3 Lessons From Fan Fiction
In 1995, we got AOL.
By late 1995, perhaps early 1996, I was using the AOL chatrooms for role-playing. And of course, I went to the one fandom that will always draw me in:
Star Wars.
I played some run-of-the-mill smuggler. It was kind of a boring experience, because it was mostly a typing competition — whoever could type their action first, got to do their action first. It was that sort of thing that got me to switch to using a MerrSonn Power 5 blaster instead of a DL-44, because it was easier to type.
But unlike most people who tend to “grow out” of fanfiction, I’m coming back to it. And as I think about the role fan fiction has had in my writing life, I start to realize that it’s critical to the development of my skills.
Lesson From Teen Fan Fiction: Output
I wrote my first novel when I was 15. It was a mashup of generic fantasy tropes, Star Wars, and Final Fantasy 7. In fact, it was a lot of Final Fantasy 7.
After I finished it, I kept trying a bunch of different genres and ideas, but I couldn’t land on an idea that kept me as motivated as that first one.
This was around 1997, the golden days of Cartoon Network’s Toonami, and the introduction of anime to a young Chris. The one that grasped me the hardest was Gundam Wing.
Gundam Wing is pretty broody and dark and a weird halfway point between your standard mecha anime and a super-mecha anime. It’s worth the watch, at least from what I remember of it.
What I mostly remember was the 75,000 word fan fiction I wrote of it.
It was a total “next generation pilots” story where each pilot from the original story took on an apprentice to reclaim their suits and restore order to the solar system. I don’t think I finished the story, and to my huge regret, I don’t have it anymore.
The biggest thing I learned from that experience was how to output words. After I wrote that “waste of time,” I realized that I was gifted with the ability to output a lot of words in a pretty short amount of time. Combine this with the fact that I was still doing a lot of play-by-post roleplaying on AOL (I had moved on to Order of the Crimson Star fantasy role playing…I think OCS still exists, actually), and I was able to sit and type and get words into the document.
This still my greatest strength as a writer.
Using a fanfiction was important because I didn’t have to worry about worldbuilding. I knew the facets of the world, could build and manipulate when I wanted to, and use what was made when I didn’t. It let me be fast and prolific.
Lesson from 20s Fan Fiction: Character Development
I got married at 23.
I had majored in Music Performance, failed to start a career as a performing musician, and had gotten a job as a music publisher. Music and I were through, professionally. You can read more about that here:
But newly married with a steady job meant that I had time to write, something I hadn’t had much of during my college years. I decided that I was going to double-down, learn everything I could, and get published.
So I worked and wrote and wrote and wrote.
At the same time, though, I felt like I was missing something. In my teen years, I had loved the community and motivation of doing those online RP posts. Whenever I didn’t feel like working on my novel, I could work on the other story.
So I joined an online RP community focused on, of all things, Naruto.
I loved writing here. I made some excellent friends, had a place to test out ideas, and had invested fellow writers who wanted to work on collaborative writing with me.
I had a lot of feedback, which is critical in the life of a developing writer. I had an instantaneous audience, which is something you don’t get when you’re cranking out your novel alone, waiting to create a full draft before you start begging for beta readers.
I also got to work on character development in a very focused way.
The site didn’t have a “site-wide plot” per se, so it was mostly personal stories that you strung together with other people’s personal stories. Sometimes you would work with people in a group to create character arcs that worked together, but more or less you just play your character with someone else’s and you see what happens.
It was the first time I made characters I had deep, profound connection with.
It was the first time characters felt like people.
I put characters in and out of relationships, had them grow up, level up, have children, raise those children, and die. Those children became new characters who grew up, leveled up, and their own children.
When I missed the characters that died, I would write alternative timelines, alternate universes, and alternate settings.
I learned how to master a character by having them exist in a fictional setting, free from the heavy work of worldbuilding.
By the time I was ready to start submitting completed novels, I knew how to create people that readers could connect to.
Lesson from 30s Fan Fiction: Love of Writing, and Writing for Love
29 was a weird age for me.
I switched careers, I had a kid, I was tired all the time from having a kid, and tired all the time from becoming a high school teacher. In the subsequent six years, I had three more kids, moved schools, went back to school, and started a podcast.
I had thought I was done with writing, but I wasn’t. I write about that experience here:
So here I am, at 35, back to writing fanfiction while I’m not working on my podcasts or novels.
Conventional wisdom would tell you that this is a bad idea, especially when trying to create a writing career while parenting and having a full-time job. Every word poured into my Spider-Man/Little Witch Academia crossover action romance is a word that could be put into a work that I could sell.
But I need this.
Firstly because it’s fun.
My twenties were the training-montage part of my writing career. I read all the books, did all the exercises, wrote thousands of words a day, listened to podcasts, read blogs, and consumed everything there was on the technical aspect of writing.
I killed some of the joy of writing.
Writing something I can’t sell is the point. It helps me remember the love of creating a story that got me into this in the first place.
The second is to write things that people want, which is actually a skill for selling stories. These fanfictions are helping me think about the target audience, what their expectations are, what their desires are, and what they hope to feel and experience when they read the story.
Thinking in that way is helping me create my next novel. It helps me narrow down the focus, not get distracted with side-ideas, and play into the proper expectations and tropes.
So writing for my love of it, and writing things that people love.
Have you read fanfiction? Did you write fanfiction? Do you still write fanfiction? Tell me about it!
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Smedian publication
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