Fanfic is whatever you make it out to be. You cannot claim a whole genre of literature is bad: not romance, not sci fi, not fantasy, not contemporary. There will always be gems, no matter where you go, you merely need the tools to find them.
I personally slam on Disney for fanfictioning themselves to death. But, fanfiction does have a place. Here are three things you would learn if you took two seconds and two braincells and fanficked around a little on a Saturday afternoon.
Passion. Sometimes the hardest thing about writing is finding what you’re passionate about. And getting past all that initial worldbuilding and character building can be a really huge hurdle for some people. So why not start with a world already built, with characters already made. If it’s the way to start, you should start there. Cause you already have passion with regards to those characters. You’re already invested in what happens to them. So, you fanfic.
A heavy dose of “this is the life of an author” which can be many things. People might never read what your write. People might read what you write. Both are terrible, more terrible than finding half a fly in your spaghettis. You have to live with the knowledge that you probably already ate one half of the fly, and that this fly has probably touched every strand of spaghetti you’re about to eat. Anyhow, people reading what you write is just as terrifying as people never reading what you write. Because people, we’re more judicious than crows.
We will all write something bad. Perhaps the last miserable thing you wrote was a project from third grade, oh you gifted soul. But for most of us, we will write poorly-stitched-up bodies of text for a very long time. And you have to live with that. And so does everyone else. So, if it is bad, that’s how it is. Fanfic is. All that it is. And not all of it will be bad. So just write it already.
I call back to an earlier post of mine where I wish there were clearer ways to share and share alike in the literary world. We have such strict rules for images, surely a book is a type of written image too? Anyhow, the rules aren’t clear. And if anything they’re quite murky to the inexperienced. If Disney wrote fanfics and then rewrote worse versions of those fanfics, then why should you not as well?
C.W. Spalding 