How Writing Fan Fiction (or Something Similar) Can Supercharge Your Process
A Useful Tool
What do you think when you hear the term “fan fiction”? If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to stories that feature elements of an existing work (book series, film, television series, etc.), written by fans of the original work. And if you are familiar with the term, you probably don’t think of anything particularly prestigious or well-regarded, right? I mean, 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 fan fiction almost always focused on off-the-wall romantic pairings. And let’s be honest: fan fiction’s overall reputation isn’t undeserved. But that reputation isn’t fully representative of that controversial branch of literature. After all, people at all levels of writing skill turn to fan fiction as a creative outlet, including some published authors. And there are some real gems in the fan fiction world.
So, what does any of this mean for you? If you have original works in mind, why would you bother sinking time and energy into something that might feel like a literary tutorial? Because fan fiction can be more than a creative outlet: it can also be a surprisingly useful tool. And if you scroll down far enough, you’ll find some alternatives to fan fiction that can get you similar results.
Why is it Useful?
When you write a fan fiction story, the pressure you feel is low. You’ll expend far less mental and emotional energy compared to writing an original work. And if you choose to release a fan fiction work, your readers, hungry for content, will often be quite supportive, and some may even offer constructive feedback (something you’d otherwise have to seek out or pay for).
By writing in someone else’s sandbox, you’re adopting a testing ground for your writing: you can play around with your ideas and style in a low-stakes environment. Starting in a familiar and well-developed space makes it easier to get rolling: you already know the characters, you already know the setting, you already know the related plots, and you know how the world works. And in that space, you have complete freedom to experiment in that space. As a bonus, you don’t have to release your work, so there’s even less pressure and more flexibility. Also, please note that some authors strongly prefer that you do not release fan fiction of their works.
Fan fiction lets you conduct a kind of scientific experiment: you remove many of the variables that you face in original works, letting you test your writing process by itself. You’re essentially benchmarking how you write, instead of having those processes get lost in the maelstrom of the other considerations that fill your head when writing from scratch.
A Step-by-Step Process
Pick an existing work that you know very well, especially if it’s one that has inspired your own ideas. 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 with story elements.
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 existing process might be dragging you down (see the “My Example” section below 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 start writing 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 probably 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 writing process more fulfilling for you. And here are some tips and recommendations on editing.
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 the latter 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 unpleasant about it, that’s their problem. In my experience (which, to be fair, is limited to a single, 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, coming back to your original work armed with better tools and processes.
My 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 quite pervasive. Hopefully, you won’t encounter that baggage. But if you do, remember that there are well-regarded, published authors who have done it, that it’s normal to remain anonymous, and you don’t actually have to release your story.
My journey started after a string of writing failures. I’d tried several times to get a pair of original works rolling, but I didn’t enjoy the process and the results were disappointing. Then, two things happened. First, I read an excellent and highly-acclaimed series, one with an ending that was equal parts brilliant and frustrating; my resulting annoyance pushed me hard towards writing again. And second, I finished a different kind of narrative that left me hungry for more: I 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 such a craving for more content, and I ended up exploring fan fiction for the first time. And…I was surprised and delighted to find some high-quality stories. The fan fiction writers made plenty of fascinating and fun decisions, but none of them gave the story the kind of closure I’d been looking for. So, with a new motivation to write and a subject begging for my attention, I decided to try it.
The last piece of the puzzle fell into place when an idea hit me: a way to take the narrative in a direction that felt authentic to the original. My motivation was strong: as with my original works, I wanted to write. But I no longer faced a blank slate; I now had an entire detailed template to work with: characters I’d spent time with, a place that felt real, and a background plot that I could practically recite from memory. I crafted a story to “solve” the questions I had with the original. Then I wrote a follow-on to wrap up the loose ends. These weren’t great stories, and I cringe sometimes when I think about the fluff, the uneven pacing, and the errors that seem so obvious in hindsight. But the experience ended up being the key to unlocking my writing in a lasting way. Here’s what I found:
I hadn’t been developing my original characters well enough. When I wrote with already-developed characters, the weaknesses in my own characters became clear. Basically, I didn’t know my own characters. I couldn’t really empathize with them, and that, more than anything else, had been making my writing feel like a directionless slog. Once I started getting to know the characters in my original works, I found that creating their adventures and challenges became fun.
I discovered that I needed more structure in how I plotted my stories. For my fan fiction stories, I created detailed outlines, mostly to make sure that I kept the plots logical (there’s my engineering background coming in). But those outlines ended up being far more than just plot hole checkers. They made it easier for me to focus on each scene: instead of having to constantly think about what would come next, I already knew. At the same time, I still had the freedom to make whatever changes I wanted, and the outlines showed exactly how any 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 one commenter said that my stories helped them through a depressing time in their life. Even if those fan fiction projects hadn’t yielded a shred of help for my writing process, that single comment made the entire exercise worth it.
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. It certainly wasn’t as thorough as the feedback I’d get later from beta readers on an original work, but it was still so valuable for my writing.
And it was fun to play in someone else’s sandbox, really. I wrote one story, then I wrote a sequel. I had a vague idea for another follow-on, but at that point, I’d started to spin up my original works, so I lost my fan fiction motivation: in a way, I graduated from a tutorial program. I did, however, get a random idea a few years later and went back to write what has become one of my favorite stories - every once in a while, I wonder if I can squeeze that story’s concept into an original work.
For me, fan fiction writing proved to be not just rewarding, but useful in the long run, providing a gold mine of information that made my writing process easier, more fun, and more productive. It helped me a lot, so it might help you, too.
Should you do it? If not, here are some alternatives
Writing fan fiction worked for me as a way to jump start my process, 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 you get to define that new direction: it’s whatever you want it to be. You can stick to the fan fiction meta and make a relationship-based work. You can just write a new chapter and stick to the existing style. You can make it super bizarre. You can craft a crazy crossover. If you want to try it, have fun and do something cool; and in the process, you’ll learn more about your writing.
But what if you want similar results without having to write fan fiction? To get a similar experience, you need to step into a writing sandbox that lets you bypass the emotional and mental load of a fully original work. Here are some options:
Isolate which portion of your original work(s) you feel may be weak (check the “Start Here” post for tips on how to do this). Then, pop that weak element into a controlled space that you know well. Here are some examples:
Have your original character(s) go through a day in your life or a well-known real-world event.
Put yourself or someone you know into your story’s setting, doing something fairly mundane there.
Simplify your plot into something that could happen over a short period of time in a well-known place, and write it (e.g. imagine the plot of The Lord of the Rings, but instead of a grand fantasy adventure, you have to get rid of a diary full of town gossip by getting it across town to the only shredder).
See the next section for writing “fan fiction” of your own works as a way to practice writing, make decisions about your works, and learn more about your characters, your story, your process, and your skills.
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 the pieces of your story:
Have your character make a meal or purchase some everyday items.
Drop someone you know 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 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 any story, even a very simple one) in the style of an author you like (or one that has a very distinctive style). Challenging yourself to use another person’s style can identify places where you might be getting frustrated.
If any of the above work for you, keep at it! You can always use the same techniques repeatedly for different stories, although you may find that different projects demand different approaches. Come back to this list whenever you need it, and you can always try fan fiction if you want.
Writing “fan fiction” of your own works
This was going to be crammed into a bullet point in the above section, but I feel that it deserves more details.
The idea here is to take a part of your current work that’s giving you trouble and iterate on it externally. Rather than reworking isolated pieces of your story, you take a scene, character interaction, or even an entire chunk of the plot, and write a different version of it. Then another. And maybe even more. This is best for aspects of your story that you can imagine going in several different ways. It can also be great for practicing types of scenes or interactions that you’re not used to writing.
I’ll provide two examples of how I used this technique to show how it works:
In the predecessor to the novel I’m currently looking to publish, a major plot arc featured something of an extended “meet-cute” between two characters. I’d never written anything like that, and I could think of dozens of different ways to do it. Rather than pick a concept and stitch it into my draft, I went off and wrote a few condensed versions of the plot. Some were only a few pages long, and a couple of them could be considered short stories in their own right. It was fun, and I learned a lot more about my characters while practicing a type of plotting and pacing I hadn’t tried before. I now have a library of content I can draw from if I want to use any of the concepts I developed.
For a difficult scene in my novel, one that explores some deep vulnerabilities of a main character, I went through several successive versions of it, drastically changing it with each revision. This was more like editing than writing separately, but it had a lot in common with the above process: I’d cut out the whole scene (previous versions lived in older revisions) and write the entire thing over, often from scratch. Then I repeated the process. At one point, I removed the scene entirely, but I decided it was such an important character development point that I brought a version of it back…and at that point, I had a few to choose from!
There are several advantages to this technique:
You get to practice writing with your original work, but in a controlled and low-pressure way.
You’ll learn more about your characters and setting as you play with different approaches.
You get to experiment with ways to handle difficult scenes, or scenes that could be approached in many different ways.
This process lets you build a library of scenes, moments, and approaches that you can use for the same project or for different ones.
It can provides a means of exploring awkward, tricky, or high-impact scenes. Think fight scenes, big reveals, sex scenes, chase scenes, big character moments, violent scenes, scenes that could be triggering for some readers, dream sequences, major plot transitions, and more.
With a small library of possibilities, you get to pick which options to use in your real draft
You might find yourself writing two or three versions of the tricky parts, or maybe a couple dozen. If it’s fun and you’re learning from it, go for it. Even if you don’t gather a ton of information, these kinds of exercises can give you good practice, valuable insight into your process, and new ideas to up-level your original works.
Conclusion
All of the options above are really about playing around in a low-pressure sandbox. Without the mental and emotional load of building your entire original work, you can explore your strengths, weaknesses, joys, and frustrations in writing. Whether you choose to use someone else’s sandbox or build your own, you can practice, build up new skills, and develop your process. Come back to this page whenever you want some ideas or tips on this type of writing practice. Even when you’re in the midst of creating your original works, you might find a good reason to step away and try something else. I’ve done it a few times: even though I don’t really write fan fiction anymore, I still craft original short scenes and stories as part of ongoing practice and getting around writer’s block.