Good morning, friends, me again! (Since Siri took my spot last month and now I owe her.)
Fanfiction is such a weirdly controversial thing among writers, which is strange to me. Are there writers out there who don’t start off with something derivative when they start storytelling?
(I certainly did. One of my first “books” was a re-write of a kids’ puzzle book I was especially fond of, except with a female lead and an actual plot. I took the characters from Sonic the Hedgehog, made whole families (this was before Knuckles and all them showed up, back in the Genesis days), and made stories for my cousins and I to role-play. I tried to write Star Trek novels. (They were bad.))
I think it’s perfectly natural to take something you love and expand on it. Most source material is limited, after all. What happens to the characters outside the book/movie/TV show? After it? Before it? How would those beloved characters act if they were somewhere else?
It’s an excellent writing exercise, if nothing else. And I don’t think it should be looked down on as not real writing. I’ve read some dang good fic in my day.
I read some yesterday, in fact!
(I may have spent most of my day, yesterday, reading fanfiction. I don’t really regret it aside from I really need to get some work done on various projects.)
My current fandom fix is Good Omens. The miniseries is out on Amazon, if you guys have missed it (though if you’re on social media, I doubt it, because my tumblr feed certainly went All Good Omens All the Time), and while I am only 4 episodes in, I’m enjoying it greatly.
(I would be done with it except I am watching with the spouse, and quite frankly four episodes in a week is the fastest we’ve ever watched anything ever.)
(I mean, I would binge if it were just me, but alas.)
Which is probably why I got into the fanfic for it, honestly. Can’t watch without the spouse, and All Good Omens All the Time on the ‘net (including fanfic recs).
There are worst ways to spend a day.
Feelings about fanfic, friends? Good Omen fic recs? Other fic recs?
I have also written my share of fanfiction and I certainly started with derivative works when I was writing as a teenager.
Like any kind of writing, some of it is good and some of it isn’t so good. I don’t think it’s any worse than any other kind of writing when it comes to that. If you think about it, some of our greatest literary works are actually fanfiction, so good fanfiction is possible. (The example I am thinking of is Dante’s works like Paradise Lost, which are based on the Bible.)
Well, Dante’s Divine Comedy is essentially self-insert fanfiction, if we really want to get into it. 😛