How Writing FanFiction Has Made Me a Better Writer

Initially, fan fiction had been my saving grace giving me an outlet to write using characters and storylines from tv shows, books and movies that interested me but I thought could have ended differently. It gave me a chance to play around with couplings that I thought should have totally happened or that would have been interesting if they had happened.

Below I detail my introduction to fanfic, becoming a fanfic author and the lessons that several very honest and at times nasty reviews have taught me about writing.

What is this?

I stumbled upon fan fiction in the late summer of 2010. I had just graduated high school a few months previously and was looking forward to college. My mother had become ill and had to stay in the hospital for several days and to pass time I took full advantage of the free WiFi. I can’t recall what led me to click or what I typed into the Google search but there was this word I had never heard of before, fanfiction or fanfic for short.

This was intriguing.

It Begins

I began to read several stories a day and created an account on a fanfic platform with a very catchy screen name. My first attempt at writing and publishing a story online came in the form of a Harry Potter one-shot ( a short story in which the writer will continue no further) and it was absolutely awful.

Every bit of that 2,192 word story was rushed and it was obvious.

The prospect of having one of my stories live forever in the digital void had me excited, thrilled even to the point I opened up a word doc and frantically typed the night way, all the while skipping story continuity and plot development.

Although I am not an English buff or part of the grammar patrol, persistent errors tend to be a bit of a pet peeve I have developed over these past few years. But what I truly lacked was continuity. The story was all over the place there was no connection as the reader moved through each chapter. It was as if every chapter represented a different thought and they all could become their own one-shots.

A properly developed story has to be just that developed. I learned this the hard way. The lesson came in the form of some nasty reviews. I vividly recall the reviews of one reader of another fanfic I had written. This person reviewed each chapter (at the time I had written and posted 22 chapters) and each was at minimum a paragraph laying out everywhere I went wrong with the characters and how the story line didn’t make sense in certain places. For newly starting out me, those reviews delivered the equivalent of a digital right hook leaving my jaw on my keys.

Now, the tricky thing with using worlds and characters that others have created and that are well known, in the case with Harry Potter, Twilight, etc., the reader enters into the story with a certain expectation of how that character’s personality and how they should behave.

For me that is the beauty of fan fiction. I can give the reader a new perspective on a well known character and this has afforded me the opportunity to see the humanity in the characters that I create. I have learned how to make them real. Writing these stories gives me practice with continuity and simply put I really enjoy writing them and I can honestly type that after playing in someone else’s world it inspired me to create my own.