Tuesday, 07 July 2009

• What Fanfiction Has Done for Me

  Yeah, I'm one of those people. One of those crazy, rabid fangirls who can't leave well enough alone and has to, upon seeing a movie, book, TV show, newspaper clipping (okay, maybe not that) that catches her fancy, go and write a story about it of her own.
  
  You're right, you do have to be obsessed with a fandom to write any fanfiction worth reading. You're right, you need to know the characters in and out. And you're right, you pretty much have to have no life. But let me tell you this: my writing would not be the same without fanfiction.
  
  Fanfiction.net is where I post my stories, which are mostly Harry Potter stories, with one just added pertaining to the scifi miniseries, Tin Man. When I first started posting, nearly no one had read anything original that I'd written, and when they did, all I got back was how awesome it was. I was twelve years old - it was not awesome. For a twelve year old, maybe, but certainly not professional quality.
  
  On the internet, nobody knows what age you are. Nobody knows your background. All they know is what you put in front of them - and what I put in front of them were some truly dreadful stories. And people, bless their hearts whoever they are, told me so. The nice ones told me how to improve and the mean ones told me to go die in a pit (joke's on them, I'm already in a pit), but either way, I realized that something was wrong with the way I was writing.
  
  And lo and behold, I started to improve.
  
  With stories that came completely out of my own head, I was too embarrassed to show them to anyone I knew. Fanfiction.net's sister site, Fictionpress, doesn't get a lot of reviews per story, so even the few I posted there didn't get me a lot of feedback. Fanfiction was my one way to be told what I was doing wrong and how to fix it.
  
  Without fanfiction, I wouldn't be as good a writer as I am now. I realize it's a super nerdy passtime, but honestly, I still have a lot to learn about writing. I will never publish any of the fanfiction stories I've written (copyright infringement, anyone?) and I will never be recognized for them beyond my screenname, but it's an outlet. Fanfiction is a writing excercise. You get used to keeping people in character, to knowing the inside and out of other people's stories, so you can know the inside and out of your own.
  
  That, and I get to bend other people's characters to my evil whim. Muahaha! ... Eh-hem. Anyway.
  
  My writing wouldn't be what it is right now without someone on fanfiction.net telling me that I wasn't up to snuff, and though those stories, those stepping stones, won't ever have any literary merit of their own, they've helped build someone who (arguably) knows what she's doing. At least, a little bit more than she did when she was twelve.
  
  

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