For as long as people have been creating, telling and writing stories, other people have been writing fan fiction. As far back as the early 20th centuary, fans of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels wrote their own stories. They were also one of the first organised, unified fandoms, calling themselves The Baker Street Irregulars and mostly writing from the viewpoint that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. Many of these fan fiction stories have been professionally published. The Baker Street Irregulars were also responsible for coining the term 'canon', in referance to fan fiction.
However, the first recorded instances of Real People (RP) fan fiction, which is the brand our Beatles fan fics belong to, date from almost 100 years earlier. The famous English authors, the Bronte sisters; Charlotte, Anne and Emily, wrote many stories about The Duke of Wellington and his sons, in a manner that was echoed and replicated in their later classics such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
Hopefully that fact alone should dispel the myth that fan fiction is all intelligently vapid, poorly written, melodramatic retellings of fantasy! You are among the literary greats!
Jumping forward a few hundred years, to around the late sixties and early seventies, there was a fan fiction boom with the advent - and moreso, the cancellation - of that cult sci-fi, Star Trek. When the original series was cancelled, the fans turned to each other to fufil thier need for more stories and boldly going. Interestingly, around now Mary Sue named and recognised. For more about her, see How to write better fan fiction.
Star Trek is probably still the biggest fan fiction fandom, with many published fan fics in novel and short story form. The first fan fiction magazine also belonged to this fandom, Spockonalia in 1967.
Magazines and fan conventions were the first large unifing force of fan fiction fandoms, although most people still continued to write it alone, sharing it with only a few of thier friends. And of course, this is where the Beatles come into the story.
When Beatlemania exploded in 1964, it would be a safe bet that Beatles fan fiction wasn't far behind, although as in the case of most fandoms at this time, it was mostly written by girls, in spiral notebooks (according to Rooftop Sessions!) and shared only among other Beatles fans in close proximity.
Most referances date Beatles fan fiction from the seventies, though I would imagine it began when Beatlemania did, and had a dramatic rise after they split up - in the same way Star Trek fan fiction did after the cancellation of the show - satisfying the need for more stories, or in this case, more Beatles being Beatles.
The biggest revolution in fan fiction, and Beatles fan fiction alike came with the advent of the internet. Now, for the first time fans were able to share thier stories with like minded people from all over the world on a scale impossible before.
It didn't take long for Beatles stories to start popping up too. Many sites have now gone, such as Sunday Night At The Palladium, The Blue Submarine Basement, Happy Rishi Kesh Cafe, and many more, but a few of the original sites - most notably the ezine, Rooftop Sessions - still remain. Rooftops, interestingly, could be viewed as the transition site for Beatles fan fiction - from the old method of notebooks and pencils and homemade fanzines to the modern sharing on the internet.
With the new online community, however, came controversy and questions about the morality of writing RP fan fiction, and questions over defamation of character and libal. Don't panic! That's not as serious as it sounds, see Fan Fiction and The Law for more info. Nevertheless, a blow was dealt to many RP fandoms when one of the largest fan fiction sites, fanfiction.net, decided to remove and stop hosting all forms of RP fiction.
But, there was an upside. Beatles fan fiction writers (and, I imagine, other RP fandoms) were brought together by this, as they had to create more sites and communities, some of which are still going strong today.
And then, perhaps not so importantly in the history of fan fiction at large, but impotant here nonetheless, the Beatles Fan Fiction Dirctory - with its webmaster's limited knowledge of HTML - came into existance in Summer 2003.
By then, most of the previous directorys had fallen away, so the BFFD enjoyed a large response quite quickly, and I'm still listing new and old stories at a rate of knotts now!
