I’m here to talk to you today about a form of writing that has gone largely unrecognized by those who are not internet denizens: fanfiction.
Fanfiction, or fanfic, is writing created using material that is not original. The writer may have used another writer’s world and characters and done something different with them (for example, making Harry Potter fall in love with Hermione instead of Ginny), or they may have used the characters and taken them somewhere else (Harry, Ron, and Hermione in Middle Earth, or in normal high school. This is called Alternate Universe, or AU, fanfic), or they may have created their own characters and put them in someone else’s world.
Fanfic writers write fanfic for many reasons. Some think that the source material (called “canon”) has done something silly with the story and want to fix it, or they like the characters or world and want to play with them, or they explore the many what ifs in any given story. Some people simply lack the desire to create their own stories, and some use it to practice their writing skills without having to worry about the development of a world or characters.
I want to be clear: there is nothing wrong with fanfiction. You can find many arguments on the internet for and against it, everybody has their own opinion. Is it legal? Yes. Can you publish it? No, unless you change the story enough that it’s not recognizable as fanfic. Is it written only by people who are uncreative/lack imagination/are too lazy to create their own stuff? No, fanfic writers are very creative. If you think they aren’t, you haven’t read enough of it. But writing your own stuff is better, right? Absolutely not. There is no “better.”
I know authors who learned how to write using fanfic. Some of them return to it when their stories aren’t working, or when they just want to have fun in a familiar world. When writer’s block sets in, sometimes writing 2,000 words of Katniss Everdeen in the woods pre-Hunger Games is all it takes to get the words flowing again.
And honestly, nobody really acknowledges how hard writing is. Creating characters that feel alive and practically jump off the page and into your lap is hard. Creating worlds that feel real without being too far-fetched, or that feel realistic instead of feeling like a movie set, is hard. Writing words that flow together, mapping plots that are intriguing but also make sense, letting your characters grow and change as the story trucks along—all these things are HARD.
We tend to forget that part. We talk about how we sit in coffee shops or people-watch on the bus and ideas just COME TO US. We don’t acknowledge that after the idea happens, we have to do a lot of grunt work to turn it into a novel. We devote thousands of words to developing this creature before the writing of the novel itself even begins.
For those who don’t have the time to do all that behind-the-scenes work, for those that have no interest in it and just want to get writing, for those that have a million story ideas but no characters or no worldbuilding skill, fanfiction is a wonderful outlet.
My opinion is this: There is no greater compliment for an author than fanfiction (or fan art). It tells me that I have written something that affected you so deeply that you wanted to live in my world. You liked my characters enough to want to spend more time with them, or my work inspired you to write a similar story, or it made you think about it so much that you wanted to reinterpret it. I will never understand authors that feel insulted by fanfiction; I believe it’s a gift we are given by the people who enjoyed our work the most.
Careful Wordsmith 