How Writing Fan Fiction Can Supercharge Your Process
A Useful Tool
What do you think when you hear the term “fan fiction”? It’s…not exactly a prestigious or well-regarded slice of literature, is it? I used to assume that just about every fan fiction story had to be low quality, overly smutty, and entirely derivative. I also assumed that they were all about off-the-wall romantic pairings. And let’s be honest: fan fiction’s overall reputation isn’t undeserved. But at the same time, that reputation isn’t fully accurate. As it turns out, people at all levels of writing skill turn to fan fiction as a creative outlet, and there are some gems out there.
So, what does that mean for you? If you have original works in mind, why would you bother sinking time and energy into what feels like a literary tutorial? Well, while plenty of people use fan fiction as a creative outlet, it can also be a surprisingly useful tool.
Why is it Useful?
When you write a fan fiction story, the pressure is low, the mental and emotional load is far lower than with an original work, and you’re (often) in a fairly safe space, where you can release material to fans hungry for content. And if you do choose to release a fan fiction work, your readers will often be quite supportive, and some may even offer constructive feedback (something you’d otherwise have to seek out or pay for).
Writing in someone else’s sandbox is useful as a testing ground for your writing, a way to play around with your ideas and style in a low-stakes environment. You’re starting in a familiar and well-developed space: you already know the characters, you already know the setting, you already know the related plots, and you know how the world works. You have complete freedom to experiment. And because you don’t have to release your work, there’s even less pressure (and please note that some authors very much prefer that you do not release fan fiction of their works).
In a way, fan fiction lets you conduct a kind of scientific experiment: you remove many of the variables that you encounter in original works, letting you test your writing process by itself. You’re essentially benchmarking how you write, instead of that process getting lost in the maelstrom of your other considerations.
Step-by-Step
Pick an existing work that you know very well, especially if it’s one that has inspired your own creative processes. Ideally, you want a work that feels like it has room for expansion, and/or one that feels like it has unfinished business or an unsatisfying ending. From a starting point like that, you’ll have motivation to take ideas and run with them. It can also help to choose a work with one or more characters that you identify with in some strong way. The work you choose can be a book, a film, a TV series, a game, or pretty much anything.
Choose how you’re going to approach it: what parts of the existing work are you going to use? Are you making a continuation? Are you plucking the characters into a different setting? Are you taking one of your original characters and inserting them into the narrative? You have complete freedom here. I’d recommend starting with the minimum amount of new content: something like a continuation or an alternate version of the existing story; this way, you can get a feel for what aspects of your original works might be dragging you down (see the Example section for how this helped me).
If you want an audience for your story, pick a platform. The most common ones are Archive of Our Own and FanFiction.net. Check what kinds of formatting quirks they have, so you don’t have to go back through your entire work to add or remove silly things.
This is where the fun begins: it’s time to write in this simplified environment. You’re most likely going to be working with plot rather than with characters or settings, so I’d recommend trying some outlining and summarizing. You can use bullet points, do the sentence-expansion method (i.e. start your story with a summary sentence and gradually expand it), or simply type out some highlights in your document and start filling it out!
Your first draft will probably suck. Don’t worry about it, that’s to be expected. You’re in a safe space, and the stakes are low (you’re not going to be marketing or selling fan fiction, after all). So keep going!
Do some editing, including read-aloud editing (yes, that can feel very awkward, but it really does help) to tweak and shift the story into what you want it to be. And again: this is a low stakes operation. Your work doesn’t have to be perfect: the goal is to try new things, have fun writing, and glean some knowledge about how to make your process work better.
If you want, publish your work to a fan fiction site; you can choose to publish it all at once, or go chapter by chapter as you write it (if you choose that path, I highly recommend outlining beforehand, or at least knowing where the story is going and how it will end).
If you get critical feedback, don’t take it personally, take it as something of immense value: someone read your work and took the time to provide feedback. If they’re mean about it, that’s their problem. In my experience (which, to be fair, was limited to a fairly calm fandom), readers were supportive, eager to give your work praise, and those that provided constructive criticism were nice about it.
Remember, the idea here is to have a fairly chill experience that returns valuable information about how you write. By shifting much of the creative burden onto something that already exists, you can identify your own growing edges.
Example
I never expected to write fan fiction. And to be honest, I still feel some small amount of literary shame over it; intellectually, that feeling is silly, but negativity towards fan fiction is built into our culture. Hopefully, you won’t encounter that baggage. But if you do, remember that there are well-regarded published authors that have done it, that it’s normal to remain anonymous, and you don’t actually have to release your story.
For me, this started after a string of writing failures. I’d tried multiple times to get a pair of original works rolling, but I didn’t enjoy it, and the results were disappointing. It felt awful. Then two different things hit me at around the same time. First, I read an excellent and highly-acclaimed series with an ending that was equal parts brilliant and frustrating; that latter part pushed me hard to desire writing again. And second, I finished a different kind of narrative that left me hungry for more: I unexpectedly identified with the main character more than with other works, and I found the ending ambiguous enough to practically demand closure. I’d never experienced that level of desire for more content, and I ended up looking into fan fiction for the first time. I read some stories: some were pretty terrible, but many were actually quite good. People took the story in interesting directions, but none gave it quite the closure I’d been looking for. And with that, I had a spark: a published series with a “bad” ending, plus a gap in a story I felt so connected to, drove me to realize that I could write what I wanted.
The last piece of the puzzle was an idea: a way to take the story in a different direction that felt authentic to the original. My motivation was intense: as with my original works, I wanted to write. But this wasn’t a blank slate: I had an entire detailed template to work with. Characters that I’d spent time with, a place that felt real, and a background plot that I could practically recite from memory. So, I decided to go for it. I crafted a story to “solve” the questions I had with the original. Then I crafted a follow-on. These were not particularly great stories, and I cringe sometimes when I think about the fluff in those stories, the uneven pacing, and some odd little errors that seem so obvious in hindsight. But the experience ended up being the key to unlocking my own writing. Here’s what I found:
I hadn’t been developing my characters enough: with the fan fiction story, writing those characters showed the weaknesses in how I’d been establishing my characters. Basically, I didn’t know my own characters. I couldn’t really empathize with them, and that was perhaps the biggest problem in my writing, and what was making it a slog. Once I started really getting to know my characters in my original works, crafting their adventures and challenges became fun.
I discovered that I needed more structure in how I plotted stories. For the fan fiction stories, I created detailed outlines, mostly to make sure I was keeping the plot logical (there’s my engineering background coming in). But creating that skeleton for the story ended up being far more useful than serving as a plot hole checker. It made it easier to focus on what was happening with each character in each scene, instead of having to constantly think ahead to what would come next: I already knew what was coming next. At the same time, I still had the freedom to change the path, and had the structure to see exactly how those changes would cascade. In the years since, I’ve drifted away from strict outlining, but it was critical in those early times.
It felt amazing to get validation for my writing: despite the amateur nature of the work, I’ve received thousands of likes/upvotes and, far more impactful, hundreds of comments that called out character and plot moments that readers loved. And I had one commenter say that my story helped them through a depressive period. Even if writing the stories hadn’t yielded a shred of help for my writing process, that single comment would’ve made the entire exercise worth it.
As mentioned briefly above, I also received some critical feedback. These comments were incredibly helpful, including one that identified a recurring error that became glaringly obvious once pointed out.
And it was fun to play in someone else’s sandbox, really. I wrote one story, then felt that it needed a sequel, so I wrote that. I had a vague idea for another follow-on, but at that point, I’d started to take my lessons learned into my original works, so I lost the motivation (basically, I graduated from the tutorial program). I did, however, get a random idea at one point and went back a few years later to write what has become one of my favorite stories - every once in a while, I even wonder if I can squeeze that concept into an original work.
So for me, doing this was both rewarding and provided a gold mine of information that made my writing process easier, fun, and productive.
Should you do it?
Writing fan fiction worked for me as a way to jump start my writing, but it may not work for everyone. I recommend it if you have a strong passion for an existing work/franchise, and a strong motivation to take that work in a new direction. And that direction is entirely up to you. You can stick to the fan fiction meta and make a relationship-based work. You can make it super bizarre. You can go for a crazy crossover. I’m certainly not going to judge you. Just have fun, do something cool, and you’ll learn more about your writing.
But what if you want similar results without writing fan fiction? There are a few ways to do it. The idea is to create a sandbox that lets you rise above the emotional and mental load of a fully original work. So, here are some options:
Isolate which portion of your original work(s) you feel may be weak (check the first post (TK) for tips on how to do this). Then, pop that weak element into a controlled, known headspace. Some examples:
Have your character(s) go through a day in your life.
Have your character(s) go through a well-known event.
Write a story of yourself or someone you know doing something fairly mundane in your story’s setting.
Simplify your plot into something that could happen over a short period of time in a well-known place, and write it (i.e. imagine the plot of The Lord of the Rings, but instead of a grand fantasy adventure, it’s you and friend that have to get rid of, say, a diary full of town gossip that everyone wants to get a hold of, and you need to get it to the only shredder across town).
Retell a historical or otherwise real-life event in your own words. You can even plop an original character into it.
Write “side-quests” in your original work: miniscule stories that use dead-simple concepts to test out your works:
Have your character make a meal or purchase some everyday items.
Drop someone you know in real life into your world, and have them ask one of your characters for help with something simple.
Have a “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” style side scene that happens somewhere in your plot: while some major event or series of events from your plot are happening, have some stand-in characters (or even caricatures of some archetypes) doing something adjacent to the action.
Try writing a piece of your story in an entirely different genre; this is a longshot, but it could reveal stumbling blocks in your approach.
Try writing your story (or a story) in the style of an author you like (or one that has a very distinctive style). Adding the challenge of using another person’s style can also identify places where you might be getting frustrated.