Thoughts After Writing My First Official Fanfiction Story

[jimhines]

Folks have been talking more about fanfiction lately, partly in response to an incident that took place at a Sherlock Q&A session, in which Caitlin Moran brought up Sherlock fanfic, and pushed two actors to read an excerpt of what turned out to be sexually explicit fanfic. Without permission from the author. For what was presumably supposed to be a

Comments

[nyxalinth]

You win the Internet, sir.

I've written fanfiction for years. Mind, just once i would love to get some publishable story ideas, but never once have I seen myself as not a writer. Thank you for this.

[gelsey]

From someone who writes and loves fanfiction, thank you.

There is bad stuff out there, of course. But I've also read better fics than some published works. And it is fun, a lot of fun.

And I adored your Frosty fic. It was awesome. Thank you for sharing it with us!

[jimhines]

There's a lot of bad *anything* out there. No particular genre or style of writing has exclusivity on crap.

[cathellisen]

A writer is someone who writes.

Thank you for this post. I've never understood what authors get out of belittling the efforts of people who choose to write fanfic.

[jimhines]

I can understand, though I don't necessarily agree with, some of the discomfort certain authors express when it comes to fanfic. But the outright belittling or mockery? Yeah, I don't get it either.

[aulus_poliutos]

Should I ever get published and become moderately popular, I can totally see some slash pairings in my NiPs. :-D

[jimhines]

NiPs?

[suricattus]

yeah...nothing many of us haven't known for years. :-)

[jimhines]

Hey, some of us are slower than others!

[cathschaffstump]

I miss the instant gratification. In my days at the Sugar Quill, I was a rock star. In the end, I decided I couldn't play covers for the rest of my life. :)

Besides, my fan fiction was thinly disguised original fiction, so there's that.

I did do an academic paper on fan fiction as a good training ground for newbie writers who wanted to have some of the ground work laid. At the beginning stages, any writing will do, methinks.

But, while the stigma of fan fiction baffles, and the quality of it varies crazily, writing fan fiction is no way to learn to write for publication. Which is why I gave it up. I miss it in the same way I miss teaching high school. It was a piece of my life that I loved, although there were both ups and downs, and it will never come again.

At any rate, it's always good to experiment, init?

[jimhines]

There are certainly some skills you can learn that would carry over. It's not a complete training ground for writing professional work for publication, but that's like saying writing hard SF isn't a complete training ground for writing professional romance novels. There's overlap, but the best training for a particular type of writing is to do that type of writing.

[cathschaffstump]

I totally agree.

You could be a professor today. If you wanted.

[jimhines]

I applied for a few college teaching jobs after I got my Masters. They weren't interested. I suspect that in the long run, ending up with a government job was better for me as a writer anyway.