That said, I don’t generally read book-based fanfic. Part of the problem for me as a reader is that, having encountered those worlds in text the first time, it becomes distractingly obvious that I am not in the capable hands of the original writer. No knock on fanfic writers, but it’s just too different for me to enjoy it.

Fic based on movies and television, however, has the benefit of not being seen in text previously. And I have read some really great stories that also allow me to spend a little more time with a character who’s no longer around (Chris Eccleston’s 9th Doctor, I am so looking at you!)

Of course, there are shortcuts you take in fanfic that you can’t get away with in original fic. I still suck at description; in fanfic you don’t have to describe characters and settings, and I have to constantly remind myself that other people don’t know what MY characters look like and I have to throw them a bone. White Room Syndrome is a constant bugaboo–and in fact I had a fanfic character wake up in a white room once as a sort of inside joke.

Is most fanfic crap? You betcha. But I bet most of the stuff in the slush pile is too.

The main reason I wrote fanfic for so long is that I had ideas for it bouncing around in my head. What if THIS happened? What if THAT happened? I haven’t actually written fanfic for over a year, and I gotta say that the ideas for original fiction are a lot harder to come by–and they’re harder to complete once I get them. In the last year I wrote fanfic, I completed 19 stories; in my first year of writing original fiction, I wrote ten (two of which still need heavy, heavy editing to turn them from crap to not-crap).

However, the satisfaction index is correspondingly higher as well. And when you sell that first story? Over the moon.

Of course, as an author myself, I’m hardly unbiased

I think the reaction I had to seeing those characters written by someone else was between thrilled at being imitated and slightly ill at what had done to them. However, they credited me, and obviously loved what I had done. What right did I have to complain (me, a fanfiction writer myself)?

I began working on my own books again at the age of eighteen. I’d written my first fantasy novel at thirteen, but that was the point I discovered that I’d developed a terrible case of writer’s block. I had gotten lazy. I was used to using a fully developed setting, just adding characters and made-up exposition here and there. Beginning my next original fantasy novel, and starting it right, took years to work up to. Was this because of fanfiction? Was I used to seeing my work too-complete to begin something new (because the background had always been filled in for me)? Or perhaps I’d just been blocked over my time at college, and it would have happened anyway. I still had ideas. I’d get forty pages in and destroy my work over and over again.

There are good points and bad points to fanfiction. From a selling standpoint, I’d say that if you have fans who are so devoted that they put all the effort into the project for other people to read, it should be considered free advertising for the original book. Word of mouth news, what people take away from it. Don’t underestimate the power of online communities.

From an author’s standpoint? I think that writing fanfiction is better practice than writing nothing at all. But writing your own work, and seriously studying the craft is better.

As a professional author, I don’t dare start writing something that I can’t get paid for. It would be a disaster and an indulgence I simply can’t afford, but I too see the communities and the (to borrow a term) wuffie that the good authors get from their readers and find it very appealing indeed.

Yes, without a doubt there is a lot of bad fanfic out there. There’s always a lot of bad anything. There are also fanfic writers who are just as good as (sometimes better than) published authors. Fanfic is an overwhelmingly female enterprise, and since so much of it deals with squishy girl-stuff (even if it’s guys doing it), I think that makes it even easier to dismiss. I’m thrilled with the advent of the Organization for Transformative Works and applaud Naomi Novik and the others who are spearheading this watershed effort toward the protection and legitimization of fan fiction.

Cheers,

Anne

I used to write fan fiction when I was younger. I don’t anymore. I think on the one hand I really dislike it and on the other it’s great. There’s something flattering when someone interprets your work or comes up with their own stories using your characters. I met a guy on the net who liked something I wrote and started drawing cute little pictures and comic stuff of the characters. That was really cool.
But I also really hate fan fiction. There’s an overabundance of garbage out there. People write these things in the same fashion as people who can’t sing show up for American Idol, and nobody tells them it’s garbage, when it really is. A lot of times they ruin the characters or write dirty junk about gay relationships that wouldn’t exist in the original source material in the first place (I understand the nature of fantasizing, but I just think it’s ridiculous with literary characters). I think some fanfic people even get this delusion of self-importance from writing work that can’t be published because it’s not commissioned (like a Star Wars book) or it is simply illegal. I don’t know, I can understand the desire to write fan fiction, but I don’t get the whole making it all up bit. If you’re going to write your own story…then create your own characters for it.
I guess if the writer of a fanfic stays within the ‘rules’ of the world that someone else created it doesn’t bother me…but there’s too much “Harry Potter and Dumbledore are Gay” stories out there…

To each his own I guess.

*I don’t want to incorporate what others have written about my worlds and characters into my work either accidentally or on purpose and its very hard to erase something from your brain.

M: I’ve only seen it a few times with mine, but one thing I noticed was that in each case, these were people who were very enthusiastic fans of my work. In other words, they were precisely the kind of people I wanted to hold on to. Obviously you can’t draw any conclusions from such a tiny sample size, but it was still an interesting observation. And yeah, there was definitely a sense of, “But you’re not doing it right!”