Using Fanfiction to Flirt: Interview with Francis Le about "I Wrote This For the You I Made Up Long Ago"

Francis Le holding a copy of their essay "This is a Fairy Tale"

Francis and I met at a local coffee shop (with a book store attached) at noon. The place is decorated for Christmas, silver tinsel strung over wooden rafters and an angel tree set up in between the lounging area and the counter. It’s crowded this time of year, being only a few blocks from the university campus and a week away from finals. 

Francis is already there. Their coffee—an iced latte with a maple brown sugar syrup—is half drunk by the time I arrive and stays that way. They are dressed for the season: a white turtle neck under a brown, long sleeve button up with vertical stripes, half tucked into a pair of loose fitting blue jeans cuffed at the ankles. It’s no surprise that they are in the creative business with publications already under their belt.

Overall, it’s a cozy little place, perfect for a classic coffee shop romance fanfiction. It’s got a homey, romantic vibe to it that makes it easy to fall in love. This however, is not the romance experienced in Le’s essay, “I Wrote This For the You I Made Up Long Ago.” Instead, through a mix of rebounding and asexuality, readers find angst in place of love.

Raven Reighard: I have Francis Le here with me today, discussing their CNF piece. So let’s get started. I really loved it. I loved it so much. I left so many notes on your piece.

Francis Le: I appreciate the notes

RR: (laughs) yeah, no. It’s having to deal with—it’s sort of picking up girls essentially using fanfiction lines is how I would describe it sort of, but it’s also gender and sexuality and even about writing itself. So, just to get started, what was your original idea and how has it changed over time?

FL: Yeah, so this piece actually started pre-pitch in which when I was with the partner of three years, which was mentioned in the piece, it’s kind of the motivating factor. I actually wrote a piece talking about why I stopped reading fanfiction when I started dating him. And it was a really good piece and I did not get to finish it before the break up happened. And so, the structure of that was still on my mind when I needed a piece to pitch in general. 

Then I was looking through Modern Love which is a—I discovered it as a show, but it’s also a written vertical for the New York Times where they talk about untraditional love and relationships and from there I was like, oh, well I just had a crazy summer and I would love to talk about that in terms of asexuality and fanfiction because as I was living through the scenes explained in the piece, I kept thinking “this is just like the fanfic I’m reading, it’s like the fanfic,” and then I kind of remembered the structure of that first piece. I remembered the pitch that I wanted to do and I kind of combined the writing style of the first piece with the pitch. And that’s kind of how I get this weird amalgamation of a story.

RR: Yeah. That was a thing that I was wondering about: the why you stopped reading fanfiction with this person, but you don’t have to go into that at all. It’s cool to see that sort of was the starting thing. So, yeah, what was something that surprised you about this piece? I know from our discussions the fact that Fiona saw a man afterwards was one of them, but was there anything else?

FL: Yeah, that was definitely one of the most surprising pieces and honestly at that point, I wasn’t entirely sure what the ending of the piece was supposed to be because it felt so continuous still. And so being able to kind of put together—it was almost as if I needed Fiona to get together with a man for it to click for me, of like, oh, the feelings I am associating aren’t actually with this person. It is with the fact that I was acting out a concept that inherently can not be successful because it is not real.

RR: Yeah.

FL: Something else that kind of surprised me about the writing in a more formalistic sense is the fact that the tone ended up being a lot more serious and kind of yearning than I was expecting. That is very very common for my type of writing initially, but when I first pitched the piece, I wanted it to be humorous, light-hearted, and, like, a quick, snappy piece. And I think the tone ended up settling in that state that it currently is in because I realized that, kind of similar to your piece, but totally in a different way, that this piece is also a little bit about grief and it’s about loss of identity. And so it needed that more mournful tone and it also needed to sound a bit like a romanticized fanfiction for it to fully fit the themes.

RR: Yeah, that makes so much sense. So, yeah, was that ending sort of the hardest part of writing it? Or?

FL: I would say the hardest part about writing it was having to write the full scene. When I first wrote the messy draft for this, it was miniature vignettes that went back and forth between that scene and some other scenes from that summer, but when I had my first revision workshop with our professor, I realized that, just kind of through that conversation—she helped me realize that it needed to be grounded in that one scene because that was the more important one, it was kind of the transformative session. And so, after that, I sat down and I wrote the entire scene action for action. It ended up being three times the length of the current piece, and that was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Not only because it was doing research and trying to remember exact details, but also I had to grapple with the fact that I was very unhappy during that scene and I was still kind of ashamed of the stuff that I did.

RR: That is so fair, especially with like—I’ve mentioned this before—but using the word “whump.” As someone who reads a lot of fanfiction, whump is like—that’s exactly that emotional state.

FL: It’s a whump, yeah.

RR: And that’s so cool. Like, that sucks, but it’s so cool in, like, a writerly way. So, yeah, what was the editorial process like? Was it sort of just that big section?

FL: Yeah, I think the editorial process really came together once I was finally able to write the whole scene. After that, it was taking the musing from the original piece and being able to intercut that in between sections of the scene itself. And in that way, it wasn’t cutting up and reorganizing everything, it was just kind of adding context into a scene that was already there.

RR: That’s honestly very similar to something that I had to do with my piece. Because it was so many drafts that I had to splice altogether. But (laughs), moving on to a different topic. Since the piece has to do so much with fanfiction, I wanted to ask, do you have any favorite fanfiction authors?

FL: (drums on the table) I wrote them down for this.

RR: (laughs) Awesome.

FL: Honorable mention is bizarrestars [works only available to those with an account]—and I will show you the spelling of these after. Bizarrestars writes for Harry Potter and Marauders and they are most famous for this piece called Crimson Rivers which is a Hunger Games setting while being Marauders—and it sounds really bad and I am aware of that—but it actually ends up mostly being a piece on loss and trauma and there are so many—because it uses an ensemble cast, it’s able to talk about diversity within racial identities as well as gender identities in a conversation of, like, [they] don’t have labels for this the way we would here. What would this look like in this other world? And it really helped me be able to grapple with a lot of gender identity stuff when I read it. And so that author will always be special for me.

And then, objectively, shaekspeares, who writes for more classical texts like The Secret History. And I really love their work because they will not write a happy ending for their fanfic. They will not—they make things worse for the characters, and I really love that. It’s a very fun kind of meta thing. And so, I’m suffering but I’m happy about it. (laughs)

RR: (laughs) Is that sort of your favorite genre, is probably whump?

FL: Suffering but I’m happy about it. (Laughs)

RR: (laughs) Samesies. Do they influence how you write or is it just the stuff that you like to read?

FL: Um, yeah they do kind of influence the stuff I write. Especially those two. Shaekspeares is, again, an interesting concept because we actually have very similar writing styles in general, but I am inspired by their ability to be able to do meticulous research. So, one of their most famous works is one in which they researched the highways in 1985 to verify that the road trip that they could write about would actually happen. And every single gas station and hotel referenced in the piece is a real one from 1985. I don’t know how this person did it. It’s incredible.

RR: That is so fun. That is an inspiration honestly.

FL: It’s very cool.

RR: So, I think you kind of touched on this already, but I just wanted to confirm that you were already thinking about the fact that you were putting yourself in this fanfiction mindset during.

FL: Yes, there is a piece in it that’s cut where I talk about this fanfiction with a character named Francis. And that character holds their drink in a—he holds his drink in a specific way and he orders specific drinks, and when I was at that bar, I was thinking “this is exactly what he orders and this is how he holds it and his name is Francis and my name is Francis and this is meta and no one is gonna understand it.” That did get cut unfortunately, but it was constantly playing in my head, just kind of these different layers. And this scene that I actually use that comes straight from a fanfiction in that section that’s kind of in a manuscript format is the section I was thinking of during those scenes as well.

RR: That makes a lot of sense. I’ve read, I think, one other of your pieces that was in KCR, it was the editor’s choice last year. That is also kind of a lot about writing itself and it sort of comes in this piece as well. Is that something that you write about a lot? Or what topics do you generally get into in your writing?

FL: I would say that sexuality and gender is not always my main focus when I’m writing but because it is so inherent in the stuff that I read and the stuff that I experience that it always seems to trickle in. Specifically in “This is a Fairy Tale,” that piece was—and it’s mentioned in the piece—it was supposed to just be biographical on Virginia Wolfe, before I realized that it wasn’t. And I feel like that’s a prime example of how that works. Kind of similar with this piece, I knew this one was on sexuality, but I didn’t realize the gender identity would be so important in it until I was rewriting the scene in full length trying to figure out the reasoning behind my actions that night. 

RR: That’s sort of something that I noticed a little bit while I was reading it. That it was more about sexuality with gender always—was like a thing that needed to come up and always did. So, sort of on the topic of your other pieces, what do you think is going to come next for you and your writing? 

FL: Nonfiction-wise, I have some long term pieces about family that I really want to write about, but that’s going to take very meticulous research. It’s actually very very similar to your piece on grief, on trying to discover things about family and not being able to and not getting those answers because of situational stuff. So that’s kind of what I have going for nonfiction. Otherwise I write a lot of short fiction as well. I have a piece that was cut in the final rounds of a very prestigious magazine, so I’m trying to find a home for that one. That one is also about queerness in performance, specifically ballerinas, ballet art. And then I have a couple novels that I’ve been pitching to places. And we’ll see where that goes.

RR: Very cool, very cool. Is there anything else that you wanted to add at all?

FL: (they lean over the table to talk directly into my phone’s microphone) Cringe is cool. We should write more about being cringey and the fact that it’s okay to kind of obsess over stuff and be a little freak. We just have to acknowledge that in a meta way. I think that’s it.

RR: That’s so fair. Where can we find you?

FL: You can find me on Instagram at mfrancislewrites. It’s spelled the same way as my name is with just writing—writes at the end. I’m also on Tumblr under that handle. I write about, well, writing itself just kind of pedagogically. I will also post a lot of memes on there about books and literature because I’m a huge reader. Then, website to come. It just published today and I’m hoping to put my publications on there so people find me more easily. That’s grammatically incorrect but that’s fine.

RR: Alright. Awesome, thank you so much.

FL: Yeah, thanks.

Check out the interview Francis Le did on my piece "About Grief" here.