On Fanfic, and Why It's Harder Than You Think

Writing fanfiction is one of those little hobbies that people are kind of embarrassed to admit to having. I have to admit that I'm sometimes a little sheepish when people find out that I spent time writing the further adventures of the characters from, say, Charmed or Supernatural. And we're talking a lot of time here, people, not just a few hours.

But you know what I'm going to do right now? Link you to my ff.net profile. Though it's nowhere near everything I've done, that archive goes back to 2001. (If you feel the need to go poking through the stories, please be kind about the older stuff!)

And you know why I'm going to do that? Because I'm tired of being embarrassed by it. Yes, I understand why some people would consider writing fanfiction somehow less than creating something from scratch, using brand-new characters and places. But writing fanfiction is a lot harder than you think.

I jumped on the fanfic train for realsies way back in the day with Sports Night. I am the first to admit that my stories were kind of terrible. Very simplistic, not a lot of punch with the language and verbage, and I totally injected myself and my friends into them. (Yes, I wrote Mary Sues! For shame!)

But you know what fanfic is good for? Practice. You get to figure out how to create and pace a short story without having to worry about characters and setting. You don't have to create the whole world the characters are in, because it's already been done for you.

Ah, and there's the rub: these characters that you're writing? You have to be true to them. These are characters that millions of people know and love/hate/tolerate. While it's true that some fanfic writers will write anything and some fanfic readers will read anything, the good fanfic writers are the ones who can write the characters in such a way that it reads like the characters you see on TV.

And that can be freakin' hard. There are certain characters who come very easily to me. Prue Halliwell from Charmed, for example, comes so ridiculously easy that it's kind of frightening. I start writing her and it all just flows, which makes everything else fall into place.

Other characters that come super-easy, though not as easy as Prue? Casey Novak (SVU) and Abby Mills (Harper's Island). Sam Winchester (Supernatural), to an extent. He's easier for me than Dean.

But there are some characters who just don't come easily at all, and every single thing they do or say is a struggle. John Winchester from Supernatural is the hardest fanfic character I've ever written. We didn't see him enough for me to get a clear enough read on him to write him properly, and the opinions within the fandom are so widespread that there's no clear fan consensus on him either.

And then there's Phoebe Halliwell from Charmed, whom I don't like writing simply because I don't like her. It's hard to put aside my own feelings on the character in order to write her favorably, even though I know I have to. I mean, I can't make her be a twit just because I don't like her (no matter how much I may want to, hee).

So why are people so embarrassed to admit they write fanfiction? After all, those tie-in books you see all the time? Published fanfic, my friends. Licensed fanfic, sure, but fanfic nonetheless. The only difference is those authors are being paid and the writers on the internet are not.

Part of it, I think, is the view that fanfic is not "real" writing. Which I completely disagree with ... any writing is real writing. If any of y'all have a blog? Congratulations, you're a writer. Sometimes plotbunnies for fics come from a line or a moment or a scene in the source material, but all fanfic is a product of the fic author's imagination. It's taking a certain direction that the show never did, it's delving into the characters' heads/backstories/relationships/what have you in a way the show never told us, it's creating an adventure for the characters that we never saw. Why should a fic be considered something less just because the fic author is using characters already in play?

And the other part of it is very few people want to admit that they spend their free time writing stories about characters on a TV show. But hey, every writer has to start somewhere, and if it helps you to start out in a world that's already created for you, go for it! You'll never know what will give you the bright idea for your novel until you start writing.

As I said before, The Witch of November started out as a fanfic. And now it's a (granted, nowhere-near-completed) novel with a word count of 84,382.

So yeah, I'm a fanfic writer, and I'm rather proud of it.

And Another One!

Since any actual content I could write in this blog right now would be more "Edits revising blah blah blah editscakes," I'm going to do another survey! Really, though, these things are good at giving me things to talk about.

Hey Look, a Survey!

This meme has been making the rounds on LiveJournal but I figured it was a perfect post for this blog. 29 questions, all about writing? Hell yes!