lunabee34

What a great essay! I think you're right about the way fanfic and profic *feel* to a writer. Fanfic is very much a collaborative experience--not only because we're building on someone else's story, but because we're reacting, sometimes very subtly, to all the other writers building on that same story. We're affected by fanon and by the plot du jour, even if the way we're affected is to react against those things. Profic feels like it's an individual effort, a solitary thing. In her book, Pugh makes a case for that feeling as false (the single authored book as myth) that I kind of agree with. Profic is building on the foundation of narratives that have come before it as well, even if that foundation isn't always acknowledged.