too young to flee.
I was a sad, lonely
child. My mother's illness isolated me
from other children. They didn't want
to know or couldn't understand what it was like to come home from school to find
your mother had fallen in the bathroom and knocked herself unconscious. No other child in the first and second
grades had to empty bedpans before school, help clean the house, or worry about
her mother choking on an apple. During those sad, long years, I was not only
faced with my mother's illness but abused by a neighbor and the target of
bullies who enjoyed making fun of my bike (not the cool kind with the banana
seat), my bookish nature, my deep-rooted love of Christ, and the all pervasive
sorrow that clung to my features like soot to the walls of a chimney.
So just as the
Marshall family was without a mom, so too I was without a mom. As the Marshalls were stranded in the Land
of the Lost, I felt that I was now one of the lost. I watched the show to the
very last dregs each Saturday, until the little notes of the Krofft logo played
on the TV and Sigmund and the Sea
Monsters came on next.
The Land of the Lost was my refuge and my
solace. Through its magical tales I
found a way to escape the horrors of my every day life and release the vibrant
soul within through the imagination.
The Land of the Lost went off the air in
1976 when I was in the second grade.
But the first and second season episodes remained as reruns at various
times on Saturday morning until I was in the fourth grade. And then...it disappeared. What to do? I needed that release into the
imagination. It was the only thing
keeping my sane.
One day when I was
twelve I read a truly awful children's science fiction book. It was so sappy and condescending that I threw
it across the room and made a black skid mark on the wall of my bedroom. I remembered the Land of the Lost. It was
never condescending or simplistic, although some episodes like 'Dopey" bordered
on sugary sweet. How dare that writer
think that kids wouldn't like science fiction! I thought. And then came a thought into my head as
revolutionary as Newton's thought when the apple conked him on the head: "I can write better than this."
I took out a notebook
and stretched across a chaise lounge in the yard and began to write. And write.
And what did I write? I wrote my
Land of the Lost stories, the stories
that I had woven during those long lonely grade school years to keep my mind
out of the darkness of reality and into the light of imagination. Since I still
thought it was illegal to write using another author's characters, I called the
planet "Landost" and created a civilization that looked surprisingly
like feudal Earth's. The heroine resembled
me; what a Mary Sue I created! (Mary Sue is the common term for an author who
writers herself into a fan fic as the heroine.
It would be akin to rewriting Pride
and Prejudice and making Elizabeth Bennett a secondary character, while a
new girl named Jeanne-Marie – a Rubenesque writer with long blonde hair –
marries Mr. Darcy).
I made stories the way
other kids make mud pies. I played with
words like kids play with blocks. I
wrote every day after school and on the weekends, often forgoing trips to the
movies or roller skating with friends to be alone so that I could write. By
eighth grade, I had written two novels.
As my mother worsened
there was no escaping the pervasive fear and terror that ran through our
home. I turned to writing to escape from the horrors of my every day existence.
I set up a writing desk in the basement on an old kitchen table. The Formica table was so tall that I needed
a barstool to sit at the table. I
taught myself to type in the 8th grade because it was faster than writing long
hand. I wrote reams of pages. I wrote novel after novel, the same story of
a beautiful princess of Landost who is raised as a peasant and doesn't know
she's a princess until a handsome young knight sweeps her off her feet and
releases her from the spell.
But
then the stories began to change over the next two years. The handsome knight was there, but he was
impressed by the heroine's pluckiness as she solved her own problems. I was growing up.
What also helped me during this time was the
new school that I attended. It was the
public high school. It was bright and
airy. The teachers were nice and the
work challenging. My favorite teacher
was my 9th grade English teacher, Pat Gross. I confided in her that I wrote novels. I showed her my stories. She was instantly on the phone to get me
into her gifted group and her honors English classes. Pat Gross became my mentor for four years, teaching me how to
write and encouraging my love of literature and writing. To this day she is a dear and trusted
friend.
One of our first
assignments in the gifted group was to write a short story for a science
fiction contents. I protested; I was a novelist, I couldn't
write a short story. She insisted. When I refused, Pat made it part of my grade
for her English class. Reluctantly, I
sat down and wrote a short story called "Runaway Boys". A few weeks later I was called into the
guidance counselor's office. I had won
the contest. At the age of thirteen, I
was going to Brockport New York to study science fiction writing with Stephen
Donaldson and Nancy Kress, two of the best living writers in the business. My story had beaten 72 other stories written
by adults, stories from all over the U.S., some from writers who had been
honing their craft for years.
I went to
Brockport and my life as a writer
began. I published articles in national
hobby magazine for horse model collectors while still in high school, and I
wrote reams of really, REALLY bad science fiction. Mostly novels of the "Mary Sue" variety; wish
fulfillment stories where I was always the heroine, the heroes always resembled
Paul Clark, a boy I had a crush on at school, or Paul Rossili, an actor on my
favorite soap opera. But that drive to
be a writer was within me and fueled my actions as nothing else would. I devoured literature and debated literary
criticism with my high school English teachers. I actually read grammar texts and memorized their rules so that
the tools of the craft would be ingrained in me (although I never learned how
to handle the subordinate clause, and to this day I continue to write dangling
modifiers that can make lovers of English scream with laughter). I did readings at parents nights for the
gifted and talented group. And I wrote,
sometimes until midnight on the weekends, often a dozen or more pages a day.
I
majored in English at Molloy College and still I wrote. Science fiction gave way to realistic
fiction because a professor of English whom I respected told me that science
fiction wasn't literary enough and I was stupid enough to believe him. My only excuse is that I was a freshman and
still awed by the letters P, H and D after his name. I studied literature and immersed myself in the poetry and prose
of Dante, Milton, Voltaire, Dickens, Austen and the great writers. In 1989, I published my first two short stories,
both horror fantasies, for a now defunct magazine called The Primordial Eye.
Every writing magazine
that I read stated with assurance, "If you get back handwritten comments
on the preprinted rejection letter, you're doing great." I received reams of handwritten comments. Editor after editor penned the same message: "Close but missing something. Try
again." "Something missing
but a good story overall. Try
again." My stories were
grammatically correct but lacking true emotion. Instead they were filled with the hysterical over-wrought
emotions of the beginning writer who has to use adverbs after every 'he said,
she said' to liven up leaden prose. My
emotions, after so many years of dealing with my mothers' illness and her
subsequent death, my father's rage, and both my parent's neediness were sealed
behind the closed doors of my heart. I kept
true feelings at fingertip distance, only occasionally touching them, and
frightened like a skittish horse when I
felt something other than numbness.
The only release was in my imagination. I pretended to be in the Land of the Lost in my imagination,
although I never wrote down the stories.
After all, professor said science fiction wasn't literary enough, and
why should a writer like me who was going places waste her time on it? My imagination wouldn't let it go. Always in my mind I saw the jungles, the
Sleestaks, the pylons and the temples that would set me dreaming. In my mind's eye I could still wander the
jungles with Will and Holly. When the
sci fi channel began showing the episodes again right after I graduated from
college, I had my father tape every last one of them. I used to watch them on Sunday mornings while my dad was at
church. I would spend one blissful hour
every Sunday morning, immersing myself in the sights and the sounds in that
land far away. But I thought that it
was illegal to write the stories down, and certainly I had no way to publish
them or share them. Besides, who else
but me still remembered the old show?
And so it went for
many years, with my nonfiction writing published in numerous national magazines
but my fiction going nowhere. It was
flat and lifeless. I received my
graduate degree in Creative Writing from CUNY Queens College and decided to
give up writing fiction. What had been
a burning passion to tell stories of fantasy had turned into a fruitless search
for one genuine paragraph expressing real emotion.
Then the unthinkable
happened. On October 27, 1997, my dad,
who I had always been close to, died suddenly just a few months before my
upcoming wedding. Though we had always had
a stormy relationship, my dad and I were extremely close, and he had always
been my biggest fan.
My world was
shattered. I had to sell the home that
I grew up in, the house my mother had died in. I was on my own for the first time in my life. I couldn't write. For three years I tried, but the words would not come. Sentences came out ungrammatical and
stilted, as if my voice had dried up. I
had to contact several magazines and tell them that I could no longer fulfill
assignments I was given. My stories
were locked away and I prepared for a life as a marketing manager and nothing
more.
During those three
years something inside my psyche changed.
Whether it was being on my own for the first time in my life or losing
all connection to those painful years of growing up with nothing but stress,
illness and loneliness, change was working within me. Although I did not know it, those three years were when my
authentic self grew within me, and I shed layers of false self that I had
acquired to please my father and keep peace within the house.
The end to the
metamorphosis came with fan fiction. Until this year, I did not even know that
fan fiction existed. But one day I was surfing the Internet trying to find
information about the new Star Wars
movie. I cruised through the science
fiction pages on the 'Net and was hit by a wave of nostalgia for my old Land of the Lost show. I wondered if there was anyone like me out
there who still watched the old videotapes, if there was anyone else to whom
the old show meant so much. And then I found it. Not one site, but two dedicated to the Land of the Lost: Landofthelost.com, with an episode guide and
more, and Tyrannosaur Lex, an even better
site filled fan fiction, a Marshall timeline, and more updates. With pleasure I began reading my first fan
fiction, and once more I was transported back to that magical land...to the
dinosaurs and Sleestak and Enik and Chaka...
Could I write a fan
fiction? Could I take the tales lurking in the dark corner of my mind and set
them to words? Could I capture that feeling of awe and mystery
that clung to the old show like the mists of the time doorway in Enik's
cave? That college professor be damned, I wanted to write what was in my heart to
write. I no longer cared if I became
rich and famous or if I penned the great American novel. I decided that if only one other person read
my fan fiction and it made them happy, then I was a success. I knew that I could write a grammatically
correct story with a beginning, middle and end. The characters were already established. All I needed to do was concentrate on my
plot and the rest would take care of itself.
And so it began - my
love affair with the genre known as fan fiction. My first fan fiction, 'Outside In,' began with the old tales of
Landost. Taking up writing again was
like learning to walk after a long convalescence. I was shaky. It was hard
to form those first sentences. But
having characters and motivation already established eased the transition back
into writing.
During the three years
after my father died when I wrote not a word,
when my voice had been silent, it had matured. Emotions now flowed naturally into the writing. Suffering and grief had changed me. Words danced from my fingertips across the pages. After the initial writing I returned to the
story and with a ruthless editor's eyes I cut myself out of the story, focused
on the character, and suddenly, I had it.
Not just any story, not just a fan fiction, but a character driven story
with emotional resonance.
When I listened to my
heart and wrote what it told me, I wrote well.
And what I wrote happened to be a fan fiction. I published the story to the Web with the familiar old tremor of
fear, a tremor I hadn't felt since I first began sending my infant works into
the world many years ago. But when the
emails from other Land of the Lost
fans started coming in, sometimes at the rate of two a day, asking when my next
fan fiction would be posted, I knew
that I had finally written a real story that made people feel things inside
themselves and made them realize things about the character of Will that they
had never realized before.
So I began writing
again by writing fan fiction of the Land
of the Lost. Like the river in
that mysterious world that always runs full circle, plunging into the ground to
rise at the swamp and circle back through the Lost City and the mountains, I
too circled back again to writing. I
had tried to escape it, but the relentless fire that had burned in my heart
since I first took up pen at the age of twelve merely smoldered until it was
stirred again. Now it burned hotter
than ever. I wrote six articles for a
professional journal this year, and emails from readers trickled in, thanking
me for the writing. One email
contained a request to excerpt my article on email list management in another
professional journal. A short story
that had lain dormant for ten years resurrected into a decent enough sci fi story
that with a smidgen of rewriting I plan to complete and sell it this year. And a fantasy novella that I wrote in
college (before meeting the anti sci fi professor) has been dusted off and is being
edited with the goal of publishing it this year.
But
I'm a changed writer from the childlike woman who put down her pen the day her
father died. I used to write to please
my father, as if my success would make him happy and soothe the wounds of all
those years of my mother's illness. Now
I am not quite so driven to write as once I was. When the work begins to dry I take time off and experience life
for a while. I play with my pets, I
take long walks with my husband, I call upon my friends. I no longer hide myself in the basement and
in the land of the imagination but burst forth into life with eagerness and
vivacity to experience all that it has to offer. The long dark days are over and I have come full circle to the
rich life that had been denied to me by circumstances beyond my control during
my childhood.
The closing song from the Land of the
Lost still echoes in my head when I think of those years when my fan fictions
were taking root. "I'm lost, I'm
lost, find me." It was by finding
that lost child through the world of the Land
of the Lost that I found myself, and the voice to express the wondrous
world of emotion hidden in my heart since childhood. And that, truly, is the reason that I write fan fiction.
About
the Author
Jeanne Rudmann Grunert is the author of over thirty
articles, essays, and stories. The
winner of both the 1984 Brockport Science Fiction Writer's Contest and the 1992
Belles Lettres Essay competition, Grunert continues to write and publish essays,
science fiction and fantasy. Her
personal essays have been reprinted numerous times, and one entitled "A
Teacher Named Kricket" was included in the collection Straight From the
Heart, published by Fleet Street Publishing.
Her fan fiction appears on Tyrannosaur Lex, a Web site devoted to the Land of the Lost. She lives with her husband, dog and cat in a suburb of New York
City, where she makes her living as the Director of Marketing for The College
Board. More of her writing appears on
her home page www.geocities.com/jeannegrunert
and she welcomes comments on her work.
Email her at jeanneg99@ivillage.com
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