The Unique Strengths of Fanfiction

It's no surprise that before they launch their own universes, many authors develop their writing skills writing fanfiction. Fanfiction offers beginning writers two helpful advantages:

1. Premade world and characters. To write a good story, you need a good plot, a good setting, and good characters. Writing fanfiction gives you two of those for free. Since the world and characters are pre-existing, you can focus on developing the plot.
2. Audience. Getting people to read your work is much easier in the context of a fanfiction community. This is basically #1, but from the reader's perspective: I already know and love the setting and characters, so the odds that you'll write a good story around them are not too remote.

The ability to skip over exposition and character development and focus on plot helps beginning writers get started, and when they're ready, they can start introducing original characters (OCs). Even for experienced writers, exposition is hard--many published fantasy authors have wrestled with the problem of introducing a whole new planet with lots of diverse cultures and millenia of history without resorting to boring infodumps. Not all of them have succeeded. But with fanfiction, you can skip all that and jump straight into the action.

Two stories that illustrate this principle well are Hard Reset and I Can Wait, both by Eakin. Hard Reset opens its first chapter with a failed spell-casting followed immediately by a Changeling invasion of Canterlot, which makes for a very effective hook; the story would not be as lean or effective if it had to stop and explain the characters and setting. I Can Wait is a more advanced example; it's a story about dealing with loss which draws heavily on the established relationship between Applejack and Rainbow Dash. As I noted in a comment on the story (comment contains spoilers, so read the story first), the story of I Can Wait would be far more difficult to tell if it had to set everything up from scratch.

And the community-generating properties of fanfiction are not to be overlooked. For about ten years now, Rich Burlew has been writing and drawing The Order of the Stick, a comic strip satirizing Dungeons & Dragons. It started out just poking fun at the game's mechanics; since then, it's grown into an epic in its own right, with a forum membership over 50,000. An Order of the Stick Kickstarter in 2012 raised over $1,000,000 for new merchandise. The author has plans for an original venture of some kind once the comic has concluded; I don't know about the rest of his fans, but I plan to be there on launch day.

This, then, is the Fanfiction Author's Path to Success:

1. Write crappy fanfics that no-one likes
2. Write okay fanfics that some people like
3. Write amazing fanfics that lots of people like
4. Design a new universe and lead your fans there
5. Profit among your adoring masses

SEEMS LEGIT

Comments

[Super Trampoline]

I've never thought about the connection between why readers and writers like fanfic.