A Discussion On Fanfic
Found this on Fantasy Magazine: Fanfic: Menace Or Threat? A quote:
"I’ve written one piece of fanfic, back when I was in my teens, featuring the Uncanny X-Men, the supervillain Arcade, and an embarassingly thinly disguised version of me. I’m curious what people’s experience in the arena of fanfic are — what do you think someone gets out of writing it? Is there a world that you’d find more tempting than others to write fanfic in? Is it a useful exercise, an entertaining diversion, or a waste of time?"
Head on over there to read the ongoing discussion. Feel free to join in, or to start one here.
"I’ve written one piece of fanfic, back when I was in my teens, featuring the Uncanny X-Men, the supervillain Arcade, and an embarassingly thinly disguised version of me. I’m curious what people’s experience in the arena of fanfic are — what do you think someone gets out of writing it? Is there a world that you’d find more tempting than others to write fanfic in? Is it a useful exercise, an entertaining diversion, or a waste of time?"
Head on over there to read the ongoing discussion. Feel free to join in, or to start one here.
posted by pgenrestories at 9:17 AM
4 Comments:
The fanfic which is an embarassingly thinly disguised version of the author happens to all fanfic writers when they're starting out. But then that happens even to original writing. Exposure to other fanfic and other writing will change that quickly.
Is there a world that you’d find more tempting than others to write fanfic in?
You'd be more tempted to write fanfiction for series that you loved a lot and immersed yourself in. I know people who write for Digimon (a more serious type of Pokemon, hehe), because they do love that show (and it does have good characters and a decent if weird running plot).
Is it a useful exercise, an entertaining diversion, or a waste of time?
To me it was a useful exercise and an entertaining diversion. I do not regret the years I spent typing it (I regret the years I didn't study because I typed! Lol!)
Writing fanfic taught me the basics of fiction writing in general, the hard-knocks way. Plotting, characterization, research, being "in-the-zone", writer's block, dialogue, description. I learned it all by typing fanfic. I also learned how to show my work to the world for commenting.
Granted, being used to using other people's worlds and characters makes a bit hard for me to formulate my own. But after that's done, at least I don't have to start from absolute scratch when I type up the story in my head. That's one important thing I learned.
EK 8 )
I have no less than five works of Legend of the Five Rings fanfic floating around in the treacherous morass that is the Internet: "Of Honor", "Geisha", "Breath", "Dark Fate" and "Words". I was writing the more universally accepted short stories before I was writing fanfic, though, so I never encountered my own personal Mary Sue episodes. Moreover, I focused on making the game universe palatable for a wider audience, so most of my five were actually publishable as written.
I see fan fiction as being as lot like bacon: You can have a few pieces when you're first starting out, but eating an entire slab will prove extremely unhealthy. The fact that you're working within the bounds of an established universe is a great help - it fills in a lot of the detail and frees your mind to focus on things like plot, pacing and perspective. However, I've noticed that a lot of writers don't seem to move beyond fanfic, which means that they are forever trapped within the fictional worlds that have captured their fancy. While fan fiction is perfectly okay in my book, I think that there comes a time to move out of it and start telling your own stories. Otherwise I get the impression of a 40-year-old who still lives in his parents' basement, and that usually doesn't sit well with me.
Hi, EK and Sean. Thanks for your thoughts.
From both your responses, fan fiction has helped you guys. I suppose this is true too for others (as can be seen in the responses on pgenrestories.multiply.com). I'm slowly learning that many do feel strongly for fan fiction.
My main concern with fan fiction is that of a publisher's: I can't print any, no matter how well written, because of copyright issues!
Well... I don't think we're saying that fan fiction should be printable on its own. I mean, you said it yourself -- fan fiction usually cannot be published as official work because of the copyright concerns.
But if anything, fanfic is workable. And it does help build writing skills. There just happens to be a fine line between writing and getting yourself published; if anything, the fanfic issue places importance on the fact that you need some degree of originality in order to see publication... and that you have to come up with that yourself.
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