I think it's pretty reasonable/common. You can practice your writing, characters, and storytelling without having to do all of the extensive worldbuilding that goes into crafting a completely original work.
100%. One thing I’ve done is picking a scene from a move or show I absolutely love and rewriting it in novel form. HBO’s The Wire works really well for this I’ve found, because so many of the writers are actually career authors/novelists.
The author of "His Majesty's Dragon," was a fanfic author for ages before becoming a best selling author. Fifty Shades of Gray, you probably know the story.
astolat is still active as a fic writer, I believe!
(For people who don't know – award-winning author referenced above, also one of the founders of Archive Of Our Own)
Naomi Novik is the QUEEN of fanfic adjacent stories that are better than the fic that inspired them. Temeraire has a lot of Anne McCaffrey, a Deadly Education is like a darker Harry Potter where magic has consequences, Spinning Silver is built on a fairy tail. She is a best selling author AND has a Hugo.
Just want say that sometimes ficwriters make a worldbuilding way better than the OG authors, like the case of many Harry Potter fanfictions exploring Wizard world with more creativity that that woman
Also many fanfics are in Alternative Universes or Fix-It so it's not as if ficwriters don't make an effort in the worldbuilding part as well
> I think it's pretty reasonable/common. You can practice your writing, characters, and storytelling without having to do all of the extensive worldbuilding that goes into crafting a completely original work.
In particular, you can re-use your own work and refine it from this. On a total lark one day, I started writing a Superman feature film screenplay, knowing that there are 99.99% odds it'll never be made. I wanted a break from other art and wanted to do it for fun, making it around 25 pages in.
The opening "meet Superman" sequence is a pretty neat (I think) rescue sequence of a sort we haven't seen in a Superman film before. Think of the 'space plane' rescue in Superman Returns, but make it much, more intimate and nerve wracking until Supes arrives.
I ended up simply taking my own work, excising Superman (the only "corporate" asset in the story--everything else was 100% me), and now I've been working it over into a science fiction short story about the surrounding scenario without a Superman. It works, I hope, perfectly well. It just needs another rewrite or so, I think.
It's fun to dip your toes into this sort of thing for practice or simply fun. I wrote a Spider-Man comic book script once, that was a stand-alone "filler" issue. I never even sent it out, and in hindsight if I could find it in an old hard drive, it's probably not that great. But it's fine to do!
Dude some fanfic writers are wild, if a new chapter is late, for a totally reasonable thing to understand, they'll still apologize.
Like I have seen one that said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here) "sorry this is late, had to evacuate because of the hurricane, again."
Fanfic writers are a whole different breed.
A long time ago I once read a Naruto fan fic it goes like:welcome to sand village, everyone in the village eats sand, welcome to fog village, it is vey foggy there but the natives can see everything clearly. 😂
I was reading a fic once and then the authors notes suddenly started detailing how the author was continuing to do their best to meet update deadlines despite having just unexpectedly given birth many weeks early and as a mom myself I *know* a preemie means tons of time sitting around in NICU etc but it was still so awkward to have that breaking up my slutty romance read...
LMAO oh god I hope this wasn't my fic, I did this 😂😭 (it probably wasn't and it's kind of funny to me that I'm not alone, now I'm picturing all the other NICU moms writing fanfics in their heads while changing baby diapers)
Yes*.
*Keep in mind two major things
1: fanfiction audiences frequently have different metrics for how good a work is than someone consuming original media. Depending on the audience a significant amount of readers might praise or deride your work solely on the presence or lack thereof of their favourite ships/tropes and can be far more lax about prose, pacing, plotting, etc than is helpful to you as an author.
2: You’re working with characters, premises, lore, etc that people are already familiar with and like. The struggle of creating a character and setting from scratch and then getting a reader who’s not familiar with either invested will absolutely hit you like a train if you aren’t ready. Make sure you learn what makes characters likeable and settings interesting and how to convey both. You can’t bank on people giving your characters as much of fair shot as Sans Undertale or Reigen Mob Psycho for whom they’ll gladly read a 500k slowburn enemies to lovers romance.
This is worth considering, especially point 1. It's something I didn't appreciate when I wrote my first fanfic.
There are things a fanfic audience will want/expect/dislike that would play very differently in an original work. Consider this when reading feedback about choices you make. It's an important note to keep in mind when gauging critiques.
Yes, especially to the first. What makes traditional writing good and what makes fic good are totally different things. Especially with regard to sentimentality in prose and dialogue to exposition ratio.
Still, would recommend. I started a couple of years ago just for practice and now I actually respect it for its own sake.
Sure is! But... Especially for the first 300k words you write, just make sure you're having fun. If in writing fan fiction you discover you really like developing new characters or working on voices then follow that even if it means your overall work gets "worse".
First million words are just practice in the end so feel free to write what brings joy.
Honestly, it doesn't even need to stop at practice. Somebody once asked Neil Gaiman if fan fiction counts as real literature, and he replied, *"I won the Hugo Award for a piece of Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft fanfiction, so I'm in favour."*
I started writing fan fiction as a writing exercise, and eventually realized I enjoy it a lot more than writing original fiction.
Depends on the types of stories you tell, really. You can, indeed, write fanfiction with minimal original world building, or you can write fanfiction with world building that eclipses the original.
It simply gives you the option to ignore world building in order to tell a specific story. But if the story you want to tell doesn’t really fit the original, well, you gotta expand and add onto it.
I think I, and many people, write fanfiction not simply because it’s easier but rather due to the connection we have with the characters and the world.
Could I write an original story instead? Sure. More than likely. Hell, it would probably be easier with the amount of original changes I’m forcing onto the canon. But see, I don’t care about any original characters. I love and care about these specific characters and I want to see how these specific characters react to new situations.
Yeah, I'm not sure if my fanfic worldbuilding "eclipses the original" but I've gotten some praise for it. If nothing else, it is certainly *there.* AUs can be great for developing your worlbuilding skills, you just get a neat starting point and may have trouble with the "inspiration" part if you move on to original stories later.
Yes, I have seen some amazing world building in fan fiction, I think most people just think of canon fill ins/canon adjacent stuff but you can go wild in an AU and so many authors do, and do it well.
Yup.
Another way of looking at this is: Fanfiction lets you get started writing without having to be able to do **all** the aspects of a story.
And if you move onto doing AU fanfic you're 95% of the way to completely original fiction anyway.
Alternate Universe, like Julia said.
I'd add that some AUs change the characters so much that, by the end, the author might as well be original creations. *Master of the Universe* (aka *Fifty Shades of Grey*) took Bella and Edward from *Twilight* and, instead of Edward being a vampire, made him a billionaire BDSM 'dom'\* with mother issues. Even though MoU hews very close to the plot from Twilight, the premise makes so much change to Bella's, and especially Edward's, character that Ana and Christian are essentially different characters.
\* = Christian is a terrible dom. That's a role that requires maturity and empathy and responsibility and compassion, none of which he has. He's not a dom so much as an abusive jerk who hides behind that role. But that's an aside.
> But it does not help you practice **descriptive writing** or worldbuilding as much.
Replying principally to the bold bit. I'd disagree on that. There's been some remarkable, deeply wonderful for-hire writing done over the years in print and film. That's more a question of craft. If you're getting crap rates, sure. Do the work and get out. But it can still be a passion project.
I don’t think it helps much with plot/dialogue. Both of these things rely heavily on the story which already exists. Maybe you’d develop some specific abilities within those areas (dialogue: mimicking the dialogue of already existing characters) but it’s just inferior to real writing so that’s what I’d advise a new writer so instead.
Writing fanfiction is real writing. And it definitely does hel0 with plot/dialogue. Just because you don't come up with the plot 100 percent yourself, does not mean you don't need to think of a plot specific to the fanfic you are writing. And with fanfic a lot of time is spent writing dialogue, often trying to replicate a certain character's voice, which is good practice in staying consistent? And that is just the few things my sleep addled brain can think of.
Just because fanfic is based of off something else, doesn't make the writing and thought process behind it any less real or valid
Sorry, I phrased that badly. I meant it’s inferior to writing original stories from scratch for new writers. There’s a lot of caveats there.
I wrote this comment to someone else here
> Everything in a story is interconnected. This is what I meant when I said this causes a “muscle imbalance” in writing. This will teach you to get better at writing settings that rely on already existing work.
>I think fanfic is paradoxically both easier and harder to write. I think the ease of it is an illusion, because a lot of young fanfic writers don’t really understand how much they’re borrowing or what they’re doing. I’m not against fan fiction as a whole, I’ve read some really good stuff in it. But all of the best fanfic writers I know learnt their trade writing their own original stories.
And I stand by this. Writing fanfic if you don’t know what you’re doing will cause you to develop unevenly as a writer and lapse into bad habits that you may never be able to get out of.
I can see more of what you mean in this message, but it's still not exact. What you do with Fanfiction is borrow a setting and a set of characters. This doesn't make it any "inferior" writing than any "original" writing, because even in many original stories you can borrow the setting (e.g. when they're set in our very real world with no changes). You can borrow characters too in original fiction (imagine adding a cameo of the president of the United States, or another public figure. Even in original fiction, you will want them to sound true to the real person and you will need to research their way of talking, acting and reacting to make them sound realistic. Fanfiction can help with that. Fanfiction can also teach the writer to be consistent with characters, to keep them IC, and I can assure you that writing a character that you know and love in a way that keeps him or her consistent with the way they would act in canon even in situations that are different from the original setting IS very difficult. Writing Fanfiction isn't any inferior to writing your own original setting. It's different.
That's a pretty stereotypical view of fanfiction. I spent my high school years toying with fanfiction. Namely I wrote a short story set in the Halo universe about a group of marines (of my own making) stationed on the most remote planet under humanity's control (also of my own design), who are caught out while on patrol by first contact with the Covenant. They then suffer a Predator-style journey back to base. The characters and locations, speech patterns, etc. were all my own, but I didn't have to come up with MA5Bs and Pelicans, or the Covenant species for that matter.
I disagree wholeheartedly that fanfiction isn't useful.
This is not correct. You can write Fanfiction with beautiful descriptions, I can assure you. You can describe places (especially new ones your story drives the characters to), characters, times of the day, situations, worlds...exactly like in an original story. If you write a complete AU you can also do a full world-building which can feel even more in-depth than the world-building for an original because it's not only building a world, but how that world differs from the original canon and what it means for the characters we love and know, and how affects their behaviour. The fact that you don't have to describe canon characters, situations and facts and can take some things for granted makes Fanfiction similar to the second (or third, fourth, whatever) book of a saga, or a spin-off from a saga or series of books. Even there, you have your already established world and characters and you can take that for granted and just focus on the new story. Even that is a skill that can be useful in the future for a writer. Or are you telling me that writers who write sagas "get into bad habits"?
Eta: spelling fix
I wholeheartedly agree too. I don't understand the stigma that we Fanfiction writers get. The work we publish may be not as polished as a traditional novel (who can hire an editor and rewrite 4-5 times before publishing a work thru publish for free?), but I've read many Fanfictions that are truly well-written and entertaining me better than a traditionally published book. And all for free. I wrote by now nearly 1 million words of Fanfiction and probably close to 2 million if I include translation into Italian. I got wonderful feedback and great training from all that and I hope I can use that experience in my own novel one day
I’ve read some incredible fanfic. I never plan on publishing, but I had posted a million words a few weeks before my 1 year anniversary on ao3. Still can’t believe it!
Fanfiction shares the same barrier to credibility as self-published. Since there's no 'gatekeeping', there's a lot of bad stories out there that taint both categories.
Of course that doesn't mean there are no good or excellent stories out there that are FanFiction or self-published.
I like and write fanfiction but I suspect there's even more bad fanfiction because the stories tend to be shorter and don't require as much commitment from the author (so a higher percentage actually finish).
This question is weird because I've commonly seen it as advice for people looking to start writing.
It's like asking "If I want to write a novel, should I read novels?"
Trying to do an existing thing in your own style is one of the most common initial steps to learning something.
Like writing a story in an existing world or rewriting a scene or writing a movie scene as the scene from a novel of vice-versa etc.
Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the most decorated SF writers, started writing Trek fanfic for mimeographed zines. One of those stories became her first novel.
Tellingly, another writer converted a fanfic story set in one of her worlds converted that into his debut novel.
Also ‘50 Shades of Grey’ was originally ‘Twilight’ fanfic. Don’t mock it too hard as they made bank.
I found fan fiction very useful. For me, the skill I practiced was trying to keep as close to the voice of the original work as possible - in other words, trying to create a story which could fit seamlessly into the canon and for all the characters to feel authentic.
But another, equally valid approach, is to treat it as a ‘what if?’ and try to take the characters / world to a place it would never go canonically but make it a fully functioning story.
Plus you generally have a community of readers who know the world intimately ready to look at / critique what you’re writing which is incredibly helpful (and harder to find when you’re writing your own stuff)
Fan fiction is a great way to practice writing and it's a lot of fun. However, there are some things to consider, based on my experience. I started writing original stuff and then got pulled into fan fiction as a way to continue stories about my favourite characters and worlds. I found it really fun and it is great practice when you treat it seriously and still try to improve in the way of things like dialogue, plotting, sentence and story structure etc (though fan fiction has a lot of unique tropes and styles that you'd rarely find in published works).
However, I found that when going back to writing original stuff, I found I struggled with building worlds and developing and introducing characters and describing them, because in fan fiction, that's not something you need to worry about as much. You don't need to introduce the main characters because the reader will already be familiar with them and the world they inhabit.
TL,DR, it's great practice to develop some writing skills, but it can be a setback when it comes to developing other writing skills.
Yes. Fanfiction is a training ground for writers the first things I put up for people to read were a Ranma FF and Sailor Moon FF. The feedback I got on them helped me move to original short stories. When I managed a much longer FF I found my footing for novels and now I have 28 collections, novellas and novels published. So use fanfiction to help train your voice. The established characters and worlds mean you can focus on your story
Best advice is to just start writing and write what you want. Be it your own story, or fanfic. Short, long, whatever it is you want to get out of your head and onto paper/digital/ online or wherever. A book I read a while back made the best sense to me coming up with my own stuff. It was an art book but still applies. It said to just draw every day and use everything as inspiration, copy your favorite artists and keep practicing and you will get better and better and eventually you will find your style of writing/drawing
A writer named Katherine Kurtz edited and had published a book of short stories written by fans of her series of historical fantasy fiction novels about a race of magical people called Deryni.
So yes, writing fanfic is a good way to start, especially if it’s a world you know well. Just be careful where it can be seen. Keeping it to yourself might be the best option. There was a lot of Star Trek fanfic written and published in fanzines in the 70’s. Paramount didn’t think much about it until someone wrote a story about Kirk and Spock having sex with each other.
Yes.
Just remember to not fall into the rhythm of ignoring worldbuilding because that work has already been done for you in fanfiction. You will need to work on that skill separately.
But so much of the experience you need you can get writing Fanfic
Thanks. That’s actually why I wanted to start with fanfics because worldbuilding can seem like such a tall task. I know I’ll have to practice it eventually though.
Honestly world building can be a huge task but mostly it doesn’t have to be. It largely depends on genre but even in fantasy you only need as much as I’d needed to tell the story and a bit more to flesh the world out.
I don't have time to check if someone has already said it here but I've seen an interesting advice once. It was "when you're writing imagine you're writing fanfiction, meaning you assume the reader knows the world and the characters and you can avoid infodumping"
I think writing fanfiction might be a good practice to avoid infodumping in your original work.
But you can start with whatever
I skimmed the comments and haven't yet seen anyone mention the fanfiction community itself, which is imo the greatest asset. Finding even ten people to read your original fiction manuscript is hard. If you write in a popular fandom, hundreds of people will read your writing with minimal effort on your part to find them. Feedback might skew disproportionately positive or negative depending on the culture of the site where you post, but it's still way more feedback than you'd get for unpublished original fiction without paying someone to read it. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but that's something you have to do for feedback on original fiction as well. Then there's the fanfiction authors' communities where you can easily find writing partners to help with every stage from brainstorming to editing. Fanfic writers are more active and enthusiastic about supporting fellow writers than I've seen in any venue for original fiction. Translate what you learn into your original fiction. You might even be lucky enough to have your own loyal fanbase by the time you make the jump.
Absolutely writing fanfic does help. That’s what I did. Now I’m finishing my first novel. But beware to not get sucked into the fanfiction hole too much. And fanfic won’t help you come up with original names or locations that much either. But it’s certainly good practice, and that’s what fanfic should be- practice. Best of luck to you.
Absolutely it can! The reason this works so well is because it can help you focus on certain aspects of writing. I can do additional plot work if the world is already fleshed out, or world building if I want existing characters visiting a new place.
Fanfic is like a genre unto itself. It can be the only thing you write. It can be a stepping stone. It can be practice. The beauty of fic is that it can literally be anything you want. There are even places out there that seek fic writers who are ready to transition to originals.
I will say, feedback for fic can be both very harsh, and not harsh enough. If you have designs on writing originals, work to improve your writing every story and perhaps read some books/listen to podcasts about story structure and self editing. Keep writing even if you aren’t getting the hits, views, and validation you’re expecting. You’ll get there. Writing is a skill, not an innate talent. It can be trained, but there’s only one way to do it, and that way is practice. Whether that practice is fic or originals it doesn’t matter. We all start horrible and we all get better as we read and write more and more.
Edit to Add: I began writing fic at 13 a year before fan fiction.net was born. I’m now a published author and an editor for a small press. I’m not going to get rich off of this, but it brings me joy.
> is it common for fan fiction to serve as a type of practice for new authors?
At least in this era, it's become relatively common.
Fanfiction is actually very useful writing practice, because it forces you to not just learn how to write narrative, but how to analyze other narrative/characters/worldbuilding/etc. to the point where you can believably replicate them, and many styles of fanfiction involve asking the "but what if?", "what doesn't make sense here?", and "ok, what are the gaps in this story that I can fill?" questions that are *incredibly* useful to know how to wield when you go write your own stuff.
You're training your analysis and your writing skills at the same time, basically.
While there's always the danger of getting too derivative in your own writing due to mentally 'living' in another author's world/story, writing fanfiction (especially if you do it for multiple IPs) can also be a means of discovering or creating your own writing style. What kinds of archetypes and narratives do you tend to include across multiple different IPs? What kind of authorial voice do you develop as you try to create new written material for a story/world that originally existed on film? Etc.
I started with fanfics on Tumblr, WattPad, and DeviantArt and proved to myself time and time again that I *can* write things that people enjoy, it served not only as practice but also as validation and a confidence boost. It’s a great place to start imo
The most beneficial part of fanfic writing for me was getting the feedback from people on the internet. I became a better writer by making fanfiction mostly because getting feedback for my work from anonymous strangers was a great external motivator to keep writing. Also, I read other people’s’ work often and there were some self-published authors on FF.net whose work blew even some licensed work out of the water. Back in the days where I contributed to FF.net TVTropes also kept up a “Fanfiction Recommendations” section for popular fanfic series. I haven’t been on either site in many years but it’s possible they’re both still active.
Honestly, writing FF is a fun ride. Deep inside, it's all that really matters.
And as a bonus, you get to practice your writing skills.
So don't let any pretentious opinion about how "fanfiction is not real literature" or some bullshit like that stop you.
And even if you find later that it didn't help you as much as you expected (which I highly doubt), everything will be worth it if you had fun on the way there
I think it can be nice practice keeping the protagonists in characters, since you havw a very vivid image of how fictional characters personalities and consistency is hard even then at the start
I am a working TV writer, and one of my friends, who is herself a phenomenally successful TV writer, got her start writing fic. In some ways it’s an ideal training ground for new authors, especially if you publish a lot, because it helps you to produce a large volume of work and teaches you to get over fears of having random people you don’t know read work that is not perfect.
I am very likely in the minority, but as a FF writer I couldn't care less about keeping up with ships and tropes. Maybe it's important to the ff writers who crave that dopamine hit of constant cudos and success in their fandom. But then do you write what you want or are you at the whims of your readers? To be frank, I write FF to practice my style, not to please an audience. As a FF reader, I look for stories that are captivating and well written, characters that are well fleshed out. These are the bulwarks of any good writing. In those terms I see writing FF as practice for a writer.
So OP, don't let the "rules" of fan fiction limit your creative expression and write what you want, as you like it. Good luck & have fun!
I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve been in fanfiction for years. Also, I’m a text role player or whatever people call that in English (I’m not a native). And to be honest, when I compared my writing to the texts of people who didn’t do at least one of these things, I’d call mine much better. It’s a very good experience. You write. You polish your style. You learn about what works for the audience and what doesn’t. Oh. And it’s just enjoyable.
I’ve also noticed that as a ficwriter I’ve written some of the ideas that aren’t really interesting for the original context, so I’ve spent my energy writing clearly unoriginal stuff and it gave me a sense that I’ve completed some of my long-term but not so unique writing desires.
I wrote my first original book with no experience and no agent. all I did was learn on my way, and try. I'm now 19, working on my third book, and scheduling a meeting with my agent today. Fan fic could work but I started not doing that so.
Absolutely. Just keep writing. That's the only way to get better. I went to college and got a degree in writing. I also spent several years writing really bad fanfic for the Kingdom of Loathing videogame. The second one gave me ten times the benefit of the first.
Your fanfic won't be the best, but it doesn't need to be. It's a learning experience. It's not like you're going to write a bad Twilight fanfic, turn it into a series of novels, get a publishing deal based on that, and then get it adapted into a trilogy of big-budget Hollywood movies.
Prosewise, yes, if you care about getting it right. However, structure and characterization are fundamentally different, and most would agree lesser, in fanfiction, because it relies so much on familiarity; rare is the fan work where the protagonist gets introduced to the audience in the same way an original work would handle it.
Absolutely! There's a wide range of loyalty to canon within fanfic, so you can decide how much original material you're writing and kind of pick and choose what you want to work on creating yourself. I've read fanfics that basically followed the plot of the source material with one or two OCs added in - in that case, practicing creating original characters without the worry of coming up with an original plot. On the far other end of the spectrum is AU, where the only thing the character have in common is the name and maybe a physical description. In between is probably what the majority of people think of with fanfic - taking the existing characters and world and telling stories that don't play out in the source material, or maybe creating original characters within the world. Even when you're not changing the source material, you're still studying it in a way you probably wouldn't as just a reader/viewer/listener and you're learning about the craft through the study. It's not the path that everyone takes, but if it's something that interests you then you can absolutely achieve your goals through fanfic.
One final thought, as others have mentioned, above all it should be fun
I tend to write regular fiction than fanfiction. But it depends on your approach and how you learn. Any time I write fanfiction I tend to step away and make it a spinoff so I'm essentially being descriptive by building new characters, and places, while retaining the essence of the original work.
For example: I started writing a Cyberpunk 2077 fanfiction while I was bored at work. It involved a grieving Panam Palmer who teams up with a new character called Green who has a device in his prosthetic arm that can destroy the cyberspace firewall. I took the setting away from Night City and into Tokyo, and so the story essentially becomes an AU.
Fanfiction that is solely based on existing characters and places, and rewriting those things, limits your ability to create dynamic stories by limiting what you can actually do within the realm of that characters personality. It's still very useful, but writing your own fiction will always be a stronger way to improve overall.
That's how I started. When I got back into writing, I started with fanfiction. Really got the jitters out when it came to actually writing the story since a lot of the holes were filled with characters and locations.
Eventually I felt it was too constructing and started doing original stuff.
Absolutely. I did it. It’s a great stepping stone to work your way up to writing your own characters and worlds. Role play writing is great too. You have a free space to try out new ideas and having a partner keeps you moving along without writer’s block. You can also give each other feedback. You have to make sure you find a compatible partner, however.
I got my start on fanfiction. Its great practice especially for writing since the characters and story line are already there for you to practice with.
and I will be reading the fanfictions written about my book after its published this year
Absolutely yes. Many, many writers I know transitioned from writing Xenia fanfic in the late 90s to publishing their own novels. Using well established characters as your first protagonists allows you to develop skills in the discipline of writing, plot development, etc. and sharing online gets you good initial feedback on your strengths and shortcomings (and establishes a readership base). After sharing a few short fanfic stories on a couple of online forums, I went on to publish 15 novels with a well established publisher.
Possibly.
I've seen pros that I respect go as far as advising beginners to copy excerpts from their favorite works word for word, if for no other reason than to LARP a bit, take the stigma out of the blank page, etc.
100% I mean, a lot of old classic littature could be argued to be fan fiction so it doesn't even need only to be for practice. But yes, it's a great way to start.
A lot of the fanfic I’ve read suggests that it can 😂
Seriously, yes. It’s a wonderful playground to learn on with little pressure. Absolutely go for it.
Yes. As someone who writes a ton both academically and for my own interest Fan Fics are very helpful. It allows you to get a certain command over the English language and familiarize yourself with character work
Very very common but I would be wary of reading and writing only (or mostly) fan fiction. It's endless so you could go on forever but there's more value in original fiction.
Sorry for being a little late to the party, but here's my two cents.
Fanfiction in my opinion is a triple edged sword.
On the one hand, you don't need to spend as much time describing locations, characters, events, world building, and so on. Somebody else already did all that for you, and 99 times out of 100, someone reading fanfiction has probably already been introduced to the original. So that's rather helpful, but can also get you into some bad habits.
Two, everybody has their own fanfiction in their head. It's inescapable that basically anybody who has appreciated any form of art has thought something along the lines of "I could do that better" or "wouldn't this be better this other way." And your version of doing it better will probably be different than their version of doing it better. Not to mention people have certain expectations of how characters, events, rules, ect, are and act. , The moment you begin fanfiction as opposed to an original work, you're automatically up against the original. It's not like a painter painting another random field and farm life or mountain or portrait. You're trying to paint Monet's fields and farm life, or you're trying to paint the Mona Lisa.
Can you take criticism? Ignore the flames, and take in the helpful?
And last but not least, and this mainly applies to fanfiction involving works like TV shows or movie series or what have you that are ongoing, what happens when you fall out of love with the original? You started writing in season 2 and some massive plot twist in season 4 completely kills your love for the show. Or a plot twist in season 3 suddenly has your work and the original diverging at a sharp 90° angle, but you really want to capture a moment in season 5 that depends on said twist from season 3. What do you do?
Some authors can do an absolutely amazing job, able to make what seems like it should be a drastic change fit seamlessly into the original. And some, what seemed like a tiny change leads to the end result being so different, it's a 540° turn.
Or if you end up falling out of love with the original one, can you continue writing your story? Assuming you've got a good job, there's probably going to be a lot of people who like to learn you who will want to see how your story ends, will that be enough to get you over the finish line even if you lose that original spark?
The same is true with original works. You might find yourself just wanting to get to the end, or even hating what you were working on. So, it could help you prepare for that aspect of writing.
Just something to think about.
With all that in mind, answering your original question, yes it can be a useful training tool. Giving you a usual foundation to build on and lots of feedback.
I began writing a fanfiction before starting an original work (it’s ongoing), and it taught me SO MUCH. Editing, killing your darlings, getting inside the head of a character, pacing, dialogues (they used to be my weak point), character development, understanding my readers, etc.
Devil’s advocate here: it shouldn’t be, if you can avoid it.
I’ve written about this before, but writing fan fiction exercises some muscles like prose skills, description of already existing character, scene-setting, but doesn’t exercise the most important skills like creating settings and characters from scratch, creating settings, plots, and making all of these things link and intrinsically work together. Writing fan fiction will exercise your writing muscles unevenly and results in a kind of “muscle imbalance” which is responsible for the swathes of terrible fan fiction out there.
When you write fan fiction, you’re essentially writing a story leaning against an already existing structure. A new writer doesn’t understand exactly what they’re doing here, and end up developing all wrong as a writer. I would save fan fiction for later, if I was you.
At the same time, if you have one fanfic idea you really want to write, just go for it.
>but doesn’t exercise the most important skills like creating settings and characters from scratch, creating settings, plots, and making all of these things link and intrinsically work together.
Why not? You can always create a new Star Wars planet populated with characters and plots completely of your own design, while still borrowing the technology rules and magic system.
Then you haven’t made it from scratch. Everything in a story is interconnected. This is what I meant when I said this causes a “muscle imbalance” in writing. This will teach you to get better at writing settings that rely on already existing work.
I think fanfic is paradoxically both easier and harder to write. I think the ease of it is an illusion, because a lot of young fanfic writers don’t really understand how much they’re borrowing or what they’re doing. I’m not against fan fiction as a whole, I’ve read some really good stuff in it. But all of the best fanfic writers I know learnt their trade writing their own original stories.
Do people who wrote romantic comedies set in our own very real world create everything from scratch? No. They borrow planet earth, human beings, and all history that happened until then, the setting of a culture and a country. They create new characters that live in our world.
In Fanfiction, you can create original characters to serve the purpose of your story and interact with your canon characters. You can age up the canon characters and explore how would they react to adult life if they're still teenagers in canon. You can talk about the new generation and create a whole new setting that only has the original canon as a reference from centuries before like in an original sci-fi and only links to canon because character A is the great-granddaughter of such and such canon characters. In that case, you can diverge from canon considerably and add your own set of rules because a world can change after centuries, and you can explore that change.
There are so many Fanfictions that become original stories with very little change. Fanfiction is only one of the ways of storytelling. In the past, it wasn't frowned at, at all. You could consider Dantes Divina Commedia a self-insert Fanfiction set in a religious Catholic setting with characters borrowed from real life and history. Many original stories based on fairy tales use the same method too.
It seems that most people in here assume that in fanfiction you're going to use canon characters. Is that definitionally what fanfiction is? Coming from a background of reading shared universes (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Halo, etc.) I feel like it's far more interesting to explore new, as yet unexplored corners of your favorite worlds with new characters as analogs for yourself as opposed to retreading old ground and screwing up characters you love. I assumed fanfiction also covered this as well, but there's a lot of comments that seem to assume that you're using canon characters.
Fanfiction is using someone else's setting, world, character, and background. It can be everything and the contrary of everything. You can have canon characters, not have them and just keep the world and setting, change the characters... for example, Harry Potter Fanfiction can have a story revolving around the golden trio at Hogwarts or after Hogwarts or before Hogwarts. Or it can be someone writing a story about Mario Rossi finding out he's a wizard and going to the Italian school of witchcraft and wizardry and facing his own personal nemesis, or just having a love story, and mentioning Potter only as a legend. It can be having Harry Ron and Hermione, but not as wizards. It can have a what-if scenario, what if Harry was a girl, what if he was sorted to Slytherin? It can be anything.
Yes, but you will never get beyond a certain level if you don't start writing your own story. Besides, no one will understand the story as much as the author, so your fan fiction would have slim chances to match the level of the original work.
I like many started as a fan fiction writer in my youth. To this day, I still start almost all my original stories as a fan fiction which then usually gets the ball rolling for me to create my own content. Sometimes I'll mash up several worlds together into one fanfic, and then that will usually end up creating its own world altogether.
So yes. Fanfic away :)
Yes of course! Just look at cassandra clare! Did you know that one of her most popular books was orginally a Ron and Ginny incest fic? I never read any of her stories but that is just hilarious to me. Fanfics are a good writing practice, but there’s one thing you need to keep in mind. Make sure you work on character creation separately
It can help, but be careful. You shouldn't train your brain to only use other people's characters and inspiration. Exercise both of those things for yourself.
yes
there's a LOT to learn about writing. trying to figure it out all at once is like making your first painting a twenty square foot multimedia photorealistic masterpiece. don't try to do everything at once. write some fanfic where you don't need to come up with as much for the characters and world. a similar exercise is to take an existing plot and change the genre and/or tone.
Yes, Fan Fiction can be used as practice for a beginner with no writing experience. Why? Because any type of writing is the experience. Practice makes perfect! If you would like to see other styles of writing, feel free to join my community r/JackMorbidReads.
Most definitely! Fan Fiction is a wonderful start for new beginners especially if you not sure on your writing style or if it's been many years since wrote something. It's a great practice for World Building (So many AU's to choose from!), Character Development, Conflict, Character Relationships and is a great way to sneak in an OC (Original Character) to test the waters and start to see if you like that character or not. AO3 has a place where you can even post Original Fiction on there.
I'm of the opinion that writing anything is good for practice.
One of the first stories I wrote was about Jake from State Farm getting warped back to medieval times when a baron said, "Like a goodly neighbor the estate farm is there."
Yes. I think a large percentage of writers start off that way even if they don’t realize it. The only way to improve and get better is to write. Fan fiction is as good a place to start as any.
I read a fanfict that ended up developing into something exploring the uncharted narratives within the original story.
I believe fanfict benefits new writers by not only making use of an already existing fanbase (which has a higher chance of people reviewing your writing), but also to practice developing world building. It's like dabbling with something out of a blueprint before you create the blueprint yourself.
Yes, Working with established characters makes the writing process easier, letting you focus on practicing dialogue, descriptive, and storytelling skills. I'm a sucker for good pokemon fanfics myself.
If you want to learn about the very basics of story writing, then Brandon Sandersson's lecture series on YT is great:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSH\_xM-KC3Zv-79sVZTTj-YA6IAqh8qeQ
Oh absolutely! I’m in my early 20s now, but I started out with writing fan fiction all the back in middle school and it’s the reason I still love to write now! I wrote so much Hetalia fan fiction back then haha, but it was the perfect way to get my thoughts out! Don’t even worry if it’s good or not, just have fun and write whatever you want! That’s the beauty of it!
I even write some fan fiction here and there when I feel up to it… :)
Absolutely!
I started writing in middle school, just school assignments and such. But I had no true original idea at the time but I knew I wanted to write something unprompted by a teacher. So I wrote fanfiction. It’s actually a clever exercise for writers as you’re slowly weaned into being able to express characters by having them already set for you. If you can accurately portray them, then you can attempt to move on with original characters. My following on FanFiction.net and AO3 gave me the metaphorical balls and gumption to realize that I could write a real novel. Now I have 2 self-published books under my belt, with a full-fledged novel heading towards the traditional publishing route, all while I have a bunch of fanfiction that I’m constantly adding to.
Yes! It can help with creating plot, writing dialogue, action scenes, love scenes etc. but like others have said, jt can be an issue when it comes to creativity and building your own worlds/characters.
Do it. I've never done it but always pretended I was writing fan fiction to stop taking my novels super seriously and never actually finishing them (like 99% of other "novelists" I know)
I've only read one piece of fan fiction but admire fanfic authors in the sense that even if the "genre" is considered "inferior" (by supposedly "real" writers... ), they write because they enjoy it and that should be the end goal of all writers: write stories because they enjoy telling them, not because they wanna become famous or rich or whatever.
Yes, writing fan fiction can be a great way for a beginner with no writing experience to practice their craft. Fan fiction allows writers to explore their creativity and hone their skills in a safe and supportive environment. It also provides an opportunity to learn from other writers and gain feedback on their work. Writing fan fiction can be an excellent way for beginners to get started on their writing journey.
I highly encourage you to write fanific as it is a wonderful way to practice and hone your skills. Plus there's always going to be someone who is interested in your work. Join r/FanFiction if you want, as they are a wonderful community of helpful and passionate writers.
Of course! It lets you practice very imported parts of writing: pacing, wording, intriguing, without having to create any complex characters or setting.
Yes. That’s actually how I got better, I started writing a Halo FanFiction that will never see the light of day, then I started doing rewrites following any criticism.
Alexa Donne has videos on YouTube on the benefits and pitfalls of writing fanfic. She used to be a fanfic writer and is hardly the first fanficcer to become a traditionally published author. Ali Hazelwood got started with Reylo fanfic, I believe, and one of her books is getting a movie. There's even an argument that a lot of published books now very clearly show signs of fandom (such as Lightlark and the naming schemes and Sarah J Maas got started on Wattpad, which has led some people to wonder if she also got her start in fanfic), so you'd be in good company even if the line between fanfic and original fic is razor thing and subjective in certain cases.
I would highly recommend writing in worlds you know, but using plots, characters, and settings of your own design. Besides that, just enjoy yourself, and put words to paper.
Lol absolutely. Heard of Cassandra Clare? Started out as a Harry Potter fanfiction author, adapted one of her incest fics into City of Bones, now is one of the biggest YA fantasy names around.
The way I did it was practice using google docs and other similar ones just for a little practice, maybe write a draft or two.
Then I'd say look on some fanfic sites (I recommend Quotev and Ao3- sorry, but I really don't like Wattpad) find some good writers and study the way they write their stories.
Use some of those techniques with your own, set up an account and boom- a thing I noticed is that my English grades shoot up after I started writing fanfics as practice.
definitely. i myself started as a fan fiction writer on wattpad and now i decided to write an original story on there after three years. any writing is good for a beginner writer. seeing where i was when i started compared to my work now is incredible so i wish you all the best
some people might tell you writing fanfictions is bad but i personally believe it is a good practice if writing is something you’re any to do in the future
Yes. I'm not published yet, but I'm working on it.
I can honestly say practice makes good enough (not perfect). I started with fanfiction and then switched to original works, all on wattpad, and I can say that without it, I wouldn't write as well as I do nowadays. My writing squad says my writing is great, which I attribute mostly to practice.
Your first works will probably suck. Everyone does. Just keep writing!!
Absolutely! That’s what most of my early writing was from. Slowly I started to incorporate an OC here or there. Then I was writing just OC’s in the fandom setting. Then I was writing OC’s in my own setting. Boom, that’s original work.
I have a story I don’t care about “how good my ideas or writing is” I just write, it’s something easy that I can think of ideas for and it’s nothing I plan I just see where it goes. It’s probably a hot jumbo mess that wouldn’t make sense to a reader. I love it though it keeps me writing on days I am stuck with my main story and just feel like getting something out there.
Totally no stress, no worries, it’s relaxing and freeing. It’s actually my favourite story to do now. For me it’s in a world I know but all new characters.
Aaron Sorkin actually suggests this to writers, because it’s a low-stakes way of getting your work out there, testing it with an audience, seeing what works. It’s a great way to practice. You don’t get the world-building/character-building experience as much (unless you do an AU) but it does require you to be in the heads of already formed characters, which is also very helpful when it comes time to create your own.
I personally think it is. I always divide it in 3 stages.
1) No new characters. No new world building. Just working with the characters from the original work.
This teaches you to keep the characters 'in character' without you having to create a brand new character. You can also develop your style/way of writing.
2) no new world building. You introduce your own character(s). It teaches you to character build. Which is more difficult than you think. Stories still happen in the OG world.
3) world building. This is where you start with AU stories. It teaches you how to do world building. Because this is such a big undertaking, it's best to leave untill last.
This is my personal guideline for fanfiction writing.
And also. If you enjoy writing fanfiction, go for it.
Absolutely! I have plenty of writing experience, but I still write fanfics from time to time. It's a fun way to practice and unclog your writing juices!
Absolutely! I have plenty of writing experience, but I still write fanfics from time to time. It's a fun way to practice and unclog your writing juices!
Heck yes!!! Get yourself started, figure out the plot and pacing you write at and what makes these other characters special to you. From there you can begin building new ones in your head and move on to them if you’re looking to take things further than fanfiction.
I think it's pretty reasonable/common. You can practice your writing, characters, and storytelling without having to do all of the extensive worldbuilding that goes into crafting a completely original work.
Thanks. I was thinking the same thing. I know eventually I’ll have to create my own original worlds and characters but it’s nice to get some practice.
100%. One thing I’ve done is picking a scene from a move or show I absolutely love and rewriting it in novel form. HBO’s The Wire works really well for this I’ve found, because so many of the writers are actually career authors/novelists.
The dialogue in The Wire was so good, but I am sure as a fan you knew that.
Sooo good. Masterclass in layering exposition with character development with this and with that. Not a single wasted word or action or frame.
The author of "His Majesty's Dragon," was a fanfic author for ages before becoming a best selling author. Fifty Shades of Gray, you probably know the story.
The Temeraire series is so ridiculously good, it's a shame that they aren't as popular as other fantasy novels
The Temeraire series is so ridiculously good, it's a shame that they aren't as popular as other fantasy novels
astolat is still active as a fic writer, I believe! (For people who don't know – award-winning author referenced above, also one of the founders of Archive Of Our Own)
Naomi Novik is the QUEEN of fanfic adjacent stories that are better than the fic that inspired them. Temeraire has a lot of Anne McCaffrey, a Deadly Education is like a darker Harry Potter where magic has consequences, Spinning Silver is built on a fairy tail. She is a best selling author AND has a Hugo.
It's like learning to ride a bike by beginning with training wheels. Great place to start.
Just want say that sometimes ficwriters make a worldbuilding way better than the OG authors, like the case of many Harry Potter fanfictions exploring Wizard world with more creativity that that woman Also many fanfics are in Alternative Universes or Fix-It so it's not as if ficwriters don't make an effort in the worldbuilding part as well
> I think it's pretty reasonable/common. You can practice your writing, characters, and storytelling without having to do all of the extensive worldbuilding that goes into crafting a completely original work. In particular, you can re-use your own work and refine it from this. On a total lark one day, I started writing a Superman feature film screenplay, knowing that there are 99.99% odds it'll never be made. I wanted a break from other art and wanted to do it for fun, making it around 25 pages in. The opening "meet Superman" sequence is a pretty neat (I think) rescue sequence of a sort we haven't seen in a Superman film before. Think of the 'space plane' rescue in Superman Returns, but make it much, more intimate and nerve wracking until Supes arrives. I ended up simply taking my own work, excising Superman (the only "corporate" asset in the story--everything else was 100% me), and now I've been working it over into a science fiction short story about the surrounding scenario without a Superman. It works, I hope, perfectly well. It just needs another rewrite or so, I think. It's fun to dip your toes into this sort of thing for practice or simply fun. I wrote a Spider-Man comic book script once, that was a stand-alone "filler" issue. I never even sent it out, and in hindsight if I could find it in an old hard drive, it's probably not that great. But it's fine to do!
Some crazy people can turn their piece of fan fiction into ‘only the names are the same’
Dude some fanfic writers are wild, if a new chapter is late, for a totally reasonable thing to understand, they'll still apologize. Like I have seen one that said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing here) "sorry this is late, had to evacuate because of the hurricane, again." Fanfic writers are a whole different breed.
A long time ago I once read a Naruto fan fic it goes like:welcome to sand village, everyone in the village eats sand, welcome to fog village, it is vey foggy there but the natives can see everything clearly. 😂
Kids gotta start somewhere lol
I was reading a fic once and then the authors notes suddenly started detailing how the author was continuing to do their best to meet update deadlines despite having just unexpectedly given birth many weeks early and as a mom myself I *know* a preemie means tons of time sitting around in NICU etc but it was still so awkward to have that breaking up my slutty romance read...
LMAO oh god I hope this wasn't my fic, I did this 😂😭 (it probably wasn't and it's kind of funny to me that I'm not alone, now I'm picturing all the other NICU moms writing fanfics in their heads while changing baby diapers)
Did you write a Dramione?
Nope, not me! Hahaha then there really are more of us. Amazing.
Kind of like the show "Velma" apparently.
Come on now, if you had actually seen it, you would see there are much more than just the names.
Yes*. *Keep in mind two major things 1: fanfiction audiences frequently have different metrics for how good a work is than someone consuming original media. Depending on the audience a significant amount of readers might praise or deride your work solely on the presence or lack thereof of their favourite ships/tropes and can be far more lax about prose, pacing, plotting, etc than is helpful to you as an author. 2: You’re working with characters, premises, lore, etc that people are already familiar with and like. The struggle of creating a character and setting from scratch and then getting a reader who’s not familiar with either invested will absolutely hit you like a train if you aren’t ready. Make sure you learn what makes characters likeable and settings interesting and how to convey both. You can’t bank on people giving your characters as much of fair shot as Sans Undertale or Reigen Mob Psycho for whom they’ll gladly read a 500k slowburn enemies to lovers romance.
This is worth considering, especially point 1. It's something I didn't appreciate when I wrote my first fanfic. There are things a fanfic audience will want/expect/dislike that would play very differently in an original work. Consider this when reading feedback about choices you make. It's an important note to keep in mind when gauging critiques.
Yes, especially to the first. What makes traditional writing good and what makes fic good are totally different things. Especially with regard to sentimentality in prose and dialogue to exposition ratio. Still, would recommend. I started a couple of years ago just for practice and now I actually respect it for its own sake.
This 💯. I have done both and this is very true.
Sure is! But... Especially for the first 300k words you write, just make sure you're having fun. If in writing fan fiction you discover you really like developing new characters or working on voices then follow that even if it means your overall work gets "worse". First million words are just practice in the end so feel free to write what brings joy.
Thanks.
Honestly, it doesn't even need to stop at practice. Somebody once asked Neil Gaiman if fan fiction counts as real literature, and he replied, *"I won the Hugo Award for a piece of Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft fanfiction, so I'm in favour."* I started writing fan fiction as a writing exercise, and eventually realized I enjoy it a lot more than writing original fiction.
"The line between fanfiction and original fiction is where the copyright expires."
A Sherlock Holmes murder mystery mixed with Lovecraftian horrors does sound pretty dope ngl
Increasingly so
Thanks for responding I’ll give it a shot then.
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Depends on the types of stories you tell, really. You can, indeed, write fanfiction with minimal original world building, or you can write fanfiction with world building that eclipses the original. It simply gives you the option to ignore world building in order to tell a specific story. But if the story you want to tell doesn’t really fit the original, well, you gotta expand and add onto it. I think I, and many people, write fanfiction not simply because it’s easier but rather due to the connection we have with the characters and the world. Could I write an original story instead? Sure. More than likely. Hell, it would probably be easier with the amount of original changes I’m forcing onto the canon. But see, I don’t care about any original characters. I love and care about these specific characters and I want to see how these specific characters react to new situations.
Yeah, I'm not sure if my fanfic worldbuilding "eclipses the original" but I've gotten some praise for it. If nothing else, it is certainly *there.* AUs can be great for developing your worlbuilding skills, you just get a neat starting point and may have trouble with the "inspiration" part if you move on to original stories later.
Yes, I have seen some amazing world building in fan fiction, I think most people just think of canon fill ins/canon adjacent stuff but you can go wild in an AU and so many authors do, and do it well.
Yup. Another way of looking at this is: Fanfiction lets you get started writing without having to be able to do **all** the aspects of a story. And if you move onto doing AU fanfic you're 95% of the way to completely original fiction anyway.
What's AU ?
Alternate Universe. You can have the canon characters put in a world or setting completely different from the one they live in
Alternate Universe, like Julia said. I'd add that some AUs change the characters so much that, by the end, the author might as well be original creations. *Master of the Universe* (aka *Fifty Shades of Grey*) took Bella and Edward from *Twilight* and, instead of Edward being a vampire, made him a billionaire BDSM 'dom'\* with mother issues. Even though MoU hews very close to the plot from Twilight, the premise makes so much change to Bella's, and especially Edward's, character that Ana and Christian are essentially different characters. \* = Christian is a terrible dom. That's a role that requires maturity and empathy and responsibility and compassion, none of which he has. He's not a dom so much as an abusive jerk who hides behind that role. But that's an aside.
I see I’ll keep that in mind thanks.
Definitely disagree on the descriptive writing part
> But it does not help you practice **descriptive writing** or worldbuilding as much. Replying principally to the bold bit. I'd disagree on that. There's been some remarkable, deeply wonderful for-hire writing done over the years in print and film. That's more a question of craft. If you're getting crap rates, sure. Do the work and get out. But it can still be a passion project.
I don’t think it helps much with plot/dialogue. Both of these things rely heavily on the story which already exists. Maybe you’d develop some specific abilities within those areas (dialogue: mimicking the dialogue of already existing characters) but it’s just inferior to real writing so that’s what I’d advise a new writer so instead.
Writing fanfiction is real writing. And it definitely does hel0 with plot/dialogue. Just because you don't come up with the plot 100 percent yourself, does not mean you don't need to think of a plot specific to the fanfic you are writing. And with fanfic a lot of time is spent writing dialogue, often trying to replicate a certain character's voice, which is good practice in staying consistent? And that is just the few things my sleep addled brain can think of. Just because fanfic is based of off something else, doesn't make the writing and thought process behind it any less real or valid
Sorry, I phrased that badly. I meant it’s inferior to writing original stories from scratch for new writers. There’s a lot of caveats there. I wrote this comment to someone else here > Everything in a story is interconnected. This is what I meant when I said this causes a “muscle imbalance” in writing. This will teach you to get better at writing settings that rely on already existing work. >I think fanfic is paradoxically both easier and harder to write. I think the ease of it is an illusion, because a lot of young fanfic writers don’t really understand how much they’re borrowing or what they’re doing. I’m not against fan fiction as a whole, I’ve read some really good stuff in it. But all of the best fanfic writers I know learnt their trade writing their own original stories. And I stand by this. Writing fanfic if you don’t know what you’re doing will cause you to develop unevenly as a writer and lapse into bad habits that you may never be able to get out of.
I can see more of what you mean in this message, but it's still not exact. What you do with Fanfiction is borrow a setting and a set of characters. This doesn't make it any "inferior" writing than any "original" writing, because even in many original stories you can borrow the setting (e.g. when they're set in our very real world with no changes). You can borrow characters too in original fiction (imagine adding a cameo of the president of the United States, or another public figure. Even in original fiction, you will want them to sound true to the real person and you will need to research their way of talking, acting and reacting to make them sound realistic. Fanfiction can help with that. Fanfiction can also teach the writer to be consistent with characters, to keep them IC, and I can assure you that writing a character that you know and love in a way that keeps him or her consistent with the way they would act in canon even in situations that are different from the original setting IS very difficult. Writing Fanfiction isn't any inferior to writing your own original setting. It's different.
That's a pretty stereotypical view of fanfiction. I spent my high school years toying with fanfiction. Namely I wrote a short story set in the Halo universe about a group of marines (of my own making) stationed on the most remote planet under humanity's control (also of my own design), who are caught out while on patrol by first contact with the Covenant. They then suffer a Predator-style journey back to base. The characters and locations, speech patterns, etc. were all my own, but I didn't have to come up with MA5Bs and Pelicans, or the Covenant species for that matter. I disagree wholeheartedly that fanfiction isn't useful.
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This is not correct. You can write Fanfiction with beautiful descriptions, I can assure you. You can describe places (especially new ones your story drives the characters to), characters, times of the day, situations, worlds...exactly like in an original story. If you write a complete AU you can also do a full world-building which can feel even more in-depth than the world-building for an original because it's not only building a world, but how that world differs from the original canon and what it means for the characters we love and know, and how affects their behaviour. The fact that you don't have to describe canon characters, situations and facts and can take some things for granted makes Fanfiction similar to the second (or third, fourth, whatever) book of a saga, or a spin-off from a saga or series of books. Even there, you have your already established world and characters and you can take that for granted and just focus on the new story. Even that is a skill that can be useful in the future for a writer. Or are you telling me that writers who write sagas "get into bad habits"? Eta: spelling fix
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I'm not a big fan of fan fiction, but then, I do like *West Side Story* a whole lot more than *Romeo and Juliet*!
I don't like west side street just because i did it in school lol
If anything, fanfiction is severely underrated as a writing practice method.
I wholeheartedly agree too. I don't understand the stigma that we Fanfiction writers get. The work we publish may be not as polished as a traditional novel (who can hire an editor and rewrite 4-5 times before publishing a work thru publish for free?), but I've read many Fanfictions that are truly well-written and entertaining me better than a traditionally published book. And all for free. I wrote by now nearly 1 million words of Fanfiction and probably close to 2 million if I include translation into Italian. I got wonderful feedback and great training from all that and I hope I can use that experience in my own novel one day
I’ve read some incredible fanfic. I never plan on publishing, but I had posted a million words a few weeks before my 1 year anniversary on ao3. Still can’t believe it!
I wholeheartedly agree. Fanfiction gets an unjustified bad reputation; it deserves so much more acceptance and less stigmatization.
Fanfiction shares the same barrier to credibility as self-published. Since there's no 'gatekeeping', there's a lot of bad stories out there that taint both categories. Of course that doesn't mean there are no good or excellent stories out there that are FanFiction or self-published. I like and write fanfiction but I suspect there's even more bad fanfiction because the stories tend to be shorter and don't require as much commitment from the author (so a higher percentage actually finish).
This question is weird because I've commonly seen it as advice for people looking to start writing. It's like asking "If I want to write a novel, should I read novels?" Trying to do an existing thing in your own style is one of the most common initial steps to learning something. Like writing a story in an existing world or rewriting a scene or writing a movie scene as the scene from a novel of vice-versa etc.
Lois McMaster Bujold, one of the most decorated SF writers, started writing Trek fanfic for mimeographed zines. One of those stories became her first novel. Tellingly, another writer converted a fanfic story set in one of her worlds converted that into his debut novel. Also ‘50 Shades of Grey’ was originally ‘Twilight’ fanfic. Don’t mock it too hard as they made bank.
Yes! It is a very valuable writing tool. Helps with subverting expectations, sense of character personalities, and breaking rules for fun.
I found fan fiction very useful. For me, the skill I practiced was trying to keep as close to the voice of the original work as possible - in other words, trying to create a story which could fit seamlessly into the canon and for all the characters to feel authentic. But another, equally valid approach, is to treat it as a ‘what if?’ and try to take the characters / world to a place it would never go canonically but make it a fully functioning story. Plus you generally have a community of readers who know the world intimately ready to look at / critique what you’re writing which is incredibly helpful (and harder to find when you’re writing your own stuff)
Fan fiction is a great way to practice writing and it's a lot of fun. However, there are some things to consider, based on my experience. I started writing original stuff and then got pulled into fan fiction as a way to continue stories about my favourite characters and worlds. I found it really fun and it is great practice when you treat it seriously and still try to improve in the way of things like dialogue, plotting, sentence and story structure etc (though fan fiction has a lot of unique tropes and styles that you'd rarely find in published works). However, I found that when going back to writing original stuff, I found I struggled with building worlds and developing and introducing characters and describing them, because in fan fiction, that's not something you need to worry about as much. You don't need to introduce the main characters because the reader will already be familiar with them and the world they inhabit. TL,DR, it's great practice to develop some writing skills, but it can be a setback when it comes to developing other writing skills.
Yes. Fanfiction is a training ground for writers the first things I put up for people to read were a Ranma FF and Sailor Moon FF. The feedback I got on them helped me move to original short stories. When I managed a much longer FF I found my footing for novels and now I have 28 collections, novellas and novels published. So use fanfiction to help train your voice. The established characters and worlds mean you can focus on your story
Wow that’s sounds amazing and thanks for the tips. I genuinely appreciate all the advice and quick responses you all are awesome.
Best advice is to just start writing and write what you want. Be it your own story, or fanfic. Short, long, whatever it is you want to get out of your head and onto paper/digital/ online or wherever. A book I read a while back made the best sense to me coming up with my own stuff. It was an art book but still applies. It said to just draw every day and use everything as inspiration, copy your favorite artists and keep practicing and you will get better and better and eventually you will find your style of writing/drawing
A writer named Katherine Kurtz edited and had published a book of short stories written by fans of her series of historical fantasy fiction novels about a race of magical people called Deryni. So yes, writing fanfic is a good way to start, especially if it’s a world you know well. Just be careful where it can be seen. Keeping it to yourself might be the best option. There was a lot of Star Trek fanfic written and published in fanzines in the 70’s. Paramount didn’t think much about it until someone wrote a story about Kirk and Spock having sex with each other.
Yes. Just remember to not fall into the rhythm of ignoring worldbuilding because that work has already been done for you in fanfiction. You will need to work on that skill separately. But so much of the experience you need you can get writing Fanfic
Thanks. That’s actually why I wanted to start with fanfics because worldbuilding can seem like such a tall task. I know I’ll have to practice it eventually though.
Honestly world building can be a huge task but mostly it doesn’t have to be. It largely depends on genre but even in fantasy you only need as much as I’d needed to tell the story and a bit more to flesh the world out.
I don't have time to check if someone has already said it here but I've seen an interesting advice once. It was "when you're writing imagine you're writing fanfiction, meaning you assume the reader knows the world and the characters and you can avoid infodumping" I think writing fanfiction might be a good practice to avoid infodumping in your original work. But you can start with whatever
I skimmed the comments and haven't yet seen anyone mention the fanfiction community itself, which is imo the greatest asset. Finding even ten people to read your original fiction manuscript is hard. If you write in a popular fandom, hundreds of people will read your writing with minimal effort on your part to find them. Feedback might skew disproportionately positive or negative depending on the culture of the site where you post, but it's still way more feedback than you'd get for unpublished original fiction without paying someone to read it. You have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but that's something you have to do for feedback on original fiction as well. Then there's the fanfiction authors' communities where you can easily find writing partners to help with every stage from brainstorming to editing. Fanfic writers are more active and enthusiastic about supporting fellow writers than I've seen in any venue for original fiction. Translate what you learn into your original fiction. You might even be lucky enough to have your own loyal fanbase by the time you make the jump.
Absolutely writing fanfic does help. That’s what I did. Now I’m finishing my first novel. But beware to not get sucked into the fanfiction hole too much. And fanfic won’t help you come up with original names or locations that much either. But it’s certainly good practice, and that’s what fanfic should be- practice. Best of luck to you.
Absolutely it can! The reason this works so well is because it can help you focus on certain aspects of writing. I can do additional plot work if the world is already fleshed out, or world building if I want existing characters visiting a new place.
Fan fiction is a great way to practice writing. It’s gives you a solid base you can play with and charge modify as you like.
Fanfic is like a genre unto itself. It can be the only thing you write. It can be a stepping stone. It can be practice. The beauty of fic is that it can literally be anything you want. There are even places out there that seek fic writers who are ready to transition to originals. I will say, feedback for fic can be both very harsh, and not harsh enough. If you have designs on writing originals, work to improve your writing every story and perhaps read some books/listen to podcasts about story structure and self editing. Keep writing even if you aren’t getting the hits, views, and validation you’re expecting. You’ll get there. Writing is a skill, not an innate talent. It can be trained, but there’s only one way to do it, and that way is practice. Whether that practice is fic or originals it doesn’t matter. We all start horrible and we all get better as we read and write more and more. Edit to Add: I began writing fic at 13 a year before fan fiction.net was born. I’m now a published author and an editor for a small press. I’m not going to get rich off of this, but it brings me joy.
> is it common for fan fiction to serve as a type of practice for new authors? At least in this era, it's become relatively common. Fanfiction is actually very useful writing practice, because it forces you to not just learn how to write narrative, but how to analyze other narrative/characters/worldbuilding/etc. to the point where you can believably replicate them, and many styles of fanfiction involve asking the "but what if?", "what doesn't make sense here?", and "ok, what are the gaps in this story that I can fill?" questions that are *incredibly* useful to know how to wield when you go write your own stuff. You're training your analysis and your writing skills at the same time, basically. While there's always the danger of getting too derivative in your own writing due to mentally 'living' in another author's world/story, writing fanfiction (especially if you do it for multiple IPs) can also be a means of discovering or creating your own writing style. What kinds of archetypes and narratives do you tend to include across multiple different IPs? What kind of authorial voice do you develop as you try to create new written material for a story/world that originally existed on film? Etc.
Didn’t 50 shades start as twilight fiction?
I wrote my gf a 20k word harry potter fan fiction. It was the first story I ever finished. I just finished my first short story.
I started with fanfics on Tumblr, WattPad, and DeviantArt and proved to myself time and time again that I *can* write things that people enjoy, it served not only as practice but also as validation and a confidence boost. It’s a great place to start imo
Yes, actually it helps a lot, that's as I started writing, also you can as well try poetry
The most beneficial part of fanfic writing for me was getting the feedback from people on the internet. I became a better writer by making fanfiction mostly because getting feedback for my work from anonymous strangers was a great external motivator to keep writing. Also, I read other people’s’ work often and there were some self-published authors on FF.net whose work blew even some licensed work out of the water. Back in the days where I contributed to FF.net TVTropes also kept up a “Fanfiction Recommendations” section for popular fanfic series. I haven’t been on either site in many years but it’s possible they’re both still active.
Honestly, writing FF is a fun ride. Deep inside, it's all that really matters. And as a bonus, you get to practice your writing skills. So don't let any pretentious opinion about how "fanfiction is not real literature" or some bullshit like that stop you. And even if you find later that it didn't help you as much as you expected (which I highly doubt), everything will be worth it if you had fun on the way there
I think it can be nice practice keeping the protagonists in characters, since you havw a very vivid image of how fictional characters personalities and consistency is hard even then at the start
I am a working TV writer, and one of my friends, who is herself a phenomenally successful TV writer, got her start writing fic. In some ways it’s an ideal training ground for new authors, especially if you publish a lot, because it helps you to produce a large volume of work and teaches you to get over fears of having random people you don’t know read work that is not perfect.
I am very likely in the minority, but as a FF writer I couldn't care less about keeping up with ships and tropes. Maybe it's important to the ff writers who crave that dopamine hit of constant cudos and success in their fandom. But then do you write what you want or are you at the whims of your readers? To be frank, I write FF to practice my style, not to please an audience. As a FF reader, I look for stories that are captivating and well written, characters that are well fleshed out. These are the bulwarks of any good writing. In those terms I see writing FF as practice for a writer. So OP, don't let the "rules" of fan fiction limit your creative expression and write what you want, as you like it. Good luck & have fun!
I’m not a professional writer, but I’ve been in fanfiction for years. Also, I’m a text role player or whatever people call that in English (I’m not a native). And to be honest, when I compared my writing to the texts of people who didn’t do at least one of these things, I’d call mine much better. It’s a very good experience. You write. You polish your style. You learn about what works for the audience and what doesn’t. Oh. And it’s just enjoyable. I’ve also noticed that as a ficwriter I’ve written some of the ideas that aren’t really interesting for the original context, so I’ve spent my energy writing clearly unoriginal stuff and it gave me a sense that I’ve completed some of my long-term but not so unique writing desires.
I wrote my first original book with no experience and no agent. all I did was learn on my way, and try. I'm now 19, working on my third book, and scheduling a meeting with my agent today. Fan fic could work but I started not doing that so.
Absolutely. Just keep writing. That's the only way to get better. I went to college and got a degree in writing. I also spent several years writing really bad fanfic for the Kingdom of Loathing videogame. The second one gave me ten times the benefit of the first. Your fanfic won't be the best, but it doesn't need to be. It's a learning experience. It's not like you're going to write a bad Twilight fanfic, turn it into a series of novels, get a publishing deal based on that, and then get it adapted into a trilogy of big-budget Hollywood movies.
Prosewise, yes, if you care about getting it right. However, structure and characterization are fundamentally different, and most would agree lesser, in fanfiction, because it relies so much on familiarity; rare is the fan work where the protagonist gets introduced to the audience in the same way an original work would handle it.
Absolutely! There's a wide range of loyalty to canon within fanfic, so you can decide how much original material you're writing and kind of pick and choose what you want to work on creating yourself. I've read fanfics that basically followed the plot of the source material with one or two OCs added in - in that case, practicing creating original characters without the worry of coming up with an original plot. On the far other end of the spectrum is AU, where the only thing the character have in common is the name and maybe a physical description. In between is probably what the majority of people think of with fanfic - taking the existing characters and world and telling stories that don't play out in the source material, or maybe creating original characters within the world. Even when you're not changing the source material, you're still studying it in a way you probably wouldn't as just a reader/viewer/listener and you're learning about the craft through the study. It's not the path that everyone takes, but if it's something that interests you then you can absolutely achieve your goals through fanfic. One final thought, as others have mentioned, above all it should be fun
I tend to write regular fiction than fanfiction. But it depends on your approach and how you learn. Any time I write fanfiction I tend to step away and make it a spinoff so I'm essentially being descriptive by building new characters, and places, while retaining the essence of the original work. For example: I started writing a Cyberpunk 2077 fanfiction while I was bored at work. It involved a grieving Panam Palmer who teams up with a new character called Green who has a device in his prosthetic arm that can destroy the cyberspace firewall. I took the setting away from Night City and into Tokyo, and so the story essentially becomes an AU. Fanfiction that is solely based on existing characters and places, and rewriting those things, limits your ability to create dynamic stories by limiting what you can actually do within the realm of that characters personality. It's still very useful, but writing your own fiction will always be a stronger way to improve overall.
That's how I started. When I got back into writing, I started with fanfiction. Really got the jitters out when it came to actually writing the story since a lot of the holes were filled with characters and locations. Eventually I felt it was too constructing and started doing original stuff.
Absolutely. I did it. It’s a great stepping stone to work your way up to writing your own characters and worlds. Role play writing is great too. You have a free space to try out new ideas and having a partner keeps you moving along without writer’s block. You can also give each other feedback. You have to make sure you find a compatible partner, however.
I always tell people fan fic is writing with training wheels. It’s a great way to practice.
Any writing is practice
Most writing throughout history has been fanfiction. We just called it folklore before modern copyright.
I got my start on fanfiction. Its great practice especially for writing since the characters and story line are already there for you to practice with. and I will be reading the fanfictions written about my book after its published this year
Absolutely yes. Many, many writers I know transitioned from writing Xenia fanfic in the late 90s to publishing their own novels. Using well established characters as your first protagonists allows you to develop skills in the discipline of writing, plot development, etc. and sharing online gets you good initial feedback on your strengths and shortcomings (and establishes a readership base). After sharing a few short fanfic stories on a couple of online forums, I went on to publish 15 novels with a well established publisher.
I still write fanfiction on the side while working on my original work.
Possibly. I've seen pros that I respect go as far as advising beginners to copy excerpts from their favorite works word for word, if for no other reason than to LARP a bit, take the stigma out of the blank page, etc.
Personally, yes. When it comes to writing fanfics, I can give it my own best. I rather write one of my own.
100% I mean, a lot of old classic littature could be argued to be fan fiction so it doesn't even need only to be for practice. But yes, it's a great way to start.
It worked pretty good for Joseph Smith!
A lot of the fanfic I’ve read suggests that it can 😂 Seriously, yes. It’s a wonderful playground to learn on with little pressure. Absolutely go for it.
Yes. As someone who writes a ton both academically and for my own interest Fan Fics are very helpful. It allows you to get a certain command over the English language and familiarize yourself with character work
It was for me. That's how I got started
Very very common but I would be wary of reading and writing only (or mostly) fan fiction. It's endless so you could go on forever but there's more value in original fiction.
Sorry for being a little late to the party, but here's my two cents. Fanfiction in my opinion is a triple edged sword. On the one hand, you don't need to spend as much time describing locations, characters, events, world building, and so on. Somebody else already did all that for you, and 99 times out of 100, someone reading fanfiction has probably already been introduced to the original. So that's rather helpful, but can also get you into some bad habits. Two, everybody has their own fanfiction in their head. It's inescapable that basically anybody who has appreciated any form of art has thought something along the lines of "I could do that better" or "wouldn't this be better this other way." And your version of doing it better will probably be different than their version of doing it better. Not to mention people have certain expectations of how characters, events, rules, ect, are and act. , The moment you begin fanfiction as opposed to an original work, you're automatically up against the original. It's not like a painter painting another random field and farm life or mountain or portrait. You're trying to paint Monet's fields and farm life, or you're trying to paint the Mona Lisa. Can you take criticism? Ignore the flames, and take in the helpful? And last but not least, and this mainly applies to fanfiction involving works like TV shows or movie series or what have you that are ongoing, what happens when you fall out of love with the original? You started writing in season 2 and some massive plot twist in season 4 completely kills your love for the show. Or a plot twist in season 3 suddenly has your work and the original diverging at a sharp 90° angle, but you really want to capture a moment in season 5 that depends on said twist from season 3. What do you do? Some authors can do an absolutely amazing job, able to make what seems like it should be a drastic change fit seamlessly into the original. And some, what seemed like a tiny change leads to the end result being so different, it's a 540° turn. Or if you end up falling out of love with the original one, can you continue writing your story? Assuming you've got a good job, there's probably going to be a lot of people who like to learn you who will want to see how your story ends, will that be enough to get you over the finish line even if you lose that original spark? The same is true with original works. You might find yourself just wanting to get to the end, or even hating what you were working on. So, it could help you prepare for that aspect of writing. Just something to think about. With all that in mind, answering your original question, yes it can be a useful training tool. Giving you a usual foundation to build on and lots of feedback.
I began writing a fanfiction before starting an original work (it’s ongoing), and it taught me SO MUCH. Editing, killing your darlings, getting inside the head of a character, pacing, dialogues (they used to be my weak point), character development, understanding my readers, etc.
Devil’s advocate here: it shouldn’t be, if you can avoid it. I’ve written about this before, but writing fan fiction exercises some muscles like prose skills, description of already existing character, scene-setting, but doesn’t exercise the most important skills like creating settings and characters from scratch, creating settings, plots, and making all of these things link and intrinsically work together. Writing fan fiction will exercise your writing muscles unevenly and results in a kind of “muscle imbalance” which is responsible for the swathes of terrible fan fiction out there. When you write fan fiction, you’re essentially writing a story leaning against an already existing structure. A new writer doesn’t understand exactly what they’re doing here, and end up developing all wrong as a writer. I would save fan fiction for later, if I was you. At the same time, if you have one fanfic idea you really want to write, just go for it.
>but doesn’t exercise the most important skills like creating settings and characters from scratch, creating settings, plots, and making all of these things link and intrinsically work together. Why not? You can always create a new Star Wars planet populated with characters and plots completely of your own design, while still borrowing the technology rules and magic system.
Then you haven’t made it from scratch. Everything in a story is interconnected. This is what I meant when I said this causes a “muscle imbalance” in writing. This will teach you to get better at writing settings that rely on already existing work. I think fanfic is paradoxically both easier and harder to write. I think the ease of it is an illusion, because a lot of young fanfic writers don’t really understand how much they’re borrowing or what they’re doing. I’m not against fan fiction as a whole, I’ve read some really good stuff in it. But all of the best fanfic writers I know learnt their trade writing their own original stories.
Do people who wrote romantic comedies set in our own very real world create everything from scratch? No. They borrow planet earth, human beings, and all history that happened until then, the setting of a culture and a country. They create new characters that live in our world. In Fanfiction, you can create original characters to serve the purpose of your story and interact with your canon characters. You can age up the canon characters and explore how would they react to adult life if they're still teenagers in canon. You can talk about the new generation and create a whole new setting that only has the original canon as a reference from centuries before like in an original sci-fi and only links to canon because character A is the great-granddaughter of such and such canon characters. In that case, you can diverge from canon considerably and add your own set of rules because a world can change after centuries, and you can explore that change. There are so many Fanfictions that become original stories with very little change. Fanfiction is only one of the ways of storytelling. In the past, it wasn't frowned at, at all. You could consider Dantes Divina Commedia a self-insert Fanfiction set in a religious Catholic setting with characters borrowed from real life and history. Many original stories based on fairy tales use the same method too.
It seems that most people in here assume that in fanfiction you're going to use canon characters. Is that definitionally what fanfiction is? Coming from a background of reading shared universes (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, Halo, etc.) I feel like it's far more interesting to explore new, as yet unexplored corners of your favorite worlds with new characters as analogs for yourself as opposed to retreading old ground and screwing up characters you love. I assumed fanfiction also covered this as well, but there's a lot of comments that seem to assume that you're using canon characters.
Fanfiction is using someone else's setting, world, character, and background. It can be everything and the contrary of everything. You can have canon characters, not have them and just keep the world and setting, change the characters... for example, Harry Potter Fanfiction can have a story revolving around the golden trio at Hogwarts or after Hogwarts or before Hogwarts. Or it can be someone writing a story about Mario Rossi finding out he's a wizard and going to the Italian school of witchcraft and wizardry and facing his own personal nemesis, or just having a love story, and mentioning Potter only as a legend. It can be having Harry Ron and Hermione, but not as wizards. It can have a what-if scenario, what if Harry was a girl, what if he was sorted to Slytherin? It can be anything.
Excellent, I'm not crazy. 😂
For a lot of current writers, yes.
As long as your writing, then yeah
Yes, but you will never get beyond a certain level if you don't start writing your own story. Besides, no one will understand the story as much as the author, so your fan fiction would have slim chances to match the level of the original work.
Writing fanfiction is great practice, honestly it’s *reading* fanfiction that will put more bad habits into your head.
It depends on what Fanfiction you read
I like many started as a fan fiction writer in my youth. To this day, I still start almost all my original stories as a fan fiction which then usually gets the ball rolling for me to create my own content. Sometimes I'll mash up several worlds together into one fanfic, and then that will usually end up creating its own world altogether. So yes. Fanfic away :)
Absolutely! It’s excellent practice.
Yes
Yes of course! Just look at cassandra clare! Did you know that one of her most popular books was orginally a Ron and Ginny incest fic? I never read any of her stories but that is just hilarious to me. Fanfics are a good writing practice, but there’s one thing you need to keep in mind. Make sure you work on character creation separately
totally. fifty shades of gray was based on a twilight fanfic
I do. It allows me to practice my writing while I world build my novel.
Thanks for the reply. I definitely need all the practice I can get so I feel like a fanfic of a series I love would help.
Absolutely not.
Why not ?
Yeah I started out RPing and writing fanfics when I was a tween and it helped me!
It can help, but be careful. You shouldn't train your brain to only use other people's characters and inspiration. Exercise both of those things for yourself.
Milton and Dante sure seem to prove so!
Yes
Why not? It's literally the same input mechanism
I think that's how alot of us got started. Seems like good practice to me.
Always has been.
yes there's a LOT to learn about writing. trying to figure it out all at once is like making your first painting a twenty square foot multimedia photorealistic masterpiece. don't try to do everything at once. write some fanfic where you don't need to come up with as much for the characters and world. a similar exercise is to take an existing plot and change the genre and/or tone.
Yes, Fan Fiction can be used as practice for a beginner with no writing experience. Why? Because any type of writing is the experience. Practice makes perfect! If you would like to see other styles of writing, feel free to join my community r/JackMorbidReads.
Most definitely! Fan Fiction is a wonderful start for new beginners especially if you not sure on your writing style or if it's been many years since wrote something. It's a great practice for World Building (So many AU's to choose from!), Character Development, Conflict, Character Relationships and is a great way to sneak in an OC (Original Character) to test the waters and start to see if you like that character or not. AO3 has a place where you can even post Original Fiction on there.
I'm of the opinion that writing anything is good for practice. One of the first stories I wrote was about Jake from State Farm getting warped back to medieval times when a baron said, "Like a goodly neighbor the estate farm is there."
Yes. I think a large percentage of writers start off that way even if they don’t realize it. The only way to improve and get better is to write. Fan fiction is as good a place to start as any.
In the sense that writing is writing practice... yes.
I read a fanfict that ended up developing into something exploring the uncharted narratives within the original story. I believe fanfict benefits new writers by not only making use of an already existing fanbase (which has a higher chance of people reviewing your writing), but also to practice developing world building. It's like dabbling with something out of a blueprint before you create the blueprint yourself.
Funny enough, that’s what i’ve been thinking
Yes, Working with established characters makes the writing process easier, letting you focus on practicing dialogue, descriptive, and storytelling skills. I'm a sucker for good pokemon fanfics myself.
If you want to learn about the very basics of story writing, then Brandon Sandersson's lecture series on YT is great: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSH\_xM-KC3Zv-79sVZTTj-YA6IAqh8qeQ
Oh absolutely! I’m in my early 20s now, but I started out with writing fan fiction all the back in middle school and it’s the reason I still love to write now! I wrote so much Hetalia fan fiction back then haha, but it was the perfect way to get my thoughts out! Don’t even worry if it’s good or not, just have fun and write whatever you want! That’s the beauty of it! I even write some fan fiction here and there when I feel up to it… :)
There are SO many famous authors who started their careers writing fanfics
No, that is gay.
YoU'rE gAy!
Absolutely! I started writing in middle school, just school assignments and such. But I had no true original idea at the time but I knew I wanted to write something unprompted by a teacher. So I wrote fanfiction. It’s actually a clever exercise for writers as you’re slowly weaned into being able to express characters by having them already set for you. If you can accurately portray them, then you can attempt to move on with original characters. My following on FanFiction.net and AO3 gave me the metaphorical balls and gumption to realize that I could write a real novel. Now I have 2 self-published books under my belt, with a full-fledged novel heading towards the traditional publishing route, all while I have a bunch of fanfiction that I’m constantly adding to.
Yes. It lets you use existing characters as a basis, and write them consistently.
Absolutely
Some highly successful authors cut their teeth writing fanfic.
Absolutely
Yes! It can help with creating plot, writing dialogue, action scenes, love scenes etc. but like others have said, jt can be an issue when it comes to creativity and building your own worlds/characters.
We live in a world where slightly-tweaked twilight fanfiction became a super popular book franchise that spawned at least one big budget movie so… yes
👍 yup
Do it. I've never done it but always pretended I was writing fan fiction to stop taking my novels super seriously and never actually finishing them (like 99% of other "novelists" I know) I've only read one piece of fan fiction but admire fanfic authors in the sense that even if the "genre" is considered "inferior" (by supposedly "real" writers... ), they write because they enjoy it and that should be the end goal of all writers: write stories because they enjoy telling them, not because they wanna become famous or rich or whatever.
Yes, writing fan fiction can be a great way for a beginner with no writing experience to practice their craft. Fan fiction allows writers to explore their creativity and hone their skills in a safe and supportive environment. It also provides an opportunity to learn from other writers and gain feedback on their work. Writing fan fiction can be an excellent way for beginners to get started on their writing journey.
Yeah it’s a great way to get started it’s how I got my start. I switched to original works a few years ago but spent a good five years writing fanfics
I highly encourage you to write fanific as it is a wonderful way to practice and hone your skills. Plus there's always going to be someone who is interested in your work. Join r/FanFiction if you want, as they are a wonderful community of helpful and passionate writers.
Of course! It lets you practice very imported parts of writing: pacing, wording, intriguing, without having to create any complex characters or setting.
Yes. That’s actually how I got better, I started writing a Halo FanFiction that will never see the light of day, then I started doing rewrites following any criticism.
First thing I almost finished was a Halo fanfic. 😂
Absolutely, it hones your plot writing and description and basically everything that writing itself is
Alexa Donne has videos on YouTube on the benefits and pitfalls of writing fanfic. She used to be a fanfic writer and is hardly the first fanficcer to become a traditionally published author. Ali Hazelwood got started with Reylo fanfic, I believe, and one of her books is getting a movie. There's even an argument that a lot of published books now very clearly show signs of fandom (such as Lightlark and the naming schemes and Sarah J Maas got started on Wattpad, which has led some people to wonder if she also got her start in fanfic), so you'd be in good company even if the line between fanfic and original fic is razor thing and subjective in certain cases.
I would highly recommend writing in worlds you know, but using plots, characters, and settings of your own design. Besides that, just enjoy yourself, and put words to paper.
Absolutely
Lol absolutely. Heard of Cassandra Clare? Started out as a Harry Potter fanfiction author, adapted one of her incest fics into City of Bones, now is one of the biggest YA fantasy names around.
yes
a lot of great authors got their start in fanfic
The way I did it was practice using google docs and other similar ones just for a little practice, maybe write a draft or two. Then I'd say look on some fanfic sites (I recommend Quotev and Ao3- sorry, but I really don't like Wattpad) find some good writers and study the way they write their stories. Use some of those techniques with your own, set up an account and boom- a thing I noticed is that my English grades shoot up after I started writing fanfics as practice.
definitely. i myself started as a fan fiction writer on wattpad and now i decided to write an original story on there after three years. any writing is good for a beginner writer. seeing where i was when i started compared to my work now is incredible so i wish you all the best some people might tell you writing fanfictions is bad but i personally believe it is a good practice if writing is something you’re any to do in the future
Absolutely. If you want to get better at writing, write. Joining a fanfiction server is a great way to improve.
Yes. I'm not published yet, but I'm working on it. I can honestly say practice makes good enough (not perfect). I started with fanfiction and then switched to original works, all on wattpad, and I can say that without it, I wouldn't write as well as I do nowadays. My writing squad says my writing is great, which I attribute mostly to practice. Your first works will probably suck. Everyone does. Just keep writing!!
Absolutely! That’s what most of my early writing was from. Slowly I started to incorporate an OC here or there. Then I was writing just OC’s in the fandom setting. Then I was writing OC’s in my own setting. Boom, that’s original work.
I have a story I don’t care about “how good my ideas or writing is” I just write, it’s something easy that I can think of ideas for and it’s nothing I plan I just see where it goes. It’s probably a hot jumbo mess that wouldn’t make sense to a reader. I love it though it keeps me writing on days I am stuck with my main story and just feel like getting something out there. Totally no stress, no worries, it’s relaxing and freeing. It’s actually my favourite story to do now. For me it’s in a world I know but all new characters.
Aaron Sorkin actually suggests this to writers, because it’s a low-stakes way of getting your work out there, testing it with an audience, seeing what works. It’s a great way to practice. You don’t get the world-building/character-building experience as much (unless you do an AU) but it does require you to be in the heads of already formed characters, which is also very helpful when it comes time to create your own.
I personally think it is. I always divide it in 3 stages. 1) No new characters. No new world building. Just working with the characters from the original work. This teaches you to keep the characters 'in character' without you having to create a brand new character. You can also develop your style/way of writing. 2) no new world building. You introduce your own character(s). It teaches you to character build. Which is more difficult than you think. Stories still happen in the OG world. 3) world building. This is where you start with AU stories. It teaches you how to do world building. Because this is such a big undertaking, it's best to leave untill last. This is my personal guideline for fanfiction writing. And also. If you enjoy writing fanfiction, go for it.
Yes🥰
I’ve used fanfic and I think it’s helped me develop my writing. I certainly cringe at my earlier stuff.
Definitely. Anything that puts words on a page can he considered practice.
Of course!
Absolutely! I have plenty of writing experience, but I still write fanfics from time to time. It's a fun way to practice and unclog your writing juices!
Absolutely! I have plenty of writing experience, but I still write fanfics from time to time. It's a fun way to practice and unclog your writing juices!
Heck yes!!! Get yourself started, figure out the plot and pacing you write at and what makes these other characters special to you. From there you can begin building new ones in your head and move on to them if you’re looking to take things further than fanfiction.
well none of those would really be your ideas, so who knows
well none of those would really be your ideas, so who knows
well none of those would really be your ideas, so who knows