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Writing fan-fiction is one way many young fans engage with their favourite movies, TV shows, books, video games and other media. Fan-fiction is often an escape and a creative outlet, one that’s existed for a long time but gained prominence with the rise of online outlets where authors could share their stories and read stories by other authors. Fan-fiction is sometimes viewed pejoratively because it’s a derivative work and may fan-fiction authors view their writing as a hobby.
Anna Todd has attained success that most fan-fiction authors can only dream of, but the way her journey as an author began is a familiar one. As ‘Imaginator1D’, Todd began writing a story called ‘After’ on her phone. What started as a story on the online writing community and platform Wattpad soon became a worldwide phenomenon, with almost 550 million reads on Wattpad. Inspired by the boyband One Direction, After chronicles the tempestuous romance between the college-going protagonist Tessa and a fictionalised version of Harry Styles. The strait-laced Tessa finds herself drawn to the smouldering bad boy Harry, who sports a multitude of piercings and tattoos. The other members of the band also appear in the story, with Liam Payne portrayed as Tessa’s clean-cut best friend.
After was published as by Simon and Schuster, was translated into over 30 languages and became a New York Times bestsellers. There is a quadrilogy of After books, and a book called Before, which is told from the male character's perspective. In print, the Harry character was renamed ‘Hardin Scott’. Shortly after the publication of the first book in 2014, film rights were snapped up and Todd soon found herself becoming a producer of the movie adaptation of her fan-fiction. Todd has often been compared to E.L. James, whose best-selling Fifty Shades of Grey series began as fan-fiction of the Twilight novels and received a trilogy of film adaptations.
After stars Hero Fiennes-Tiffin (nephew of actor Ralph Fiennes) and Josephine Langford (sister of 13 Reasons Why star Katherine Langford) as Hardin and Tessa respectively. The movie is rated M18 in Singapore, so fans can rest assured that the novel’s steaminess is translated to the big screen.
While some movie adaptations of books cut the author out of the production process almost entirely, Todd closely oversaw the making of After. “I’m a producer of the film and I was involved in everything from casting, to choosing director, to helping write parts of the script,” Todd said in an interview with Book Riot.
"Our team and crew are nearly all women, so we understand the story and know how to portray those women,” Todd told the BBC. "It's been incredible - we've had a lot of crew members say they've never worked with this many women on a film before." The film’s director Jenny Gage and screenwriters Susan McMartin and Tamara Chestna are all women.
While the After novels are massively popular, they’ve also attracted their fair share of detractors, who mainly object to the relationship dynamics portrayed in the stories. Todd told Cosmopolitan how she deals with the negative feedback, saying “The people that love and support me, there’s so many of them. There would be days when I would forget and be like, ‘Everyone hates me!’ But when I look at the big picture, most of the people—and not just with me, but in any fandom—they say things on Twitter and they don’t personally care.”
Todd has been prolific, with her novels The Spring Girls, a retelling of the classic Little Women, and The Brightest Stars, about a young woman’s romance with a soldier, being released in 2018. While Todd has written more than just fan-fiction, she credits the One Direction fandom with kick-starting her writing career. "For me, One Direction is the only fandom I've been in and I made so many friends. The internet can help you come out of your shell and gives you a chance to make friends who have the same passion as you, it's a real community," Todd commented.
For Todd, obsession is in the eye of the beholder. "Ironically, people who called me ‘obsessive’ would get into a fight over a football game," Todd quipped. "You wouldn't say that to someone who queued overnight for sports tickets or a new Apple product, but you'll have a go at teenage girls who like One Direction?"
With After, Todd has gone from being one of legions of teenage girls who like One Direction to a best-selling author and film producer, and the stigma against fan-fiction based on real people aside, that’s no small feat.
After opens in cinemas on 18 April 2019.
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