How Fan Fiction Helped Me Hone My Writing Skills
I’ve been writing ever since I was a child. Back then, I scribbled out grand narratives ripe with misspellings with a 64-pack of Crayolas. I filled wide-ruled notebooks with large, incomprehensible letters and plotted out stories with Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets. Most of these stories were inspired by the things that I loved. I wrote about animals. I wrote about ghosts, because I thought they were cool, and I’d seen some in The Nightmare Before Christmas. I also wrote about the things I loved. I took Pikachu on adventures and wrote about the escapades of all my favorite Disney princesses.
Basically, I was writing fan fiction before I even knew what fan fiction was.
I kept at it, too. In between stories about Victorian vampires and make-believe kingdoms, I wrote about Buffy Summers and Final Fantasy characters. I wrote about Batman, and about the Teen Titans, and explored Hogwarts with Harry Potter himself (say what you will about self-insert fic, but I’ll always think they’re fun).
In that playground of established worlds and characters, I found my footing as a young writer. I still dabble in fan fiction from time to time. I’ll dip into the Stranger Things universe, or play around with Marvel superheroes.
A few weeks ago, I included fan fiction in a list of writing warm-up prompts, and that’s because that’s how I often write my fic these days - to turn on my writer’s brain and shake off the cobwebs. I often treat these little escapades as writing exercises, and I think that I do this because I learned so much about writing this way. This week, I want to share with you how writing fan fiction has helped me hone my writing skills…
It let me play with descriptive writing and imagery.
When you’re working in a premade world, assuming that you haven’t flung the characters into some alternate universe, the scenery is staged for you. I mostly wrote fic for visual media (namely video games and television shows). I could see places like the Magic Box in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I wrote scenes in those places, I got to practice describing what I saw so that a reader would see it, too. It made me look at settings in detail. What is Giles seeing as he stands behind the counter? What color are the books over Willow’s shoulder? The more I practiced this in known settings, the easier it became to bring new settings to life, so that I was writing scenes in made-up diners just as vivid as ones that took place in Buffy’s own home.
I studied characterization and dialogue.
Characters, too, are pre-set when you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox. They are fully fleshed out with strong personalities and established speech patterns. I love dialogue. I think that our speech says a lot about us; our accents tell where we’re from, our inflections betray our emotions. This is all the same for characters, and fan fiction helped me translate the kinds of speech patterns I heard onto the page. I would listen to dialogue in the shows I was watching and then try to repeat those patterns in sentences that I would make up. In doing so, I also got to explore the characterization of each person. Would they look down when they say this phrase? Do they fidget while they talk? What does that say about them? Translating each character’s personality for a fic helped me learn how to shape my own characters in my original work. To this day, creating and writing new characters are my favorite part of setting up a new story, and I think I owe that to the practice I got in writing fan fiction.
It taught me that you can’t please everyone, and that’s okay.
I grew up in the glory days of FanFiction.Net. Back then, we called negative comments “flames”, and I definitely got burned a few times. The thing was, I wasn’t writing for an audience yet. I was writing for my friends. We would spend painstaking hours creating characters based on one another and we would tease each other with previews of upcoming fic chapters. We uploaded the stories for each other to read. Theirs were the reviews I looked for; everything else was extra. The nice comments from other readers were always exciting, and while the negative ones hurt, I still had friends badgering me for the next chapter, and the next, and the next. As long as they were happy, as long as my stories excited them, those “flames” didn’t bother me. I’ve carried that attitude into my working life. Not everyone is going to love my poetry, and not everyone is going to fall head over heels for my fiction. Some people are going to have unkind things to say, and that’s alright. I’m putting my work out there and opening it up to that kind of judgment, but that doesn’t mean that I’ll let the bad stuff get to me. We all have preferences, and I’m perfectly fine not being everyone’s cup of tea.
It reminds me that writing is supposed to be fun, not just work.
When you’re trying to “make it” as a writer, it’s easy to get caught up in the seriousness of it all. The seemingly endless drafts, the revisions, the editing, the query letters. The concept of writing solely for the fun of it can fall between the cracks. Fan fiction, though, exists outside that realm. It is an amusement park of possibilities; you can write something happy, or something angst, or something sad. It’s not for money. It doesn’t have to go through any drafting phases. You don’t have to draft a cover letter to send out with it. It can just exist for its own sake. Sometimes, when I’m feeling really bogged down, I’ll revisit an old favorite character or explore a forgotten world, and in doing that I’m reminded of why I started writing in the first place: because I love it. Because I have fun doing it. Because it makes me happy.
And, sure, all of these lessons could come in other ways. I’m sure I would have learned them through some college seminar or in a workshop, or through writing a bunch of my own stories over the years. But I don’t think that it would have felt the same that way.
I fell into fan fiction because I liked writing, and because my friends liked writing, and because we all wanted to write about the characters and stories we knew and loved. In practicing my skills on those established worlds, I became the writer that I am today, and I’ll always be grateful for that.