Why Every Author Should Write Fanfiction

Preposterous, you say. Why would I waste my time on something that can never be published when I could be working on completing my novel, or perfecting my craft?

Because the benefits outweigh the costs—and it’s so much fun!

(In case you’re still wondering what fanfic is, though, here’s a handy explanation: fanfiction is the term for stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.

Say you’re a fan of the television show Supernatural (in which case, I say: you have good taste!) and you didn’t like the way an episode in Season 2 was handled. Sam, you think to yourself, doesn’t talk that way.

Or you’re in love with the Bollywood movie Jab We Met, and you’re endlessly annoyed by the fact that Geet had red nail polish in one scene and no nail polish in the scene immediately preceding it. You want an explanation, and since there isn’t any in the actual film, you decide to provide it for yourself.

This, in essence, is fanfiction. It’s not part of the original creation, the characters and their world don’t belong to you, and—most importantly—you can’t publish it, and make money off it.)

 

So why would anyone want to write fanfiction?

Well, the simplest answer would be the same reason you’d give if someone asks you, ‘Why do you write?’

Because you love it. Because you can’t see yourself not writing.

 

I got into writing fanfiction back in the day, when a television show called The Pretender aired on Star World. The show ended abruptly, since it had been cancelled in the middle of its story arc, and I was left feeling like someone had ripped out the last few pages of a book I loved. I had to know how the story ended!

So, I did what any teenager in the 21st century does—I went online, looking for any information I could find.

I discovered fanfiction.

It was a new world of stories featuring the characters I loved, and—most important to me at the time—they all had endings! I devoured all the stories I could read, and before long, I was fully conversant with the various terms used to describe fanfiction, like AU (Alternate Universe), and WAFF (Warm and Fuzzy Feelings) and even PWP (Porn without Plot).

At this point, I had been writing, on and off, for three or four years, always a poem or a short story at a time. It was a desultory kind of writing, I wrote when the mood struck me, never showed my writing to anyone else, and there it stayed, shut up in notebooks and journals.

And then I started writing fanfiction. The website featuring The Pretender fanfiction was defunct by then, but it didn’t matter, because by then I had seen the movie Serenity, and fallen quite in love with the incomplete story of two of the main characters, Mal and Inara.

I went looking for fanfiction of them and discovered LiveJournal. I read hundreds of stories, leaving gushing reviews for some and bookmarking many more.

Image by Yumeshojo.

My initial fan stories were all attempts to give Mal and Inara’s story a happy ending. I posted my stories to communities dedicated to fanfiction about these two characters, and many of the authors I had interacted with were kind enough to comment on my writing. And so started my love affair with fanfiction.

I wrote every day, commented endlessly, and became friends with a unique circle of creative, fun, and extremely welcoming people.

So what did I learn from writing fanfic? Why would I recommend that every author should start out in fanfiction and continue writing it?

• It’s easy: Fanfic is the perfect place for beginners to start – you have ready-made characters, and a ready-made world for them to inhabit. All you need to worry about in your stories is the writer-ly stuff, like sentence structure, plotting, and pacing.

Fanfic is the perfect place for beginners to start writing. ^{[Tweet this!]}

• Instant feedback: Sure, you can blog your original fiction on your own website, but when you write fanfic, you have a ready base of people willing to give you instant feedback on your writing. They’ll tell you when your sentence construction sounds clunky, when characters are offbeat, when you misspell words like ‘occassionally’. They’ll be your biggest cheerleaders when you get it right; they’ll tell you in detail what lines they loved, what moved them, what made them cry, laugh, and save your story to their bookmarks.

• Broadening your skills: When you write fanfic, you don’t end up sticking to the kinds of stories you’ve read all your life. I wrote 100 word vignettes for a community on The Lord of the Rings, where I learned how much you can say in just a few words and the turn of a phrase. I wrote stories in the second person point of view, when I realised how immersive they could be for a reader.

• I wrote stories that explored characters – the villains became misunderstood heroes in their own right, incidents in the original work were retold by minor characters, protagonists became antagonists in alternate universes where just a single decision had a profound impact on their lives – it went on.

• Fanfic gives you the freedom to be a male character, or a female character, or an elf, or a dark wizard, or mage— whatever you want. Writing fanfic gives you the freedom to try writing non-linear stories, or flashback fic, or a hundred other things you’ve seen and loved coming from other writers, but never knew if you could pull off on your own.

Fanfic gives you the freedom to try writing non-linear stories, or in second POV or a hundred other things you’ve seen from other writers, but never knew if you could pull off on your own.
^{[Tweet this!]}

• Learning to appreciate—and write—variety and minorities: Whenever I see questions on Quora asking ‘How do I write believable x characters?’—x being female, black, Chinese, Indian, gay or transsexual characters, all I can think about is the wide variety of fanfic I read, featuring nearly every kind of character known to man. And the very best of them all rang true.

• In the fanfic circles, I read—and write—stories featuring same-sex relationships. Being a heterosexual woman, same-sex relationships were never something that impacted my sheltered life before discovering fanfic, but reading about them made me appreciate the idea of telling stories about people different from me. My characters stopped being cookie cutter versions of people; always heterosexual, always looking to settle down and marry and have as many kids as possible. Reading and writing these stories, I realised that not everyone’s ‘happily ever after’ looks the same. And that’s alright.

• Sense of community: Writing is a lonely business. It’s solitary. It consists of you, in your room, alone with a computer or a notebook, bringing things to life. And no matter how much they love you, sometimes your significant others and families and friends will not understand the frustrations of dealing with a character who just won’t behave the way you want them to, or how horrible it is to be afflicted with Writer’s Block, or how terrifying it is, staring at a blank page. This is where your community becomes your best friend.

• I’ve bitched about my characters to my fanfic friends, and listened to their own horror stories of never-ending tales, and plot bunnies that just won’t die. I’ve asked them to critique my attempts at original fiction, and their comments and feedback have been invaluable.

• In rare cases, it’s publishable: There are instances where what we would now call fanfiction has been published. To be fair, though, these are all cases where the copyright on the original has expired. Examples include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Mary Reilly, and Wide Sargasso Sea. 

• It’s fun! Perhaps most importantly, fandom is fun. Fanfic is fun. You write stories you never thought you’d write – simply because your online friends love certain characters. You get the chance to read the exact story you always wanted to read, the exact scene you always wanted to see play out for your favourite characters—for free! You get to experience the joy of creating, and in return, you get comments and compliments you wish you could frame and display on your walls, if only more people knew what fanfic was.

In end, nothing I say can ever be really enough.

All I can tell you is that fanfic can be a fun and fulfilling way to earn your writing chops, and to broaden your mind as a writer—and as a person.

Additional reading: 10 Famous Authors Who Write Fanfiction

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[mood| cheerful]
[music| Kinare: Mohan Kanan, Queen OST (2014)]