Is Fanfiction Detrimental? · 8:55am Jul 8th, 2014
Maskedferret asked this question in her blog a long ass time ago and I did want to answer this in a blog post, but I forgot. Now that I remembered, let's see where I can take this line of thought. The question: is fanfiction detrimental?
And like many other things in this world, my answer is "it depends". Focusing on her blog post, let's assume that the one writing this fanfiction has the intention of publishing original works later on down the line, instead of doing it for the lolz. We will also assume that the person who intends to get published also cares about their work, as in they edit, avoid making characters OoC, the usual stuff. With that in mind...
What does fanfiction bring to the table? Well, like Ferret said, fanfiction is writing. Writing is good because it is practice. Practice is inherently a positive experience for the medium, especially if you want to publish later on down the line. Speaking for myself, the massive amounts of fanfiction that I've written over the past 2-3 years has made me look at nearly everything I've written beforehand in a different light, in a good way. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'd imagine that a person who sits down to write a book, with no previous experience beforehand, will write an inferior book compared to someone that has written a year or so of fanfiction. Lauren Faust said (paraphrased) during one of her panels way back during Season 1-2 that in order to be a good artist, you just draw 10,000 pictures and imagine that the 10,001st picture will be the one that's worth it. That's kind of what writing is like, and I especially believe that with my stories. Clop not included, while I did sort of have beginner's luck with Therapist Visit, that wasn't the first thing I wrote. I wrote an entire novel back in high school before I did that, but I'm never going to publish it, so is that novel as worthless as fanfiction? Neither are worthless.
Fanfiction has the capability to teach the author about fiction inconsistencies and problems. Having canon characters be OOC, not making your story boring, being creative instead of ripping stuff off, these are all fanfiction problems, and something that must be overcome to make a "good" fanfic.
Now, with that in mind, some of the reasons that fanfiction can be detrimental is more on the fault of the author than anything else. For example, not improving with your fanfiction and continuously writing trash, or not paying attention to editing. A good comparison that I could make is that you could go to college, but that doesn't mean that you'll educate yourself there. Another possible detriment concerns not making money off of your fanfiction, since you're not writing work that can sell, which I just feel is a little odd. Holding everything else equal, usually people write what they want to write. If they are capable of writing something that could sell, they would, and if they don't, that's on them if they want to spend their time on fanfiction. It becomes a hobby at that point, and unless the hobby is preventing the bills from being paid, then normatively, there's nothing wrong with that.
Simply put, fanfiction has a lot of net positives compared to negatives, but the negatives can either be not a problem, or a huge problem depending on the writer. The positives also have the capability to be minuscule compared to writers that manage to break into the field somehow, but more or less, it's a (usually) productive hobby that could go the way of League of Legends or masturbation. HOW ARE YOU PLAT V AND STILL SO SHIT YOU MAOKAI TRASH JUNGLER JESUS CHRIST.
People still jungle Mao? What is this the beginning of season 3?
Do you think writing clop/mature fiction, presuming it's decent clop with a story and themes that work alongside the clop for some specific purpose, is worthwhile in terms of experience?
Reminds me, must play more matches. I've got a pretty good feel for Nasus, but I need more practice with Kennen.
2267203 Of course it is. You're just playing with a different part of the storytelling medium