Why You Should Write Fan Fiction
Across the internet, forums, and in plenty of news articles, I often see people trashing on fan fiction, and I don’t always mean it a blatant way. Some people may say Fan fiction is terrible, or shouldn’t be allowed. But many other people often trash Fan Fiction and they don’t realize it. They’ll say something like: ‘I just feel wrong using other people’s characters’. Or: ‘Oh, it was fan fiction of that book before it became this, no wonder it’s shit’.
Specifically we see a lot of this with 50 Shades of Grey, and even more so around Kindle Worlds, which is a new program that I find absolutely remarkable (if it wasn’t for the fact that they legally screw you over with it).
This is why instead of bashing on fan fiction, or the stuff that has come out of it. I want to talk about, why, as an author or writer, you should also be writing fan fiction. And I’m not talking about just stealing other people’s works, or words and using them as your own. There’s a major line between plagiarism and derivative works. And most people freak out about it being the same thing when something is still in its copyright period.
Everyone has different opinions around it. And while I’ve always strongly believed if you aren’t receiving some benefit from it (usually money) you are free to derive what you want (even if the original author asks that you don’t), not everyone does fall in this same line. Which is why if you are concerned you can always ask the author. But I will tell you, as long as you are respectful to the characters the author made, there isn’t an author alive who would not want you to write fan fiction using their characters. Imitation is truly a sincere form of flattery, possibly the only one. So when a fan fiction is done well, everyone can benefit from it.
As for why you should be writing it?
You Should Be a Fan and a Writer
If you aren’t a fan of another author’s work, why are you even a writer? The first and most important thing for any writer is that you read books. And that means reading other author’s books. If you can find yourself being a fan of at least one book in the entire world and the characters in that, you might have a bigger problem that includes all the joy being sucked out of you when you were a kid by a beautiful witch.
Being a fan of someone’s work is a good thing, especially for authors, because it gives you something to talk about besides your own work that still pertains to your world. It also gives you a goal and a way to analyze it. What about that writing or book did you like? Can you incorporate parts of that style into your writing?
Not to mention, you can’t be a geek without being a fan first. And especially in the cases of pop culture references for urban fantasy books, you are able to actually show your likes in your works by referencing them. And believe me, if you don’t think references can’t be powerful, you probably haven’t read The Dresden Files, or watched Castle. References provide a great way of nodding to the fans and the creators of shows and books you were a fan of.
Fan Fiction Teaches You To Plot
Have you ever been so bogged down with the research, or developing the characters, or a back story, that when it actually came to the plot of your story, you just kept falling short? Maybe you looked back over it and realized your character doesn’t do anything worth anything for five whole chapters! Well, that’s exactly what Fan Fiction teaches you to handle.
When it comes to fan fiction, you essentially drop yourself into the writing of a piece directly after the first sentence has been started. You have the characters, their back story, how they act, what they generally do, and most of the research was done for you. That means all you have to handle is creating a real plot! When all that other stuff is handled, it allows you to just learn to focus on what your plot can be. Focus on actually telling the story (or showing it), and that kind of experience will last with you for a long time, because the plot is one of the harder parts. After all, anyone can write a book, you have to prove why your story is worth reading.
Fan Fiction Teaches You To Stay True to a Character
With characters already made, and clearly defined rules and quirks of how that character acts and reacts, you can actually learn how to write that type of character quickly, and then another type, and another, and so on. If you think any character ever is actually original, they aren’t. They are archetypes. A general design of a certain character. They might have the occasional slight twist to them, like having a badass godfather type mob boss, but is also a ten-year old girl. But that is actually just a combination of two archetypes together.
Once you’ve learned how to do the base archetypes and how to combine some, you quickly learn how to not only create your own characters, but to stay true to how they act and what they do. And that’s all because you borrowed someone else’s character to learn how that archetype worked and let yourself get some practice on writing that type.
The Best Way to Learn is to Imitate Others
The single greatest way you will ever learn things, is by imitating others. And this follows perfectly with learning your own writer’s voice. Everyone has one, but often it takes time in learning to create one for yourself. And yes, you don’t find your writer’s voice, you create it. Much like how you don’t find yourself, you create yourself.
Your writer’s voice, whether you choose to write fan fiction or not, will be drawn from all the writers you have read previously. Little pieces of each of them will shine through, added with one or two random quirks from your personal speech patterns. And if that’s the case, why not seek out the best authors and learn to imitate and draw upon strengths in their writer’s voice when creating your own? Imitation isn’t just flattery, it’s an effective learning tool, even for writing.
Sometimes an Original Story is Hiding in You
Believe it or not, living in the Fan Fiction circles you become acquainted to the amount of authors who have actually started their writing careers as fan fiction authors. Most people know about how 50 Shades of Gray was Twilight fan fic that was different enough from the original story that changing the names allowed the story to be copyrighted as its own work. This isn’t unusual either. Fan Fiction writers do this all the time. They take a series or show or book, and add-on some new element to it, and by the time they finish the fan fiction they discover they’ve written something completely different.
It’s a bit like having guidelines in drawing, you erase the guidelines when you get far enough along with the drawing, but they helped you immensely at the beginning. Quite literally using someone else’s words to start your own, which is actually writing advice from the movie Finding Forrester.
Fan Fiction Teaches You COLLABORATION with writing
Above all else, if there is anything you will learn with Fan Fiction writing. It is collaboration.
No matter what you write, you never finish writing the story yourself. There must always be a reader for every writer, and the reader provides just as much input into a story they are reading as you did writing it. They provide the images, and the focus, and the meaning, while you provided the words to get them started with all that. It’s a bit like a writer hypnotizes the reader, and depending upon how subtly you have tried to manipulate your readers will determine how well the story connects with them.
The only way to learn those techniques though is through trial and error. Or more specifically, you have to write, have someone read it, and then get feedback. Quite literally a collaboration of your writing with other people’s reading. Fan fiction provides an area (especially with the internet) where you already have an audience to direct that writing to, and those people are more than willing to critique it and point out areas they didn’t notice when they read the original author’s stories, or when they completely thought everything you wrote was dead-on exactly how they thought those two characters acted in the original stories.
When it comes down to it. Fan Fiction is the breeding ground for the future authors of the world. And chances are, you probably started with fan fiction, without realizing it. Just because something is out of copyright does not mean it isn’t fan fiction. Because nothing is original, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be authentic.
To close I have a quote that is worth it for every writer to know. A quote that has ringed true with me and I’ve wrote about years ago, despite only knowing about it for about three weeks. Because the act of stealing is not what’s important. It’s what you do with what you’ve stolen that matters.
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.’”
- Jim Jarmusch
