The first story I wrote was Star Trek fan fiction. It ran about two-thirds of a page long and was about the Enterprise blasting the heck out of a Klingon ship. I proudly handed it to my third-grade teacher for review. She neither mentioned it nor returned it. I apologize to my biographers for not being more diligent on their behalf when I was 8 years old.
The second one was a Batman story of several pages, written in the fifth grade. It was, if I may say so, actually pretty clever. I had a cameo appearance by the Joker but created a new villain for the plot: Dartman. I think he shot poisoned darts at people; it’s been awhile since I’ve read it, but given the evildoer’s name it seems plausible. I’m sure a copy is among my papers somewhere.
The advantage of getting started by writing fan fiction is that you’ve got a ready-made world to work in. You know the characters and how they act. You are familiar with the setting. The only challenge is plotting – giving these familiar people something new to do. It can be excellent practice.
Some people go on from there to create their own characters, their own worlds. Others, though, do not. A look at just one site – FanFiction.net – will quickly show you how popular fan fiction is (the number of Hogan’s Heroes stories alone surprised me).
Some authors don’t mind having other people playing in the worlds they’ve created. They see no harm in it and have no desire to slap down the devotees. Other authors practically go on quests to hunt down these thieves and place their heads on pikes outside the castle as a warning.
This Time magazine article takes an in-depth look at the sometimes pleasant, sometimes bizarre world of fan fiction. And once you’ve read it, you’ll appreciate this xkcd cartoon.
For myself, I can (must, really, to avoid hypocrisy) appreciate fan fiction as a starting point. I don’t see any real harm in it, and it’s cheap entertainment. But eventually, I think, a writer should work without that safety net and fully exercise his creativity. Have your say below.
I’m about where you are on this. When I was a kid the first story I wrote was about a dog, and I was consciously trying to do the same thing, in the same style, as Albert Payson Terhune’s Best-Loved Dog Stories. Then I wrote a short comedy skit in what I perceived as the style of Robert Benchley, whose work I’d run across in the classic collection A Treasury of Laughter, edited by Louis Untermeyer in 1947, if memory serves. (I really am citing this from memory. The book was my style manual when I was a kid. My favorite book.)
And I agree it’s a good exercise, and I agree any serious writer had better move on, had better studiously avoid sounding like any other writer or creating characters or plots that seem like those of another writer.
I was going to ban fanfic entirely for that Creative Writing class, until I realized I couldn’t define it. I couldn’t create a definition for it that included peopling that Halloween movie — The Nightmare Before Christmas, maybe? — with oneself and some cute classmate, and yet exclude Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace, which springboards off the Gospels and creates a parallel story line in the same setting, intersecting with Jesus at rare but key points.
Or Monty Python’s Life of Brian, or Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern are Dead.
So I didn’t ban it, but I warned that it was only an exercise as far as the class was concerned, and character creation was a skill I wanted them to learn.
Susan ran across something this evening that said something like “The Harry Potter series is all about love, and doing the right thing even when it’s difficult, and the Twilight series is all about how important it is to have a boyfriend.” So I guess the quality of one’s fan fiction may depend partly on what you’re a fan of.
Ben-Hur as fanfic. Fascinating. It’s obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me. Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord books would be fan fiction, too, as she explicitly writes to fill in the missing years in the life of the young Jesus (not generally my cup of tea, but they’re quite good).
Now, a hardcore fanfic writer would do a crossover story of Ben-Hur and Planet of the Apes for the Charlton Heston dual role fun.