I’m the kind of person who spends a lot of time pondering unanswerable questions that are only tangentially related to real life. It’s not always a desirable trait, but I like to think it’s a good thing for a writer. The questions I’ve been pondering this week have to do with fan fiction – stories written by fans based on their favorite TV shows, books, movies and other forms of entertainment.

Fan fiction (fanfic) isn’t something most professional writers and editors usually pay much attention to. It occupies murky legal ground, since it’s derived from other people’s copyrighted works, and because of this it’s usually not commercially saleable or publishable. For decades fan fiction was an underground activity, with die-hard fans exchanging stories through inexpensively produced newsletters. Enter the Internet, with easy distribution and instant feedback, and fan fiction has exploded.

My sudden interest in fan fiction started with the fear that TV-watching was sucking the creativity and motivation right out of my brain. Being me, instead of just pulling the plug, I started researching (when in doubt, read a book). The book I’m reading (Television and the Quality of Life by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), is a little out of date (1990), but still interesting and probably reasonably accurate, DVRs and internet TV notwithstanding. One of the authors’ findings was that TV viewing induces a passive state in the viewer, and that this passivity lingers after the set is turned off (“passive spillover”). No surprise there.

Having got that far, my natural oppositional defiance kicked in. Being a writer, and mainly concerned with the negative effect TV might have on my creative process, I started wondering about all those people who get so involved with certain TV shows that they actually turn off the set and write their own stories. This phenomenon seemed to be in direct opposition to the brain-sucking theory.

To get an idea of how many people were spurred to creativity by TV, I Googled and found the TV page of fanfiction.net – with its 884 entries. Almost nine hundred fictional worlds that lingered on in at least one person’s mind after the screen went dark, and inspired them to continue the story – not just in daydreams, but by investing the time and effort to write it down, post it, and to connect with other fans. Of these 884 shows, just over a third boasted a dozen posts or fewer; a hair under two-thirds had fewer than 100. After that it got crazy, with the top 3% clocking in with over 5,000 entries apiece, topped by Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a whopping 37,665 posts – and counting.

Always before, if I thought about fan fiction at all, I wondered about the writers. Were they any good? If so, why didn’t they make up their own characters and stories? Were they just obsessive lunatics with too much time on their hands in between dressing up like Spock and learning to speak Klingon?

But while looking at this list, a different set of questions came to mind – not about the writers, but about the fictional worlds they adopted and wanted to make their own.

What makes certain fictional worlds so compelling that tens of thousands of people cast off their TV-induced stupor, take a step past fantasizing, and actually feel compelled to participate? What differentiates these shows from others that merely offer an hour’s distraction, interchangeable with everything else on the idiot box? What creates such a strong identification with the characters and their milieu that it inspires people to abandon the original visual medium and expand the imaginary world on the page?

And how can I, as a writer, create such compelling worlds of my own?

My quick, unscientific analysis of fanfiction.net didn’t yield any obvious answers about why certain shows captivate fanfic writers. Sheer ratings popularity isn’t necessarily a factor; CSI, #3 on the list, is watched by 17-20 million people each week while Buffy only reached about 4-6 million viewers per episode. Seinfeld and The Sopranos, hugely popular shows, weigh in with a paltry 136 and 73 stories respectively, while Dark Angel (a little-known post-apocalyptic sci-fi offering that was cancelled after two seasons) boasts 6,231. There is also a mix of content: half of the top fanfic shows are sci-fi/fantasy offerings; the other half are split about equally between crime/medical shows (ER, House, all three CSIs) and soap-opera type shows (One Tree Hill, The O.C.)

Since I’m a fan of many of the top fanfic shows on the list, I asked myself what made me tune in week after week and buy the DVDs. I noticed a heroic/rescue theme – saving the world, saving lives, fighting crime. And then there’s the “team” element – tight-knit groups of people that share an intense, single-minded, altruistic purpose. Many of the top-listed shows feature the team relationships as much as, if not more than, the weekly plot lines.

But those are only conjectures based on my personal preferences, and they don’t fit all of the top shows, or explain why similar shows don’t catch the attention of fanfic writers in the same way.

I do know that there are certain fictional worlds that I return to again and again, whether in books or on TV. Stories I wish I had written; characters I wish were my friends. And I also know that one of my dreams as a writer has always been to create such a world for readers, giving them characters and stories that carry them through dark times and give them something of lasting meaning; worlds they wish they lived in; stories that never end.

It may be that the answers I’m looking for just aren’t there – maybe trying to analyze why some fictional worlds take on a life of their own is as useful as analyzing a relationship to figure out why you’re in love. Maybe the spark is magical and unquantifiable – an unpredictable alchemy of time and place and story and audience.

But I wish I knew how they did it.