scarletmanuka1:

But why fanfiction?

I got asked again recently why I write fanfiction and not ‘proper books’ (I’m pretty open about my fic writing, I’m not ashamed). I told them what I’ve told everyone else – I’ve done both and this is so much better. 

I self-published a YA novel a few years back, the plot of which I was super proud of, and I even have ideas for two sequels, but they’ll never see the light of day. I just have no motivation to write them, and world building is hard and that amount of effort just doesn’t seem worth it.

See, everyone I knew wanted to read my novel, but no one wanted to buy it. Probably about 40 people read it but I only sold 16 copies, and for the effort to format text into a publishable format, the cost of ordering proof copies only to find it was wrong and to do it all again, and the stress of the whole process was just so not worth those few dollars that I made. But I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to be one of those fairy tale stories of an unknown author suddenly becoming a sensation overnight. The story was too obscure, set in Western Australia and wasn’t an ‘outback romance’ which is the only ones that seem to be popular in this setting. I’m more than okay with that because I have fanfiction now.

The difference? I have thousands of people reading my stories, and not just reading them, but I get feedback from some of them (never enough, we authors are fickle creatures who always want more comments, more interacton, more discussion). The thing is though, fanfiction gives me an audience that I will never have from my YA novel. That audience already exists, it’s out there, and they’re hungry for the story to continue. Not all fanfiction is successful – the people who read it aren’t a mindless mass; they have expectations, standards, itches that need scratching. Quality matters, but not just the quality of the writing but of the idea. It’s not just formulaic bullshit that a ghost writer can churn out, change the names but the plot is the same and then throw a big name author on the cover and it’s instantly a bestseller. We’re forgiving of small mistakes if the plot makes us want to keep reading until dawn lights the horizon, we’ll salute the authors who write in English when it’s not their native language and will gladly offer help with those phrases that they’re not sure of, and best of all, we stick together to protect and support each other from annon hate so those ideas have a safe place to grow. We’re a community, a family.

Fanfiction has also given me a platform to improve my writing. Looking back at the standard of my work at the very beginning (and even in my novel) I cringe now at how terrible it was. I’ve written over 1,200,000 words of fanfiction and I’m forever improving. I know how to properly punctuate dialogue tags now, my vocabulary has expanded, I’m not afraid to use adverbs just because some twat said ‘show, not tell’ is better. If an adverb makes the story flow better than three extra waffly sentences then I’ll damned well use it and be proud of it. I’m more confident in my writing and that shows in the quality. I would never have gained that confidence by selling fifty thousand books to ‘silent readers’. It’s the interaction, the feedback, the community that fanfic has that has made me a better writer.

So that’s why I prefer to write fanfic over ‘proper books’ and I will fight anyone who says that we’re not real writers. At the end of the day, people read fiction to be entertained and if I can honestly say that thousands of people from all over the world have been entertained by my fanfiction, that makes me a real bloody writer.