Fan Fiction Addiction

In a previous blog on characterisation I mentioned watching TV as an aid to improving your understanding of character and writing about the characters as practice. I am of course referencing an often miss understood phenom, Fan Fiction.

Fan Fiction, or fan fic, is taking an established ‘Universe’ (in this instance Universe is the realm inhabited by particular cast of characters in books or TV with it’s own physical and metaphysical rules) and then creating their own scenarios often times seriously changing the plot and messing with the universe rules. Fan fic is an exercise in make believe for the creative geek, it’s fun it’s engaging and most importantly it’s really good practice.

There’s a tendency among some writers to look down on fan fic that it’s the realm of the obsessive fan, tantamount to plagiarism, and ‘lazy’. To this I say for the most part. Balls. So long as credit is given to the intellectual owners of the characters and world, for which most fan fic has a staple header, there’s no copyright harm and this is not done for profit. Also who among you can say you’ve never obsessed over anything? And lazy, you may want to go out and read some of these fictions, while it’s true there’s some real stinkers out there it’s just as true that there are some amazing pieces of writing from short to truly epic in length.

Fan fic allows us to explore our own writing skills in a comfortable recognisable sandbox. We already know the characters, we’re used to them and how they react to situations so it’s easy to work them into what we’re planning because we automatically adjust the situation to them, which is what needs to happen for a good story. In essence it’s a way of teaching yourself how to write.

I have always been making up stories for as long as I can remember and I spent years trying and failing to write them down, I’d get lost my plot was poor my characters totally un-relatable. I was (and still am) a complete telly addict, and I fell in love with Buffy, this was just before we got internet for the first time and so obviously the first thing I did when looking into the net was look up Buffy, this was where I discovered fan fic for the first time and it was a revelation. I’d always made up little ‘what ifs’ about my fave shows but writing them down never occurred and sharing them with the world… I set up a page and got to work. My first attempts were pretty bad still, but it improved to the point where I got compliments on my work, especially my dialogue which had been my worst point but thanks to the excellent work of one Joss Whedon I learnt this key skill and it’s become one of my strongest.

So long live fan fiction and all those writing for their fave shows, hold your heads high and keep writing!