To those of you who write fan fiction.....

So this is something I've been thinking about recently. I think of writing fan fiction (or anything else for that matter) as one thing, but posting it for others to read as something else entirely. The question I'm asking is for those of you who have posted your work to a public forum, how did you decide to start doing that? And are you glad that you did, or not?

The first couple fanfics I wrote were posted on user forums, because that was what I had available to me. I've since moved to posting on fanfiction.net

I'm deeply suspicious of posting to an actual forum, because...well, bluntly, I've seen a lot of good stories get ruined by audience participation. (To the point I call that sort of breakdown Spacebattles Syndrome when it happens, after one of the greatest sources of it.)

As for myself, it was more or less a "why not" moment after knowing of the existence of ff.net for a fair bit.

I started posting fanfics because I figured writing these stories and keeping them where no one can see them was kind of a waste. It's not like the characters belong to me or anything I write has any effect on the shows themselves anyway, so I never felt any special reason to keep anything I wrote to myself.

Though reviewers can be dicks - take from their reviews what you can to help yourself grow, but in the end it's all about your growth as a writer or (if you're not too interested in growing as a writer) just putting out the story you want.

I figure I can just delete the stories and close off the ff.net account when I get tired of them.

I initially posted stuff on a forum, mainly because the first stuff I wrote were just brief joke stories inspired by comments in that thread.

Once I started writing actual stuff, I moved over to Fanfiction.net. Sometimes I still post on forums about it, but that's largely for proofreading purposes.