I was thinking the other day about fanfiction and why it’s made such an impact on me. I’ve been writing fic in some for or other since I was 15 years old. That’s over 20 years now, in dozens, hundreds of fandoms, and now, I’m a published author with 3 novels and 5 short stories under my belt.
Without fanfiction, I would never have reached this point. I’ve always been a story-teller, but when I started out, I had no idea how to create worlds or characters or how to structure a plot arc. I knew I had a story to tell, but it would have come out the same way a child would tell a story: “and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened”.
Then, I discovered the Extended Universe of Star Wars and realised that there were people out there writing stories in this world that I loved and creating new stories and new characters. As many new ficcers do, I stumbled straight into the glorious world of self-insertions, because when you’re new to writing, you write what you know.
This is where fanfiction has helped me in a way no courses or training or reading could: it let me build up my skillset. Let’s say that writing fiction is a bike. Fanfiction is the equivalent of training wheels or your parent running behind you, holding the back of your seat to keep you from falling. You can write, but you don’t have to immediately create a world. You don’t have to create new characters. You have a whole universe sitting there and you can poke it and turn it around and see how it works.
It’s all about the practise. The more fanfiction I wrote, the less I needed the training wheels. It helped me figure out how to develop characters, writing show not tell, building universes from scratch, all the little nuances and details that I had struggled with. As time went on, my fanfiction started turning more and more into Alternate Universes, where I had created a universe to put the fandom characters into, and supporting OCs and with each step, I was gradually removing my own training wheels.
The day I had a novel accepted for publication, it felt like a culmination of years of dabbling and playing and frantically spinning my wheels trying to get a story out of my head. Without fanfiction, I wouldn’t be where I am. That’s why I will never, ever stop anyone writing fic based on something I write. Somewhere out there, there could be someone who was just like me and I’m not going to be the one to stifle that.