Fanfiction. If you liked reading or were (unhealthily) obsessed with something as a teenager and you have never so much as glanced at a piece of fanfiction, I implore you to let me know how it escaped you. On websites that offer the public an opportunity to share their writing such as the more general Wattpad and the more tailored Fanfiction.net, you are not hard-pressed to find fanfiction on anything from K-pop idols to Youtubers. Whatever you may be worryingly fanatic about, someone else probably is too and has also devoted their time to writing about it. Extensively.
I used to love fanfiction for many reasons. The first is that it allowed me to consume stories for free. As a child and teenager, I would read anything I could get my hands on, never really caring about the genre, and so hundreds of stories about something I was interested in with no cost seemed too good to be true. Another reason I loved fanfiction was the drama. Somehow, the plots of the fanfictions I used to read were all packed with, quite honestly, an impossible amount of twists and turns that left me on the edge of my seat. I was not very hard to impress, and I was aware that most of these stories were incredibly cliched, carbon copies of one another, but it did not really bother me when I could discuss the drama with my equally obsessed friends. If a certain kind of storyline was popular, it was guaranteed to crop up again and again. They weren’t always creative or ground-breaking stories, but they were always exciting to me.
I’m a real sentimentalist and I fear the ruinous possibilities of revisiting the things that made me happy in the past, only to discover how wildly disappointing they are to me now but I will hold on to how they made me feel at the time. My claim is not that all fanfiction is well written and should be considered masterpieces of modern literature. I just want to suggest that it’s not the worst starting point for writing your own fiction. If at any point you find inspiration in someone else’s work, you shouldn’t have to feel discouraged about being unoriginal, especially if you are not looking to be published. Everyone is unoriginal in some way, they just don’t always know it.
There is also the fact that imitation only started to take on negative connotations during and after the Early Modern period. In the Romantic period, originality became the more valuable method of creation, but it remains that copying was not always a practice that was frowned upon and prevented by law. Instead, the practice of imitation or imitatio was encouraged in art as a crucial part of the creative process. Originality is the more modern concept but nowadays, as long as you aren’t trying to make money without involving the original owner, both originality and copying are acceptable.
Adding your own twist to existing stories, modernising them, or offering retellings is also an acceptable form of copying that can be seen across history. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is essentially a retelling of the biblical fall of man, many of Disney’s movies are retellings of folk/fairy tales from the past and they all manage to maintain incredible success, despite being glorified, albeit well done, fanfiction.
With all of that in mind, I want to summarise what I think the pros and cons of fanfiction are in 6 points:
PROS
- PRACTICE – Fanfiction has the potential to provide you with a ready-made cast and setting. If the creation of characters is an aspect of your writing that you are not focusing on improving, it allows you to work on things like plot, editing, character development and your writing style.
- PASSION – There is nothing like having a real interest in what you are writing about to provide some welcome inspiration. You might want to continue a character’s story or explore a character you feel deserved more attention, and anything that can reignite a passion for writing can’t be a bad thing. Art inspires art, and if you’re moved to create something by a novel you’ve read, do it.
- COMMUNITY – Often if you share your work, there will be someone willing to read it and discuss it with you. Writing can be lonely and unrewarding if there is no one to share it with and writing fanfiction will offer a ready-made community of people that might be interested in what you’ve created because they’re already invested in the original author’s world.
CONS
- LIMITATIONS – There are obvious limits to improving your writing if you are neglecting your ability to create and then develop your own characters. Alongside this pitfall, there is also the fact that copying someone else is not the best way to become a published author, as you will not be able to make money from it unless you remove all traces of the source material and make it your own.
- OFFENDING PEOPLE – There are multiple reasons why a piece of fanfiction may be offensive to people. Sometimes readers cannot stomach things that are outside of the canon or can’t fathom a relationship between certain characters. I’ve never seen people who read fanfiction complain about how overtly sexual it can get, often in an inappropriate way… but I would say that can get to an offensive level too.
- LACK OF CREDIBILITY – Fanfiction is associated with fangirls and fanboys, who are inextricably linked to hardcore fandom and young people, and when has the public ever taken teenagers seriously? The use of someone else’s characters, the outrageous plots, the sex, the assumed poor writing quality, are only some of the reasons fanfiction is frowned upon by people who might consider themselves more literary.
I am not arguing that fanfiction should be considered a genuine category of fiction because I know that is not entirely possible, despite a few name changes having tremendous effects on some published novels today. But I do think it has a place as a purely self-indulgent form of creative writing and that it should not be discouraged. Not all writing is looking to be critiqued, or bring in money, and fanfiction can serve as welcome entertainment alongside a testing of your own limits.
Read 'N Riot 