Fan Fiction: An Argument for It

Both of us have mentioned it at one time or another, but that’s because it’s meant a lot to both of us.

Fan Fiction.

Most of you have probably heard of it, if you don’t write it yourself. Let’s be honest here, online blog for teenage writers? Most of us probably know about it. This fall I have been writing fan fiction for five years. Margaret started writing it a few months before I did. It’s how we met. We were both writing fan fiction for a website called Artemis Fowl Confidential.

You can see why I consider fan fiction one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That being said, I am not ignorant to the ugly side of it. There is a lot of ugliness.

A lot.

Just in case you don’t know, fan fiction is a story that is written by a fan of a book/movie/show ect. These fans come up with stories or ideas about the characters or the world and write them. If you want a new ending, you can write it. If you think of something that was mentioned in the book that was never realized, you can write it or find it.

That of course opens the door to quite a bit of ugly. When it comes to couples in the fandom (a mix of the word fan and kingdom, it’s the collection of fans of a certain book/movie/show ect. and everything that they do to show their love for it) things get really ugly. There are crazy shippers (people who support certain people in a relation’ship’) who will attempt to murder you if you try to tell them that their ship is wrong or not going to happen.

Not only that, but you’re sticking a bunch of (usually) inexperienced writers in a situation where they can go crazy and write anything they want. That leads to a LOT of bad writing. Probably only about half of the fics (the term applied to a fan fiction story) you find on FanFiction.net (the main website for fan fiction) are legible, despite the fact that they’re all typed. Bad grammar, poor sentence structure, horrible characterization, cliché ideas, cliché characters that are basically their attempts to stick themselves in the story… We’ve mentioned it before in the Non Cliché Protagonists Post. Mary Sues are the hated Queens of Fan Fiction-dom.

And that’s not even going into the PWP (porn without plot)/M (Mature rated) fics, or how it’s a gateway into the worst parts of fandom.

All this being said, it’s probably done more for my writing than anything else I’ve done.

First, most obviously, it’s practice. I mentioned in the last post about consistency ( Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goal) that I’ve written 2000+ words of a story pretty consistently every week for the past three years. That’s a fan fic. If you start at the first chapter and make your way all the way through to where I’m writing now, you can tell that there’s been growth in my writing.

Just the simple act of writing constantly improves your writing. And if you’re a dedicated fan of whatever it is you’re writing, you will probably be writing pretty consistently (sometimes too consistently when it interferes with writing your actual material).

Not only is it practice, but if you’re in the right fandom/website, a lot of time there are other writers who are willing to give you advice or tell you what you did right or did wrong. Especially when you’re trying out a new style it’s a great place to try to out because you can tell from the reviews whether the readers think that you pulled it off or not.

Which brings me to another valuable skill I’ve learned from my years of writing fan fiction. Learning how to take constructive criticism. Not everyone is going to be nice. In fact, depending on your skill level they often will not be. But there is a difference between someone just being plain rude/mean (flamers) and people who are offering constructive criticism which is a fine line that you learn after enough reviews. Being able to tell the difference and bending your pride enough to at least take someone’s advice is an incredible useful skill.

In fact, it’s a skill that’s not only useful in writing, when you’re getting rejections from agents or editors or either one is giving you suggestions for what to do with your manuscript, but it’s just useful in life.

You learn how to develop characters. The mistake almost every new fan fiction writer makes is trying to write an OC (original character) that turns into a Mary Sue or warps one of the characters so that they’re completely OOC (off original character). I did it. My first major fan fiction involved my OC, Amanda, making the main character, a character who is not interested in romantic involvement at all, fall in love with her. She also spoke eight languages, had over 200 IQ points, came from a poor family, was beautiful… It didn’t help that the title of the story was “Amanda’s First Adventure”.

You learn to not make those mistakes. Making a mistake like that will (hopefully) keep you from getting a book picked up by any agent or editor.

It’s also an introduction to all different sorts of formats and styles. You can do drabbles, one shots, three shots, full length stories. You can write stream of consciousness, traditional, interrupted, scene skipping, flashbacks. Decide whether you like first person or third person. Try present tense. Figure out how to pace a scene so that it’s not going too fast or dragging on. Learn that you really do need to plan out what’s going to happen in a story or face epic writers block (See Margaret’s post on the Brick Wall from Hell).

Maybe even make a best friend.

How Writing Novels Helps You Pass Your AP English Test

So today I took the dreaded AP English language and Composition test. I'm technically not allowed to talk about anything on the test because I signed the little "I will not talk about any of the stuff on this test until it's released" section on the booklet that you had to sign to take the test, so I will not do that, but I will tell you that the multiple choice was harder than I thought it would be, but the essays weren't that bad.

Probably because going into the test I was not worried about the essays much at all. Not only were the essays just about the only think we worked on all year in my class, but even before the class my essays were already pretty good.

Guess why?

As this is a writing blog, I think you can all manage to guess the answer to that.

Even though essays and novel are rather different writing forms, you'll either be surprised or already know how much extensive narrative writing skills can help you write good essays. 

At the bare minimum, you've got the writing mechanics down. You know how to form a sentence and that sentences form a paragraph. Even with spell check, you should have a good enough grasp on spelling an punctuation that the grader won't cringe.

If you're really dedicated to/good at writing, you also probably know how to develop an idea. Good essays aren't just thesis, evidence, idea, conclusion. (Unless you're in my 7th grade English teacher's class. In that woman's class you conformed to the strict format or she would fail you on the spot. So if you are in the younger grades (7/8) stick to the format and have hope for a future in which you can break free from suck limited writing. There is hope, I promise.) 

They have flow. The idea is developed and supported and expanded, just like a plot or a character. A Character is typically introduced and developed in the readers mind, then some of their background is explained so that we can understand them, then the character ( if dynamic) grows as a person/character.

Usually when writing a novel, you start to use a lot of different methods and structures and sentence lengths ect. It would be really boring to read a book with the same sized sentences and the same sized paragraphs and the same words. Unless it's a purposeful styles, "he said","she said" books are boring.

In short, you develop a certain repertoire of skills that don't just apply to narratives. They work and even should be used in essays. it makes them much better.

And of course, writers are more familiar with taking constructive criticism. Or at least you should be. So we're a lot better at taking a grade lower than we wanted because we can take that to improve our writing better than most kids who are used to getting As on everything.

We also tend to be a lot better at sitting in one place for 2+ hours, doing nothing but writing.

That helps a lot.