From Shipping to Ship It

Interview with Britta Lundin

By Suzette Chan
May 7, 2018

Fan fiction was once hidden from view, but as writers began to post their stories online, it became clear that fan fiction was a massively popular form of fan engagement. Not only does writing fic allow fans to express their interest in a show, it allows fans to explore and express their own identities.

Writer Britta Lundin dramatizes these dynamics through the points of view of two fully realized characters in her debut novel, Ship It. Claire is a teenaged fan fiction writer who finds herself caught up in the real-life world of the people who produce her favourite show. Forest is one of the lead actors of that show, and one-half of a fandom OTP. After fumbling a question from Claire at a convention, Forest gets a rocky introduction into the world of fan fiction.

Lundin has experienced both worlds. She used to write and post fan fiction. Now, she's a staff writer for the CW show, Riverdale. Lundin kindly took some time out for a phone interview with Sequential Tart the night before a landmark episode of the show.

Leading off the questions, I reached into one of the ideas in Ship It, that fandom is personal because it's so intricately linked to a person's identity. Below is her answer to that question and the rest of the interview.

Sequential Tart: I want to start with a personal question. What was your first fandom?

Britta Lundin: It was the X-Files. I found it in, I think, seventh grade. I tuned in one night and watched it on a whim. Immediately after watching it, I remember going to our family's desktop computer that we all shared and searching. It was before Google; I Alta Vista-searched for the X-Files because I immediately needed to learn more about what this show was, who these people were. Were Mulder and Scully ever going to kiss? I needed to know everything about it. I fell into a deep love of the show, right then and there. After that -- this was early days, late 80s, early 90s -- I found forums, and after the forums, someone must have linked to a fan fiction. Then, found that people were writing stories that were set in the world of X-Files, and nothing was ever the same for me after that. Any time middle school or high school got difficult or hard, or I got stressed out, at least I could go read a story about Mulder and Scully being lovers and that would make me feel better.

ST: I don't want to out you, but did you ever write fan fiction?

BL: I did. I didn't write under my own name, obviously. I did an X-Files back in the day. I've searched and searched, and I can't find it, but I think it's lost in the sands of time because it was so early in the days of the internet. I have more recently, as well, although I haven't published any in the last five or 10 years. There's this sense that once you decide you're going to be a writer to make a living, that there's an economy of time. I only have so many hours in a day. To write something that's just for fun, just for fandom, instead of focusing on my career and doing all the things I'm supposed to be doing to advance my career, is difficult to do, but sometimes [I say to myself], "I just need a break right now. I'm just going to write some fic." But I haven't been publishing it.

ST: How did you get into writing as a profession? Did you decide that this was the route for you after you started writing fan fiction, or was that totally a different, separate thing?

BL: Yeah, I think writing fan fiction helped me. It was some of the first times that I ever did creative writing. I was never thinking that I would be a writer. It took me a long time to even be able to call myself a writer, like at a party or something, when I was introducing myself. It was hard to admit to that, because it seemed something that was impossible to do, and it seemed foolhardy to even try. I don't think I was ready to tell people I was a writer until I was 28 or 29. I'm 32 now, so this was fairly recent in life.

I do think that writing fan fiction, and reading fan fiction, and meeting other people who are engaged in these creative pursuits, definitely helped me at a young age, to form those connections in my brain that would become useful later on.

For my undergraduate, I studied political science, intending to get into politics and then discovered that I maybe would enjoy shaping the cultural conversation through making media, rather than through electing candidates. They both sort of have the same end goals, but they come at it a different way: trying to better the world, but I'm trying to do through media, so I decided to go to film school. I have an MFA in film production from University Texas in Austin. I was going to be a filmmaker, a director.

ST: Is this why Ship It was originally a screenplay?

BL: Yeah. Coming out of film school, I had written a bunch of scripts that were maybe a good way to get better at writing, to get better at structure, dialogue, scene work, and all of that stuff. But it wasn't until I wrote Ship It that I started getting attention from people, like production companies, who were maybe interested in it. It won a few screenwriting awards. I got my agent from that script. I think what appealed to people was that this was a very personal story. I don't think there were a lot of other writers in Hollywood then, or maybe even now, who were writing scripts about gay fan fiction, so it stuck out in that way. I remember thinking it would be a hindrance, like, "No one's going to want this script about this kid who writes gay fan fiction. Nobody even knows that that is, like who am I kidding?" But it was a story that was so personal, and important to me, that I felt like I had to tell it anyway.

It was very exciting when that started to get traction. I initially wrote it because I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I wanted it to be my first feature. I was going to direct it, try to put the financing together for it, debut at Sundance. It was going to be this whole thing, and then, a totally unexpected thing happened. Freeform Books, which is located in L.A and is the publishing arm of Freeform the network, reached out to me and said they had read the screenplay. They loved it, and thought it would make a great young adult novel, and was I interested in writing that? I was like, "Yeah, of course!" I love YA. I've been reading it since I was a teenager, and I never thought that I would be an author. I had never written a book before, but I thought that it was a great opportunity. I could totally see it as a YA book, so I wrote them a few sample chapters, and they loved it. So we moved forward and now it's coming out. It was kind of a wild, unpredictable, unexpected ride, but it's been a really fun and rewarding way to get the story out there.

ST: That's amazing. I've only recently discovered the fan fiction community, well, recently in the last 10 years. The fiction is fun, and so on, but one of the things that I really like about it is how the community makes its own rules and has its own language. You've got a great line in the book, where Forest says to Claire: "I feel like I only understand about half of what you say." I really like learning that about the communities, as well. Like, what are the writing conventions here? And how do you go about things? But, of course, this also leads to a lot of controversies. One of the fun things about reading Ship It was recognizing some of the controversies, or at least, they were similar to some of the fandom controversies I knew of. I was wondering if some of the stuff that went into Ship It were things that you had witnessed or experienced or heard of?

BL: Yeah. I get a lot of people asking if the show, the fictional show in Ship It, "Demon Heart", is based on a specific show from the real world. The truth is that this sort of scenario keeps happening with all kinds of different shows and it will keep happening until queer readings of characters are taken seriously in Hollywood.

It's not necessarily based on Supernatural or Sherlock or Once Upon A Time or Teen Wolf, or any of the many, many shows that go through this, but it also kind of is. It's like an amalgam of everything. It's funny that you mention that line. I like that line, too. I wanted to write a story that felt authentic to fans who come from that sub-culture and totally understand everything I'm talking about in it, but also felt accessible to people who don't necessarily know anything about this world, don't know anything about fandom, or even what shipping is. I wanted to explain the world enough that those people could maybe have a little bit more empathy for where these fans are coming from and understand why a TV show can have an outsized impact on somebody's life.

That's why, in the first 20 pages of the book, Claire explains what shipping is to her clueless mom, so if you didn't know what shipping is, now you do. That scene is specifically there to give a primer to the people who are coming in to this totally cold, who don't know what's going on. You also have a way in through Forest, who also is coming in cold and doesn't understand. Forest is an actor who was hired because he's a good actor and he's talented, and he's pretty, and he's someone you want to see on your TV screen every week. He wasn't necessarily hired because he's good at standing on the stage and talking about the social politics of television. That wasn't part of his job description, and yet he finds himself in this situation where now he has to navigate those waters. He's totally out of his depth and it shows, and he ends up pissing off the fans because of it.

But this is the thing that we expect TV actors to do on a regular basis, to get out there and be up to date on the social politics of TV, and to understand what representation is, and why it's important. If they mess any of these things up, they're going to get giffed, and they're going to be put on the internet, and the YouTube video will be there, and it will rack up a million views, and their image will be tarnished, all before they've had a chance to step off the stage.

So I understand why these things are important, but I also understand why it's a hard position to put actors in. It's not that I wrote Ship It so that every up-and-coming actor who was just cast in a fandomy kind of TV show could read it, but, you know, they could read it. They could understand where these fans are coming from a little bit better. I want it to be accessible to both sides.

ST: You're writing on a show that has generated a lot of ship controversies. Did you join the Riverdale staff during the writing of Ship It, and did that experience inform anything in edits or later versions of Ship It?

BL: When I got on Riverdale -- I've been on it since the first season -- I had already written the screenplay. I was just in the process of selling it as a book when I got on staffed on Riverdale, so I wrote the first chapters of the book during my first season at Riverdale. And yeah, it absolutely affected the writing. It's been a really interesting to work on a show like Riverdale, which has a booming fan community around it. I feel like I understand where the fans are coming from, because I've been there. But also, it's been interesting to see it from the other side, and be like, "What does this feel like when you are on the receiving end of hundreds of thousands of tweets of fans asking for specific ships, as opposed to being on the sending end of all of that?"

The main take-away I've had from the experience is that, when you're a fan, you look at a TV show, and all you see is the end result. You don't know why any of the creative decisions were made the way they were, and so you have no choice but to just assume that's the way that the showrunner intended the show to come out, that every decision was intentionally made, which neglects the very intense, complicated, ridiculously difficult, logistical nightmare that is scheduling a TV show, where you have to bring it in on budget, and you have to worry about actor availability, and scheduling, and does this scene have to be during the day or can we shoot it at night? Usually it's the opposite: does the scene have to be at night or can we shoot it during the day? Does the scene have to be on location or can we shoot it on one of our standing sets in the studio? Do we need all these actors in this scene, because it's going to cost more money and take more time to shoot, or can we pare this down to just two actors?

So if you're looking at a scene, and maybe you see a scene where only one half of your ship is in the scene, and you're thinking to yourself, "Wow, they really hate my favourite character. They're not in the scene; they're never in the scene. I'm taking away from that, that the writers hate my favourite character and hate my favourite ships."

You might be right, or it might be because an actor's dog was throwing up all night, and they didn't come to work that day. Or because they missed a flight; or because we ran out of money; or it could be a million different reasons. But all of that is an obscured part of the process. All fandom can see is the end result, so they have no choice but to draw conclusions from that. It's a flawed way to understand why decisions get made, if they're trying to get into the psyche of the showrunner. But if you're on the other side, it's like, "Yeah, it's just a messy, complicated process." They're just barely trying to get by, to make a TV show the best they can. Your ship may not be at the top of their minds.

ST: You're living Claire's dream, in a way, because you're now in the room where the canon is happening. You're participating in making it. Do you feel any kind of responsibility to give voice to things that might not have a voice? You mentioned earlier about queer ships and queer relationships on a TV show. Do you feel a responsibility for bringing things like that forward?

BL: Yeah. I do. I mean ... It's one of the reasons I got into writing for TV, was because I wanted to tell stories of people who don't always see their stories on television. A big part of that is seeing more queer characters and queer women on TV. When I was a teenager, I was a young lesbian who didn't really fully understand myself or my own sexuality, but I knew that I wasn't straight. I could go on the internet and look at fan fiction, and there was a million stories being written about queer characters online that you weren't getting on television at that time. This was in the early 2000s, and the gay characters on TV at that point were, you know, Will and Grace, and basically that was it. There were others, not a ton, and not ones that felt like they were written just for me. But what you get in fan fiction is so many stories. These same characters are getting written over and over and over as gay. You can get angsty stories or you can get happy stories. You can get ones where they're tragic or ones with a happy ending, or fluffy ones or whatever you want.

ST: The idea is that there are many possibilities, right? Not just one fate that lesbian characters have fallen into in recent years.

BL: Yeah, exactly. When I got on Riverdale, I definitely wanted to make sure we were having queer characters represented on the show, and representing all kinds of marginalized identities. I feel there are also lots of other writers looking out for these issues, but trying to get queer women on the show is something I've been excited about from day one.

I wrote an episode this week, season two, episode 17 of Riverdale where Cheryl Blossom has a lesbian kiss. We had made allusions to the fact that maybe Cheryl was bisexual or queer in some way. Fandom had been shipping her together with a character, Toni. That ship finally goes to canon this week, and it gets to go canon in my episode. I'm just so excited and delighted to help put this storyline out into the world. It could have happened in anyone's episode, and the fact it happened in mine is a little bit my showrunner giving me a nod, like, "This one's yours to put out there."

ST: They plot the story points and then they assign the writers? Is that generally how it works?

BL: It's so collaborative. We all work on every single episode. We all break the episodes together and we write the outlines together. What happens is, at a certain point, a showrunner says, "Okay, Britta, this is going to be your episode." Then, you're the person who ushers it through the notes process, and the person who goes up to Vancouver, where we shoot. [For episodes Lundin writes] I'm on set overseeing the shooting process, and I'm sitting in on the props meetings and the costumes meetings and the extras meetings. All of that stuff. But as far as the writing goes, it's very, very collaborative. We all work on everybody's episode.

ST: Congratulations. That's amazing. I just can't even imagine!

BL: Thank you. I'm super excited. It's happening tomorrow and I hope that the fandom loves it as much as I do. It's a great kiss. It's slow motion. The music kicks in at the right moment. It's cinematic. I feel like it's going to launch a thousand gifs. I think it's going to be beautiful and the fans are going to freak out. It's so lovely.

ST: Were you an Archie reader before you got onto Riverdale? Did you read those comics?

BL: It's funny. I wasn't. I don't even know if I had read one until I got this meeting for Riverdale. Then I immediately called my friend Brandy, who is the biggest Archie fan I know. I was, "I will buy you drinks all night long as long as you tell me everything you know about Archie comics." She was like, "I have never wanted a phone call in my life more than I want this one. That's my dream!" So she told me everything I didn't know for the meeting. I went in and when I met with my showrunner [Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa] the first time, I was knowledgeable about the different dynamics between them. But no, I'd never read the comics until I got the job, and now, boxes of comics arrive all the time!

ST: At this point, do the comics serve as a reference for the show, or is the show now its own thing?

BL: It's its own thing, but the nice thing is that our showrunner is a giant Archie fan. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Archie comics. He's been reading them his whole life and he's been working at Archie Comics as the chief creative director. He just knows everything. So any time there we're like, "We need a bowling alley in town. What's the name of the Riverdale bowling alley?" Half the time, he just knows it already, and the other half of the time, we refer to a list that our writer's PA [production assistant] has created for us, which is a list of all the canon locations and characters he can find. He spends his days going through Archie comics and looking for more. In the first season, we had the Twilight Drive-In, and I'm pretty sure that was named after something he dug up from an Archie comic. [Editrix's note: the drive-in in the comics is the Starlight]. We have a character named Rad Brad that came out of the comics. Fangs Fogerty, that was pulled right out of the comics. Anything that feels weird or off for a CW show, it's probably because it's an Archie comics' reference. That's what you'll find is different from your regular, everyday show. It's because of all of these references. It's just something fun about them.

ST: That's awesome. I saw you were signing books last weekend at a convention?

BL: Yeah, I was at Wondercon.

ST: So, you were a guest at a convention. What's that like now?

BL: Yeah, that's true! It's funny. It's weird, because when I wrote Ship It, I wrote what I imagined what it would be like to be a hot, young actor at conventions. I gave [Forest] things like an entourage of people telling him where to go, and when he needed to be there, and people telling him how to dress and fixing tables before he went on stage. I do think that happens for the upper echelon, like fancy actors who come to conventions. But when I go to a convention, it's like you have to wait in line to get your badge. There's no one telling you where to go, and I'm constantly afraid I'm going to be late. I'm all rumpled and my hair looks like ridiculous. This is not the VIP experience that I imagined I would have! If I maybe sell a million copies of something, I could get there one day. For now, it's just like being a fan at a convention, but you have more responsibilities and more ways you could totally screw it up.

ST: Finally, are you working on anything else we should keep an eye out for?

BL: We're waiting to find out if Riverdale gets a third season, which seems likely, and, if so, I'll be working on Riverdale season three next year. [Editrix's note: CW renewed Riverdale.]

Also, I have another book idea I'm noodling around. I never intended to get into writing YA. I never intended to write a book. As soon as I was finished, I was like, "Wow, I don't know if I ever want to do that again." Now that it's been a few months since I turned in my last draft, I don't know, maybe I'll do that again. Maybe you'll see another book from me in the future. We're still figuring it out.

Britta Lundin — Official Website
Ship It — Official Website