Benefits of writing fanfiction.

I make shittons of mistakes, especially when it comes to tenses and redundant description, so I can't post any chapter without getting it beta'd first. :/

I just thought of a disadvantage:

You won't be able to show fanfiction to anyone who doesn't know the fandom enough to spot continuity errors as well as general writing errors—and, moreover, be able to comment with an unbiased opinion.

In this very forum, there are examples of people who have asked for feedback on fanfiction but get a much more reduced response, simply because most people here don't know the works mentioned, and aren't confident enough to give feedback based on that.

I've argued in the past that truly good fanfiction should be able to be read independent of knowledge of the original work.

Then why write fanfiction at all?

The point of writing it is to expand upon a setting or characters, and saving time on establishing the foundations is a given because it's aimed towards other fans of the setting and characters.

You can have new storylines, alternate universes, new characters to an extent. But if you go so far as to make it accessible to people who aren't fans, it might as well be a rewrite, or another original work. The only area where this would strictly apply is for crossovers, in which one work might not be known by fans of the other, or fanfiction concerning material which had limited releases of some sort.

It's very possible to write fanfiction that's accessible for non-fans of the work too. If you can place the canon-specific terms in an understandable context, show how attached characters are to each other and special abilities (like writing the beginning of your new story), and there's no ass-pulling the story (only because you know X happened in episode 13 of the show, and you mention this at the very last second to affect what happens). Ja. You can even interest the newcomer readers into watching the show you've written about.

edited 23rd Nov '11 7:18:57 PM by QQQQQ

Right. Fanfiction is written by fans, but it doesn't have to be for fans, at least not preexisting ones. Approaching your fanfic without the assumption that everyone who reads it will be familiar with the source material, I think, tends to make it a better work overall.

So there are people idly wandering sites of media they haven't consumed yet? Or every fanfiction writer has to put in an abridged summary of what has happened up till the events of the current story to an imaginary newcomer?

(There is really no way to satisfy me on this.)

I think The Hill Of Swords and Unfamiliar are good examples. I haven't watched/played any of the source materials and have only the most shallow information about them, but they are nevertheless extremely good reads.

edited 23rd Nov '11 7:28:49 PM by dRoy

Where you start off in your fanfic can be like starting off your own original story. Like your original story, you might have loads of background in store by the time we start the ball rolling — and you can get the reader acquainted. It serves the verisimilitude and believability of what you have to tell better if you're not exclusively falling back onto canon to patch holes.

"Not having to explain what time dilation means the first time you bring it up in a fanfiction" does not equal "falling back on canon to patch holes".

I personally read a lot of fanfic, including a lot in fandoms that I previously knew nothing about, and I have no problem with reading fics that assume I know things I don't. It's usually easy enough to figure out from context. Of course, it's been impressed on me multiple times that I am atypical; many people probably wouldn't be so tolerant.

Just mentioning that this mode of thinking would almost certainly rule out Deconstruction Fic or Fix Fic, of which the main points are to address things that fans already know about.

edited 23rd Nov '11 8:44:19 PM by Sharysa

Personally, I dislike Fix Fic more then any other kind of fanfiction, including shipping. I'm not going to get into a debate on it and I'm not saying it's objectively bad, but someone making a work solely to correct the author's "mistakes" rubs me the wrong way.

And even then, I'm not sure if the idea of Fix Fic is mutually exclusive with writing a work where you don't have already be part of the fandom to enjoy it. An unfamiliar reader would miss out on some things, like how at the point where one character nearly died he did die in canon, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be able to enjoy the story.

I write fan fiction because I like to. In a way it's sort of cathartic and helps me work out feelings or express certain emotions vicariously through the characters. It's sort of like my replacement for journal writing, which I don't do because it's boring. I'm not interested in money or fame or making something cool. I do what I want to do with it and if people like it and tons of people read it than that's awesome, but if no one reads it, whatever, I don't care. I'm writing it for me, anyway. I think that's how most fan fiction writers approach it. They write it for fun, it's not like they are trying to get it published. Fan fiction can be good practice for getting published, but in the end that isn't really what it's for. It's for personal enjoyment and that is really all the benefit it needs to have to be worth it. If it makes you happy than keep doing it. Nothing that makes you happy (and is non-destructive) could be a waste of time.

Conveying time dilation upon differences in dream layers is divine.

You can just as well introduce the elements of canon through a rather warped lens to the reader. That fix fic better provide a damn good story (instead of solely wanking "That's not it!").

But see, the main point of well-written Fix Fic is to address problems that fans already know about and had an emotional response to. I get what you're saying about it (Fix Fic can be made more accessible to non-fans by treating it like a standalone story as well as a fanfic), but making it more accessible may actually be a detriment because when you boil the premise down, the plot isn't going to sound very impressive to non-fans.

Non-fans may appreciate Fix Fic on its own terms, which is certainly a good thing, but the majority of the story's significance is going to go right over their heads because they just don't have the knowledge or the emotional response that other fans would have. It's great to see someone earn their happy ending, but knowing about the original Downer Ending of whatever canon the fic is for gives it an entirely different level of catharsis.

edited 24th Nov '11 12:40:31 PM by Sharysa

Wrong. Simply conveying time dilation is accurate to canon.

But someone who hasn't watched Inception yet would ask "Why did the characters just spend hours in one level and go up to another level where twenty minutes have passed?"

Thus, if we wanted to make it accessible to non-fans, we would have to load down the story with information which the characters and 99% of the readers already know.

I don't understand. What is it about writing in an existing universe that doesn't improve your writing skills?

edited 24th Nov '11 1:19:28 PM by loganlocksley

There are some writing skills fanfiction won't help you with - for instance, no matter how much original material you work in there, you're still relying on someone else's worldbuilding. But there's plenty of others it can, so I'm not sure I would agree with that statement either.

edited 24th Nov '11 1:48:53 PM by nrjxll

Despite not writing any actual fanfiction about it, my Mega Crossover world in my head has taught me a thing or two about world building. After noticing the various plot holes, I started actually trying to explain and justify the coexistence of all these characters from different time periods and/or mediums and eventually worked out a rather reasonable system involving multiple levels of reality, starting with our world and getting more fantastical as you go up.

Not much, but it suits my purposes and I think it's clever.

edited 24th Nov '11 2:10:27 PM by Mort08

It helps you with keeping the characters and worlds consistent, but that's a staple of writing skills which you would have to develop anyway. At best, it keeps you from getting any worse, which is not the same as improving.

I still disagree. Why doesn't it help you improve? Please explain yourself, I want to understand what you're getting at but I don't see it. Practice helps you improve. Practicing keeping characters consistent helps you get better at keeping characters consistent.

This I agree with.

edited 24th Nov '11 3:50:31 PM by loganlocksley

Well, if you're practicing how to keep someone else's characters and world consistent, you're not practicing how to establish a setting so that people who have never seen it before will know what you're talking about by the middle of the story.

Nor will you figure out how to rope people into caring about characters which they are reading about for the first time, instead of characters they have heard of and already like.

And look, the point of fanfiction isn't even to improve at all, it's to have fun writing stuff about things you like, and showing it to other people who like the same things.

Fair enough. I agree with that. However, you've only listed two points that fanfiction usually won't help you improve upon, which is a far cry from saying it will not help you improve at all, ever.

Oh, I totally agree with that. Any benefits that come from writing fanfiction should be thought of as perks. You shouldn't think "I'll write fanfiction to improve X", you should think "I'll write fanfiction because I want to, because it's fun. Oh, by the way, it might be good practice for X, too."

Well, that's kind of the biggest two things that you need to be a writer. No one will give you a leg-up when you start writing original fiction in earnest, and to have any sort of credibility as a writer you need to show your range, which means introducing new characters, new settings, new tones, even just new writing styles.