Over the last eight or nine months, I’ve spent a lot of time teaching creative writing to children. When I started, I found it a little frustrating that no matter what the prompt or lesson or skill development, almost every child in every class would start off with a Great New Idea, which promptly turned into fan fiction the moment their pen hit the paper.
What started as “a race car driver has to win his final race to save the world from aliens” quickly became Top Gear fan fiction.
What started as “a girl has to find magical mushrooms to defeat an evil monster” was suddenly set at Hogwarts.
I spent far too much of my time trying to figure out how to overcome this “problem”. And then it occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t actually a problem at all.
In fact, writing fan fiction was incredibly beneficial to these kids. And the more I thought about it, the more I came to realise that writing fan fiction can be beneficial for anyone — whether you’re a brand new writer or a highly experienced one.
What is Fan Fiction?
Fan Fiction is simply fiction that uses the characters, settings, world, or plot points from an established work of fiction to tell new stories. The characters and worlds are drawn from books, movies, TV shows, comics… if it’s fiction, chances are there’s fan fiction written about it.
For obvious reasons, Fan Fiction isn’t written for profit. It’s written for pleasure by people who either keep it hidden in notebooks or on their own hard drive, or who upload it to one of the (many) fan fiction sites online.
The joy of Fan Fiction comes from writing about favourite characters and worlds — often in unexpected ways, or by crossing fandoms. (Harry Potter aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise? Han Solo catching Pokemon?) While that sounds like a lot of fun, how does that help us become better writers?
The Elements of a Story
The hardest thing about learning to write fiction is everything.
I don’t mean that it’s all hardt, but that there’s so many different skills that you need to hone in order to be a truly great writer. Individually, the skills aren’t necessarily difficult, but when you consider all the aspects of a story as a single topic, it’s not at all easy. Consider just a few of the different elements that go into writing a piece of fiction:
- Well-developed characters
- Authentic dialogue
- Engaging character arcs
- Interesting plots
- Useful sub-plots
- Language that flows
- A unique voice
- Suspense and tension (and micro-tension)
- Realistic world-building
- Effective description
And so, so, so much more.
One of the reasons that our first novel (or novels) tends to be unpublishable is that it’s practically impossible to work on improving every one of those skills at once. We have to enhance our natural strengths and work on improving our weaknesses.
And there’s where Fan Fiction can be helpful.
One Thing at a Time
It’s so much easier to work on one thing at a time than to try to do everything at once.
- If you want to work on plotting and character arcs, you can use characters and settings that you already know intimately.
- If you want to work on developing your voice, why not re-tell a story you already know in your own words?
- If you want to practice writing description, how much easier is it if you’ve seen the people and places on the big screen?
Fan Fiction can be a way to focus on improving your skills in one area, without having to focus on all the other areas as well.
That’s right, it’s not just a fun exercise in immersing yourself in your favourite stories, it’s a learning tool.
Writing is Writing is Writing
The other, more simple, way that Fan Fiction is beneficial is that it’s writing. The more you write, the better you get at it.
Even more than that, the more writing you finish, the better you get at finishing your writing.
When you’re not having to invent everything about a story, it can be easier to get to the magic words at the end of your story. The mental component of writing can’t be overestimated. The more often you write “The End”, the better you get at sticking with a story all the way through, rather than being distracted by Shiny New Ideas.
Challenge Yourself
After I’d gotten past my frustration with inadvertent Fan Fiction in my writing classes, I came to a point where I realised that there actually were times that the children wrote stories that were based solely on their own ideas. It happened in classes when I wasn’t challenging them to try something new.
When I simply gave them a prompt and let them write, they’d come up with all their own ideas.
But when I taught them a new technique, or asked them to focus on a particular element of their writing, they would automatically fall back into writing Fan Fiction. Not for the element they were working on — they worked really hard at getting that right — but for the other aspects of the story that they didn’t want to focus their attention on.
When their idea turned into Fan Fiction, it wasn’t something to be frustrated about, it was a sign that they were growing their skills, and trying new things. They were using their favourite characters as a way to focus their attention on the areas of their writing they wanted to improve.
And that’s a process that could benefit all of us.
(Even if the Fan Fiction never leaves our hard drives.)
Do you write Fan Fiction? How do you think it could (or does) benefit your writing journey? If you were going to write a piece of Fan Fiction today, which characters would you write about?
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About Jo Eberhardt
Jo Eberhardt is a writer of speculative fiction, mother to two adorable boys, and lover of words and stories. She lives in rural Queensland, Australia, and spends her non-writing time worrying that the neighbor's cows will one day succeed in sneaking into her yard and eating everything in her veggie garden.
Thank you for posting this. You’re absolutely right about the benefits of writing fanfiction. I started off writing Supernatural fanfiction way back in 2005. At the time I was curious about writing. I wanted to see if I was any good at it. I tried various POVs and themes. I worked on plotting and character arcs. To my surprise I was good at it. More importantly, I enjoyed writing. Feedback from my readers encouraged me to try new things. They let me know when I succeeded, and when I didn’t succeed they certainly let me know. I listened to their feedback. It helped me grow.
The only drawback to fanfiction has nothing to do with fanfiction itself. It has to do with the snobbish attitude that some people have towards it. That’s their problem, not mine. I’m currently working on an original fiction series, something I wouldn’t have attempted had it not been for fanfiction. It’s a great place to start.
This is a question about the Flash Fiction contests you oversaw in the past (I didn’t know where else to post this). I really enjoyed and valued participating in them, not necessarily for the contest aspect, but for the way it pushed me to write in flash fiction mode. And I really enjoyed reading all the other entries, and the range of imaginative responses to the same image prompt. I’m hoping you’ll consider bringing it back in some form, even if not as a contest. I’m sure it was a big demand on your time, and that might be one reason not to resume. If so, perhaps someone else might be interested in heading up a new version. I suspect there are many others who would love to see the Flash Fiction contest (or something along those lines) brought back. Thank you!
I am a middle grades humanities teacher; last year, I was the Teacher of the Year for my school. I have my MA in humanities and am a published scholar in the field of Tolkien studies. I’ve also published original short fiction.
I’m putting my bona fides out there first because, after I say the next bit, a lot of people would stop listening to me. Because I’m also a fanfic writer. Yep, 37 years old, an accomplished professional, and I have been joyfully writing Tolkien fanfic for 14 years now. I even run my own website for Tolkienfic.
I also allow my students to write fanfic, but I allow it for a different reason than you do. I allow it because fanfiction is fiction. This idea that they are two different things is a modern notion, driven by the economic interests of publishers, who need to lay a claim of ownership upon an artwork to make money on it. And to be clear, I am not disputing the rights of authors to make a living on their work; I am disputing the idea that fanfic is somehow a lesser, easier form of fiction.
Consider how many classics would today be dismissed as fanfiction. Or the number of authors who have become multimillionaires using stock characters and plots less imaginative than many fanfic stories I’ve read.
Or bestselling authors who have used characters, settings, and plots from history and mythology. Are they writing fanfiction? Why not? They’re not inventing their own plots and characters, are they? Why should the fact that the source texts are in the public domain matter if the issue isn’t economic interests but the works’ derivative nature?
I don’t think kids tend toward fanfic because it’s easier–although I respect that you’re seeing a pattern in your own teaching that can be explained in that way–but because they’re kids and they’re tending toward a form of storytelling that is natural for us as human beings. We have always made sense of the often senseless world in which we live through story, and for much of human existence, those stories have been largely oral and passed down, i.e., constantly retold and retooled for a new audience, i.e., fanfiction.
Nor is fanfic necessarily easy. One can see it as having some of the pieces in place, or one can see it as having to write within stricter parameters. One of the glorious things about fiction is the freedom of the form: We are limited by nothing but our imaginations. Fanfic is limiting and, in my experience, the more disciplined–not easier–form of writing. I often spend more time on research before writing a fanfic than an original story, where I retain full control of my characters and universe.
Long story short, I’m glad you’re letting your students write fanfic. I hope your respect for the genre continues to grow to recognize that they’re exercising a bone-deep storytelling instinct that’s as human as anything we do and are writing fiction, not merely warming up for something better.
Oh my goodness!
Hi Dawn, this is Pearl Took aka Pearl R. Meaker. So cool to see you posting on Writer Unboxed! Thank you so much for your input into this discussion.
My thought on this always run to: How many of the Star Trek books on the shelves of bookstores and the screens of Amazon and other online bookseller’s sites were written by Gene Roddenberry, the actual creator of Star Trek? How many of the Star Wars books that are available were written by George Lucas?
Every one of those books are fanfiction – commissioned and approved by the companies that own the rights to Star Trek and Star Wars, but fanfiction none-the-less.
You can also buy all sorts of books based off of the works of authors whose work was never copy written because there was no copy writing of books when whey wrote. I’ve seen tables full of books for sale at Barnes & Noble based off of the works of Jane Austen. Books with enough respect from their publishers that they are hardcover editions. And yet, they are fanfiction.
Fanfiction: it’s not just for “wannabees”.