Claudia Gray’s Career Is Fueled by Fanfic

“I wrote before people paid me to do it and I’ll write after people stop paying me to do it,” Gray said in a recent interview at ConnectiCon in Hartford, Connecticut.
Gray is part of the generation that grew up alongside the beginnings of internet fandom, and was a part of the original online The X-Files fandom, where the term “‘shipping”—a shortening and conversion of “relationship” into an active verb )but you knew that)—came into being. Example: “I ‘ship Mulder and Scully.”
“Writing fanfic taught me how to write,” Gray said during a panel focused on turning geeky pursuits into paying work. How much of it has she written? At minimum, over 100,000 words.
When I asked Gray how fanfic writing influenced her original fiction, she said you can see it in the overall shape of her work.
“You can see the fandom influence in my Firebird stories, which are basically a whole set of AUs for my original characters.”

Fandom writing often takes popular characters like the Marvel superheroes, and places them in an alternate universe (AU) setting, such as a coffee shop or high school, allowing exploration of the characters’ personalities in a strange new world.
Gray’s Firebird books, which includes A Thousand Pieces of You, Ten Thousand Skies Above You, and A Million Worlds With You, is about a girl, Marguerite, who must chase her father’s killer through multiple dimensions. To do so, she keeps jumping into alternate versions of herself, though always in the same time period. The structure allows Gray to portray alternate realities as well provide different takes on her own characters.
I asked her if her experience writing fanfic influenced her Star Wars books—particularly her portrayal of the pivotal character Leia Organa-Solo in Bloodline and the forthcoming Leia, Princess of Alderaan, but she shook her head. “To be honest, I wrote more Star Trek than Star Wars fanfic. As for Leia, I’ve worshiped her since I was seven years old, so it was easy to find her voice. It just clicked, and off I went.”
Thanks to Disney’s careful control of the Star Wars extended universe, Gray cannot talk about specific elements her work in on the franchise. But she does see an overlap between fandoms for the property and her Star Wars books.

“When I was writing Lost Stars and the general plot was announced, there was a lot of preliminary feedback from parts of fandom like ‘what is the young adult stuff'[and] ‘what is all this romance doing in my Star Wars?’ But then the same people read the book and [became] invested in the relationships. What they didn’t realize is romance is ‘shipping, and fandoms do love ‘shipping.”
Gray has been fascinated watching fanfic evolve. She points to Harry Potter as the fandom that changed the game forever. Before, she said, fanfic was something people did but didn’t talk about that much, even though they already loved writing or reading it. “Harry Potter is when fanfic really became something everyone did or read. It just exploded then. Perhaps because there were so many characters, and such a rich world, readers could be invested in so many different things. Now, it’s open and established and going strong.”
And, yes, Gray still writes fanfic. “It’s pure,” she said. “It’s a different thing than my original writing. I can just turn one part of my brain off and go. It fuels my creativity.”
Claudia Gray’s most recent (original) book is Defy the Stars. Leia, Princess of Alderaan will be published September 1.