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

[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.

[beccastareyes]

There's also the fact some of us writers aren't shooting for publication beyond 'posting free stories on the internet'. (Well, fiction publication. I'm in academia, which requires I publish non-fiction regularly to show I'm still a scholar.)

One of the pieces I'm starting to accept as a hobbyist is all the different things I do. Some of it will never be put up on the Internet beyond a mention in my word counts. Some of my original fiction I might change my mind and shoot for commercial publication*. In between, I have many options.

* Which means editing it a lot more than I do for fanworks, since 'worth the time to read' is less expensive than 'worth the time and money to commercially publish'. (Regardless of self-publishing, small press or large press, it still costs a lot more time and money to bring a book to an actual store and getting people to notice it.)

[babsbybend]

The Sugar Quill was a good site. I'm glad it's still up, even though it's closed to new submissions. It had standards, and that's saying a lot!