I had some serious writer's block and couldn't finish my novel. Every time I would make progress, I would find myself getting into "perfectionist mode" and ended up not making any progress. I finally had enough. So, I decided that I would try FanFiction stuff the kids like. And I was shocked at how good it was for me. Here are some lessons it taught me: 1. Writing should be fun and enjoyable. I got into writing because it was an outlet for my imagination and creativity. But once I started getting all serious about being published, I lost sight of that critical aspect. Then it just became a chore. 2. It doesn't have to be perfect. FanFiction has a very low bar of entry. All you have to do is respect the source material and post regularly and your fiction will probably be pretty successful. And while I think people believe that we ought to always put the best of the best work forward, I really question that. What good is your "best" if it makes you miserable and you don't even up completing it anyway? Is that really your best? There's a lot to be said about just having at least something completed. 3. Learning when and how to publish for maximum results. Believe it or not, a lot of those FanFiction places do have metrics for you to keep track of your work. This was really valuable in learning to read trends and seeing when people lose interest. Is it better to post on a weekday or on a weekend? Is a consistent schedule better or just when you get it done? The answer to that is "it depends." How the sites work plays a huge factor in that. Wattpad most users have an account and they have a weird algorithm for how they promote the work, AO3 is hard to get an account with and they post the most recent updates on top. These two completely different sites mean completely different tactics for maximum results. 4. Responding to requests from passionate people. People are really passionate about things. They want to see certain characters and things happen in the story. And learning to respond to those things with grace, and letting them down easily (but also being able to promise that it's still going to be great even if you're not hooking Harry Potter up with Haggar like they want) is an art. 5. Most of the basics of storytelling are still the same. Even though it's fanfiction, it's silly, and they're not your characters, the basics of writing are still the same. You still have to have that rising action. You still have to have things go somewhere. You should have good grammar and good spelling. You should build your scenes and not just rush to moments. 6. Setting a schedule for myself. This is the real reason I decided to try out fanfiction. If there's an audience waiting for what comes next, it's easier to get the motivation to write. 7. Audiences take time to build. I think a lot of audiences don't want to invest in work that's abandoned after a few weeks, which happens a lot in Fanfiction. So they see your work, and maybe be interested in it, but they wait and see if you're going to devote yourself to actually writing it. 8. Getting away from the computer and committing to what I already wrote. My downhill spiral with writing started when I stopped handwriting my rough drafts. And there was no real reason why I stopped doing that other than I thought it would be faster. I built a handwriting system that is so effective, that I could literally write for hours without stopping or getting writer's cramp. I think the argument was made that it was "faster" with the computer, but I think it also contributed to being a perfectionist as it was so easy to change things. With Fanfiction, I went back to handwriting and since I'm posting as I go along, I learned that I really do need to commit to what I wrote and not go back and change it.
I love this. I started fanfiction in 2010 and wrote short, novella and novel-length fics. I'd written hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic before I ever even tried original fiction. I still go back to it sometimes, for many of the reasons you've outlined above.
It's one of those things that I don't think anyone wants to openly admit they do (and I honestly like that part of fanfiction). It's a little... weird. I also got to see how kids use social media. I found this one fanfiction and the author was giving it his all to self-promote it. He was doing these skits on youtube and hiring an artist. I was really impressed. And I thought, "I need to keep an eye on this kid. This kid knows how to use social media to promote and I need to follow what he's doing. Because I might have to do that when I get into writing." I wouldn't have found that kid if not for fanfiction.
Malcolm Gladwell says you need to put in your 10,000 hours of good practice, and I'd say that's about right. I got mine from just writing all kinds of crazy stories, some comedy, some serious, in all kinds of styles and approaches. Sometimes I spoofed certain writers, sometimes I emulated ones I liked. My friend and I came up with a couple of series' we both wrote shorts for, and it was all necessary and helpful experience. At certain points, and I'm sure it was because I just wrote so much and also read a lot, my skills would level up. I don't think what you're writing matters all that much, though of course if your goal is to learn to write fiction, you should be doing that. Fanfic makes it easier in certain regards because you already know your characters and settings and situations. It's like entering an already-existing series and just being able to start working with existing characters. That takes a lot of the difficulties out of the equation and lets you concentrate on other things. Just be sure to transition out of fanfic at some point or it'll be all you know how to write. Use it as a starting point, like putting training wheels on your first bike, and when you get your balance take them off.
Yeah, I always liked that one from Gladwell. 10K hours is basically 5 years at a full time job (40 hrs x 50 weeks). That's a nice round bench mark.
I like this video. But this does make me wonder how much fan fiction adds to this 10k hours. He says the first step is accessing what the experts are doing. Well, the writing experts aren't really writing fan fiction as far as I know. I guess if you want to be a fan fiction writer, it could be the way to go. He talks about the quality of practice and where and who you are learning from. True that the 10k hours isn't a hard and fast number, but where you are learning and what you'r practicing does come into play, according to the guy in the video. I don't think there is anything wrong with writing fan fiction. I've had bouts of considering writing some and getting into it, but then I have always decided to work on my original fiction or read from authors I admire and strive to be like. I guess I have just never found the time to give fan fiction a try or even a deeper look. Don't get me wrong. I think fan fiction is a cool concept. I'm not knocking it at all. I'm just not sure how much practicing fan fiction is really developing writing skills as much as writing original fiction would. I mean, that's sort of what the guy in the video is saying, and it makes sense to me.
I think it can be a good starting place. It makes it a lot easier to get right to writing stories, because you don't have to do all the work of crearting characters and story situations etc. I never did it myself, so I can't say how useful it is, but it might give a writer a head start, unless they get stuck in it and never expand into writing original stories. I think it offers a way in for people who otherwise would never have thought they could be a writer, and for that I'd say it's valuable. But I agree beyond a certain point you need to take off the training wheels and start writing original fiction with characters you created yourself.
I think whatever gets time on the grindstone when needed is fine. Fan fiction still has to have scenecraft, pacing, plot, and character development if there are original characters. Audience is a bit less discerning on quality, since they're there for the IP and 'shipping,' but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Most important, though, is recapturing the habit of productivity for its own sake, which the OP has accomplished. Doesn't matter what the vector is so long as it gets one writing every day. Edit: unless that vector is alcohol, or hitting your spouse. Those are not good ways to get past writing slumps.
I'm not putting down fan fiction or commenting on the quality at all. It's, honestly, not something I've ever looked into. But I could see myself visiting the idea in the future, I think. Mainly, because when a good season ends sometimes you don't want to wait a year for the story to pick back up. I think it could be interesting to see where fans have taken a series while waiting on a new season. And I would be a reader first just to see what I got out of it. Maybe I would write something, but I'm not really going to think about that too much before checking out the scene. I could see this as being fun. I'm not sure. I think there is one serious I'm Kinda curious about. Are there any recommendations on where to read the best fan fiction? However, 10k hours of writing fan fiction might just make you an expert at fan fiction. Sure, many kinds of skills transfer from one writer to another, but, at the same time, many do not. Having written article and even a novel, didn't really help me all that much when it came to writing short fiction. Sure, I could write well going into it, but there is a difference between writing well and being able to do what I wanted to do. I guess there are some exception to all this, and maybe fan fiction is one of those.
Actually in the beginning writing anything helps to develop profluence (a fancy word I learned from John Gardner that means fluency basically), plus helps develop your syntax and paragraph structure and wording etc. I'd say something like fanfic could be helpful for the first thousand hours or so, maybe more than that.
Almost all fanfiction these days, the great, the good, the mediocre and the bad is found at https://archiveofourown.org. It is run by The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit that protects and defends fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. They have an amazing tagging system where you can find just about anything you want for any TV show/movie/book/manga/video games/etc. that exists on Earth. When people like a fic they click the Kudos button, and you can sort stories in order of highest number of Kudos first (or Comments, or Bookmarks). There is no algorithm like social media, it is truly an archive where you can search with an amazing level of specificity for whatever might float your boat on any particular day. For reference, my most popular fanfic is 11 years old, 9 chapters, 70,564 words with nearly 1700 Kudos to date. I still get Kudos or Comments all this time later on at least a monthly basis, which blows my mind. It's for a show that went off the air in 2015! There are a not-insignificant number of fanfics that get re-written into original works. My second book is actually an adaptation of one of my novella-length fanfics and I've sold a fair amount of copies of it. An early version of Cassandra Clare's City of Bones was posted as a Harry Potter fanfic, 50 Shades of Gray by EL James was a Twilight fanfic, After by Anna Todd was a self-insert One Direction fanfic (!), I could go on and on. You might quibble with the quality, but when these books hit the NYT Bestsellers list and get adapted for movies and TV...well, the publishers who accepted these books sure saw something there.
To answer the question: How useful is it? It depends on what the problem is. If your problem is coming up with ideas and characters, fanfiction is not a good tool to fix that. Nor is it a good tool to work on your spelling and grammar since the expectations are set extremely low. Trust me, no one will call out your grammar or spelling or tell you that you're using too many -ly words. They just want to be entertained. It's not a good place to learn to accept feedback, since no one is going to tell you how much you stink either. However, keeping a consistent writing schedule and developing an effective prewriting process are both things that fanfiction could help with. And those are not small things! Before writing fanfiction, I had no prewriting process. With Fanfiction, I developed a very effective prewriting process. And I'm really excited to finish this fanfiction and then get back to what I actually want to work on. It's also fairly good at teaching diplomacy. While the bar is very low, people do express disappointment and disagreement with how you handle characters from their favorite fandom. How do you handle that? Can't be a jerk. So you learn to address their disappointment and disagreement. You have to address that in a way as to not put yourself as an authority on source material you don't own, but at the same time not cater to things that aren't going to work.
