I’ve been a fanfiction author since my early teens—a few years after I began writing original long-form SFF—and I’ve learned more about the art and craft of writing from fanfic than I have in any classroom. It’s allowed me to develop and hone my skills while having fun, rather than completing assignments, and exposed me to a wonderful variety and range of other people’s work over the years.
Crucially, fanfiction is a discipline of its own, and it can teach you some specific things that will be of use to you in whatever kind of writing you choose to pursue.
Let’s start with the big picture:
Story
The reasons people write fic generally come down to story: either the desire to change some aspect of it, or to explore an aspect further. So far, so good, but if you look a little further under the surface of your own preferences or tendencies you can begin to learn a little more about why those things are important to you. Why is it that you want to write fix-it fic for this kind of situation every time you encounter it? What does your desire to whump the hell out of certain characters tell you about the kind of story elements you find compelling or interesting, and what can you do with that information in constructing stories of your own?
Style
No one is good at writing in another person’s style at first; it will start out as pastiche, but if you keep at it, and look at other people’s versions of that style, slowly you will gain control over what specific decisions you are making to emulate the original or to riff on it. This goes all the way back to Byzantium: being instructed to write a piece in the style of a specific author or orator was one of the ways young Byzantine scholars learned the art of rhetoric. As a fic author, working on this particular aspect expands your vocabulary of what makes a style, what appeals in others’ work and why it has those impacts, which helps you develop your own command of style and voice.
Practice
Books on how to write generally agree on very little other than that one should read a great deal and also write a great deal, and this is another benefit of being involved in the fic community: you get to read a lot of other people’s work, some of which is better than others, and you get practice with every story you write. Fanfic authors tend to be prolific, which is a good thing—even if the individual stories are not yet stunning works of genius, they each represent just that little bit more practice under your belt. This is important; it doesn’t matter how much of a fantastic writer you are, if you don’t practice you get rusty, and you also can’t develop increased sophistication and control. In an active fan community, authors have the opportunity to change and improve all the time, and learn from each other, while enjoying the material they’re engaging with and sharing in a common experience and library of referents—and they can collaborate, challenge, and encourage one another. Which leads me to…
Practical Exercises
One of the things I love most about writing fic is the option of writing from prompts—give me one or two characters, a setting, and a situation, and I will write you a story right now. It’s like wind-sprints for your brain, and it is tiring but also exhilarating, and the more you do it the easier it gets. It works in the realm of original fiction just as well—if you’re writing within a universe you’ve already invented, you are doing precisely the same work as if you’re writing prompt fanfic, with the added benefit that nobody can accuse you of being out of character.
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Grave Importance
Reaction/Commentary
This is one of the best parts about writing fic and posting it on the internet: instant gratification. There are few writing disciplines in which this reward via reactive commentary is so readily available. For young writers who are beginning to explore their skills and talents, the encouragement of reader comments is invaluable. If you’re not sure you are doing a good job, having people comment with even the simplest positive statement is enormously helpful—not only is it active positive reinforcement, it is clear and present evidence that what you have written is being read; that it exists, and is being paid attention to, and that it matters. Later on you will want more useful information than just I like this story, but when you are starting out—sometimes that’s all you need to hear, and it can mean the difference between someone continuing to write and get better and someone giving up because they don’t think anybody cares.
Critique
Following on from reaction, perhaps the most important thing you can learn from writing fic is how to take criticism. The critique you receive from commenters may not actually be of any practical use—but that doesn’t mean a slew of omg I love this! comments don’t have their value. It’s enormously different from the kind of feedback you can expect to receive on original fiction: at best, you’ll get to meet with your class or writing group once or twice a week, perhaps, and read part of a story, and get the reaction of a handful of people who are required to give you their responses. When you put your fic up on the internet, literally anyone who has access can read it and tell you what they like and don’t like, or that you suck and should feel terrible, or that you changed their life. It’s a completely different paradigm, and it allows you, the writer, the opportunity of practice in deciding how and when you want to pay attention to your critics.
Not everyone is going to like what you make; this is true for any kind of work. The earlier you get used to this, and to the variety of responses you get, the easier you will find it to put your work out in the world and be able to face what follows. The sheer scope and volume of reaction available to fanfic is a kind of luxury in itself; it allows you, the fic author, to develop a (necessary) protective shell without revealing your most vulnerable and personal original work to the pitiless view of the rest of the world. You can learn a lot from the kind of responses your fic elicits: if the majority of commenters like this but not that, or ask questions about a particular element, or wish to tell you that you are the worst because you have mischaracterized a particular individual or relationship, clearly what you have done has caught attention—and possibly hit a nerve. It is up to you to determine how much this affects you, and what you want to do with it.
Fanfiction is a fantastic way to grow and develop your skills as a writer, and as a creator of content in general, while having a good time. The things you can teach yourself—and learn from your fellow fic authors—will stand you in good stead no matter how many fandoms you pass through. I will never stop writing fic, because it makes me a better writer with each story I produce, and because it gives me a simple and abiding joy—and I can’t think of a better reason than that to put words down on a page.
Vivian Shaw wears too many earrings and likes edged weapons and expensive ink. Her debut trilogy starring Dr. Greta Helsing is published by Orbit; her short fiction has featured in Uncanny and is forthcoming in Pseudopod. She is a stickler for research and currently lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Arkady Martine. Look for Strange Practice and Dreadful Company now out, and Grave Importance coming in late summer 2019.
Image Credit: Stuart Caie under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
Fanfiction can also be a useful jump point for your own brand of fiction. Twice I’ve adapted ideas I wrote for another universe for other stories. One was based on a scene in How To Train Your Dragon, where I realized Hiccup should have been toasted by the Nightmare in the background — what would happen to Astrid’s life / relationship to other kids / affections for Hiccup / relationship with Toothless if Hiccup disappeared right there? That Astrid became the basis for a character loosely inspired by a historical figure with few known details of her life. Another time I had a waking dream of sorts about how a long-running graphic novel series might end, and started writing a synopsis. After reaching 5200 words of plot ideas (not written story, just ideas!) I decided to change the setting and use that outlandish plot for my own purposes. It now bears no resemblance to the original, and will probably include a LOT more time travel than the inspiration wanted to mess with.
Just stay away from Mary Sue stuff, and no more than than one crossover at a time, and for the love of god people, label your OC centric fics as being OC centric. Jesus, that last one. I don’t know why OC centric fanficcers are so adamant in refusing to label as such. It makes it so much easier to filter them out when they do it.
Edit: Oh, and if you are writing Ranma fanfic then it is Ranma-chan/Ryouga with a vaguely sympathetic Genma. Okay?
Bad things about writing fanfic. It becomes a warm, safe space, and some writers I know never venture out of it. That’s okay if all you want to do is fanfic, but, if your ambitions are to go professional, that’s a bad thing.
Fanfic, for the most part, isn’t as structured, long, or plot-driven as most commerical fiction. Fanfic writers are essentially writing dramatic opera pieces which aren’t really the tone or pace of commercial fiction. You have to learn the difference if you want to succeed beyond fanfic.
If you decide to turn your fan piece into your own universe/work, readers and editors may very well recognize the source and will not be happy.
Also, you don’t want to learn how to copy someone else’s style. You want to develop your own style and voice which means you will spend about a million words getting everyone else out of your head and into your own so you comes through.
Good things beyond what you mention. At the same time as I was writing my own fiction, I wrote some fan pieces as gifts and at the request of friend fanzine editors. I used those pieces to play with themes and different narrative techniques. A short piece is much more suitable for that than the novel you are currently writing.
@3 “Also, you don’t want to learn how to copy someone else’s style.” It’s not just the Byzantines. English teachers still assign imitation as a tool to teach rhetoric. It helps young writers gain control over how they sound, which is the first step in developing their own voices.
@@.-@ Fiction and nonfiction are different in that sense, although anyone who wants to write nonfiction professionally needs to figure out their own styles. (You need different ones for different types of nonfiction.) Fiction is all about individual voice/style. I’ve taught fiction craft for many years, but, beyond mentioning that a writer’s natural voice comes after a lot of writing where the sheer exhaustion from trying to imitate others finally allows the natural voice/style to come through, I don’t teach voice/style because it shouldn’t be taught. I do recommend that the writer read extensively in their specific genre, and the authors they pay attention to be newer, more successful authors. Narrative styles change over time, and recent years have seen lots of changes. If the writer immerses herself in enough newer fiction of her genre, she will find that her voice will reflect that.
Thank you for this article – really enjoyed it! I have also written fanfic since I was a teenager – starting up again 15 years later into adulthood. It’s been a fun way to try out different writing styles, develop more sophistication over time, and figure out what kind of stories I do like and why. (Example: I’ve never written it, but John Reese whump for Person of Interest remains deeply satisfying reading to me for some reason, and there are some really great writers in that fandom.) It also gives my brain a creative outlet since my day job doesn’t let me have that. Of all the nerdy hobbies it seems to get an especially bad rap, but I appreciate it for all the reasons you mentioned.
I think that reading a lot of fanfiction has also made me a better reader. There’s nothing like reading a hundred different interpretations / interpolations / variants on a text to drive home what is important about that text, and how it interacts with me as a reader.
@3 (Mbyerly) (snerk!) Right in some regards, so wrong, wrong, wrong in others. As a fairly established fanfic writer specializing in diminutive colorful equine literature (ahem), I found that it expanded my writing scope to places I never would have gone if I had just stuck with dragons and sorcerers. I’ve written crossovers with a Bolo, Harry Potter, epic level destruction and the simple pleasures of drifting down a lazy river on a raft, of love between characters who belong together, and characters who really need restraining orders against them. I’ve raised gales of laughter, gallons of tears, and friendship with authors I never would have met in a million years if not for this hobby. And if I ever get back to dragons and sorcerers, they are going to be far more epic than ever before.
–Georg
@8 What works for you, works for you. Writing is very individual.
One problem I’ve noticed with a number of fanfic writers, especially for TV / movie / comic fandoms, is that all they read is other fanfic. Fanfic becomes very insular and the problems introduced compound, turning the fandom into a giant mess of bad writing. I guess it’s a bit like having a limited gene pool increasing the occurrences of recessive mutations until they reach damaging levels. I wish there would be more “reading a great deal” outside of their comfort zones.
Cool article. I’ve dabbled in fanfic over my life as I tried to create my own voice. As a kid I wrote a Doc Savage story (longhand!) and in high school I wrote an Incredible Hulk story (based on the TV series) and a Bionic Woman story (because I had a crush on Lindsay Wagner.
As an adult I once wrote an Animorphs story for my son because we were both fans, and a House, M.D. story where I woke up as a patient in Princeton Plainfield hospital, which was fun because I flummoxed the cast members by knowing all about them. My son appreciated it too, although he made me change my heart attack to something else because it made him nervous.
What I liked about all of them was having an existing world to move around in so I didn’t have to create a new universe in every single story. It’s also why I tend to write series characters. Not published yet, except on my blog. Am I allowed to post the URL here?
I’ve been enjoying writing my fanfic. I can see, even in just a few chapters, how my writing has significantly improved.
One of the biggest challenges I had was trying to get the two magic systems to work together (crossover fic) and compare. Are the level 90 Warcraft characters more powerful than the anime characters of the world that they found themselves in? If so, how much? How are they more powerful?
I addressed the problem that I considered that the anime had not only not addressed but had actively glossed over. By then, though, I found that the story had morphed as the anime itself progressed bringing even more issues. Decided to end the story in another six chapters after that and deciding to pretty much can the story from the anime otherwise it was just going to go on forever.
I’ve learned a lot writing fanfic.