Three Pieces of Writing Advice I Never Thought Were Real Until I Wrote Fanfiction
I’ve been writing for over a decade now, and I’m as familiar as you probably are when it comes to the standard litany of writing advice: “write what you know,” “the best writers read,” “you should know your audience,” etc and so forth. It gets spread so constantly that it all starts to sound like white noise after a while, to the point where you’ll either ignore it, or write it off entirely because you haven’t seen it proven yourself.
Thing is, about three years ago I finally decided to take the leap and make myself an account on ArchiveOfOurOwn.org, and as I’ve written and posted within a medium that has as little goal of monetization as it does censorship, I’ve started to notice that a lot of that advice I’d been brushing off for years was actually starting to make sense.
These are the three pieces of writing advice I’ve seen proven right over those three years.
#1: Write What You Want to Read
Here’s the thing that separates fanfiction from pretty much any other form of writing: you can’t make money off of it. Due to copyright laws and the fear instilled in every author until the age of 16 by one Anne Rice, it is both illegal and stupid to try and profit off of work that you’ve written with another person’s (published) characters and setting, so there’s really no reason to try and make your fanfiction anything new and noteworthy.
The New York Times will never call something like Alone on the Water a bestseller. Nobody is going to win an award for their in-depth exploration of the realities of homelessness in America in their 500k word Destiel fic. Beautiful pieces of work like Ghazal will never have glittering, gold-leaf covers glinting out from a bookshelf. The only fame or notoriety you can expect is some other nerds like you sharing your work with their friends.
And honestly? That’s the best thing about it.
When you take away the pressure to be something grand from your writing, you wind up with something genuine to yourself and what you want to write.
The only thing you can write is what you want to read, and somehow that makes it some of the best writing you’ll ever create. Whether it’s allowing your own fears to come to light within the actions of some of your favorite characters, or taking a scene that broke your heart and using your own words to stitch it back together again, nobody can write what you need better than you.
Sometimes it’s exhausting and hard to think that “your the only one who can write your story,” but somehow fanfiction makes it easier. Of course no one else is going to write 15k words about your favorite pairing from that one obscure manga working as counselors at a summer camp; why would they? So it only makes sense that you be the one to do it.
#2: You Can’t Please Everyone
Sure, fandom has become an… interesting place these last few years. As being an unabashed rabid fan of things has become more mainstream, the newcomers have begun trying to sanitize the space to their own sensibilities, but honestly, that’s a losing battle and everyone knows it. Fandom has always been a lawless, wild place where the most you can ask for is a few trigger warnings or name-dropping a piece of fruit to help you avoid the worst of it.
Because of this, it’s important to remember that nobody hates as viciously as a fan who thinks you’ve treated their favorite thing poorly.
You can write the most beautiful piece of prose ever put to paper (or word document, as the case may be) and still get bombarded with single sentence reviews along the lines of “I hate that you wrote the characters in a way that ignores my own personal interpretation of them, go die in a hole.”
Lots of published authors speak of learning to ignore the rejection letters, but somehow nothing thickens your skin and sense of resolve like a few negative comments from 14-year-old Kyle in Wisconsin.
Because fanfiction is truly a transformative medium, you’ll find that something will always be wrong in someone’s eyes, because the main thing driving people to create fanfiction is that something in the original work didn’t do what the writer wanted it to, and now it needs to be fixed.
Some people will think that you’re wrong for changing a character’s sexuality or backstory, while others will claim discrimination because you didn’t change those things enough. You might hear that your way of showing a character’s grief over their tragic backstory is unrealistic for their character, or maybe someone just really hates that you erroneously slipped in a line about them liking strawberry ice cream when in episode 17 of season 22 they were shown eating chocolate.
At the end of the day, you just have to accept that your ideas and wants are going to be different from other people’s, and that they can find something to suit their needs someplace else.
On the flip side, though…
#3: Your Writing Will Always Find Its Audience
One of the things that continues to amaze me more than anything else about posting fanfiction is publishing a passion project, having it get maybe 50 likes over the course of 2 years, and then one day waking up to a comment from a complete stranger telling me how it’s the exact story they’ve been wanting for years and how much they love me for it.
Whether it’s a pairing of two characters or a crossover that only made sense in my mind at 2am, somehow it always manages to find someone who loves it.
Something that I’ve learned from growing up in the digital age is that, even if you think that your work is bad, or cringey, or anything else, if you’ve posted it online, there’s a good chance that at least one person loves it. Sometimes I think that it would be better to take down the stories that don’t do as well, to just tuck them back into a corner of my hard drive and let them collect dust, but then I remember my own sadness at going to pull up an old favorite story of mine, only to find that the author had deleted it.
Published books are just the same.
Just because your book isn’t an immediate bestseller, doesn’t mean that it won’t end up in the hands of someone who will treasure every last word and margin.
Three years ago I posted a short story that only managed to get one comment, which was a very aggressive note from someone in Spanish calling me disgusting for writing a character as bisexual.
Four days ago that same story got its second comment from someone telling me how much they loved it and my interpretation of that same character.
Sometimes these things take time, but it’s hard to imagine not having shared a story that made someone happy.
