Is Fanfiction the New Charles Dickens?
By Emma Zande
Fall 2025 Intern
Charles Dickens, one of the greatest English novelists, never intended for his work to be read as full-length novels. His stories first appeared in serial form, as weekly or monthly installments that kept readers on edge, waiting for the next twist in his characters’ lives.
Sound familiar? Today’s young readers do much the same with fanfiction, refreshing Wattpad or AO3 for the next chapter of their favorite worlds. Like Dickens’s fans, they’re consuming stories in real time, just in digital spaces instead of print.
It’s easy to point to smartphones or “shrinking attention spans” as the reason young people gravitate toward fanfiction, graphic novels, and short-form storytelling. But maybe these habits aren’t symptoms of a declining attention span at all—perhaps they’re echoes of how storytelling has constantly evolved. After all, if serialized fiction has captivated readers since the 1830s, can we really call it “a sign of the times” that readers are gravitating to this format?
Of course, social media has reshaped how we read. Many students now struggle with long-form content—thanks in part to gaps in foundational skills, attention fatigue, and the lingering effects of the pandemic. But blaming social media and COVID-19 alone might be too easy. The truth, as always, lies somewhere between Dickens and the “For You” page.
Students struggle with reading long-form content for a variety of reasons. When students are assigned challenging texts, they may find it difficult to understand them simply because they require a level of cognitive skill and critical thinking that they haven’t quite reached. Others may struggle due to learning disabilities such as ADHD or dyslexia. Some may not have a strong vocabulary foundation, making it more difficult to process and understand the meaning and nuance of texts. Some may have working memory deficits, causing them to struggle to organize and retain the information from the text. Others may find the text boring and unrelated to their life—when students cannot see themselves reflected in the material, they often struggle to engage with it.
Likewise, students aren’t engaging in extracurricular reading for a myriad of reasons. They can get easier dopamine hits through short-form digital content, and many of them grew up engaging with this technology from an early age. They also may find themselves overscheduled. When students are bombarded with extracurricular activities, homework, and work, they don’t have the time or energy to read, especially when they’re not accustomed to it. And, they aren’t accustomed to it—students are taught to inspect a paragraph in isolation and identify a thesis, a skill that’s helpful for standardized testing but unhelpful for developing the reading and comprehension skills needed to enjoy longform content.
However, a new wave of public concern regarding literacy has gained wide-spread attention. While there are undeniable reasons to be concerned about decreasing attention spans and reading habits, it is a cyclical tide of concern that we’ve seen many times before. There may be some genuine concerns, but many people aren’t proposing the right solutions.
Educators, parents, and people with Reddit accounts tend to stress the importance of teaching students to read long-form content through assignments and classwork, and they’re not wrong. Research has shown that regular reading helps develop students’ cognitive abilities, including imagination, creativity and critical thought. However, the importance of reading in an educational capacity has little to do with students’ unwillingness to read in an extracurricular capacity. And while there are many reasons students might not read for fun, one of the biggest reasons is quite simple: we’ve stopped showing them that reading can be fun and meet them where they are. Students can, and do, read—they just tend to read fan fiction, video game walkthroughs, YA literature, comic books, and news stories. When asked to report on their reading, students have often been taught, directly or indirectly, that these formats don’t count—so they don’t count them.
We cannot expect to make engaged, lifelong readers out of students who have been told that there is a right and a wrong way to read. So if students aren’t reading less but simply differently, maybe the solution isn’t to pull them away from their alternative reading but to meet them there. Some students struggle with traditional reading methods and can greatly benefit from the incorporation of nontraditional ones: Sparknotes, audiobooks, comic books, graphic novels, read-along novels, large print, magazines, and Speed Reading software can help to engage these students with reading.
While some may get behind alternative reading methods enthusiastically, others might find themselves involuntarily turning their nose up: students can practically hear the adults around them critiquing them with “Back in my day, I had to walk five miles to school while juggling Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy” or other similar quips. I’d remind those adults that if Dickens were alive today, he’d probably have a Wattpad. He knew that stories are meant to meet people where they are—on the street, in the paper, or on the page. For today’s students, that place might not always be between the covers of a traditional book, but it’s storytelling all the same.
Photo by Marcus Spiske for Unsplash
