Essay | Some Thoughts on Writing Fan Fiction
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A borrowed world and its boundaries
Writing fan fiction means telling a story with a world and characters that have already been established.
The advantage is that the setting is already there and does not have to be designed again. Fan fiction also builds on another work and extends something that already has an audience, so it begins with a degree of appeal that original fiction must create for itself.
The disadvantage is equally clear. Fixed characters and settings draw a boundary around the writer. They remove the burden of invention while also constraining creation. The highest point a derivative work can reach may lie below that of the original, although most of us need not worry too much about that limit when we are still far from reaching it.
For pleasure or for payment
Before writing fan fiction, one should decide on the purpose: is it to satisfy one’s own interest, or to earn money? Different aims require different approaches.
Writing for pleasure allows greater freedom, and there is nothing wrong with never publishing the result. Once money enters the matter, however, greater care is needed. The work has to be treated as a product as well as a piece of art.
If it is a product, the writer must consider what readers hope to receive. A good story usually contains something capable of awakening recognition or sympathy. Written language is abstract rather than immediately visible like an image. The writer therefore acts a little like a hypnotist, using description to summon knowledge and feeling already present in the reader and draw them into an imagined world.
Why do readers seek fan fiction? Presumably they want something different from the original that can nevertheless exist within its framework: an old regret finally answered, a possibility the original never explored, or the collision between a new premise and familiar rules.
Unfortunately, before the work exists, we cannot know precisely what readers want to see. They may not know it themselves.
Long works, outlines and characters
A long web novel needs an outline. I do not normally outline essays, partly because I never developed the habit and partly because I can often write them in one continuous movement without straying too far.
That method does not suit a work of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of words. Long fiction needs a skeleton in advance so that it does not become top-heavy or lose its subject.
The characters and world should remain close to the original. A work written purely for amusement need not be too strict about this, but a long and serious narrative is easier to sustain when the original characters do not collapse into contradictions under the new writer’s hand.
The author therefore has to understand each character as fully as possible, infer a personality from the fragments offered by the original, and let that character begin to act independently in the imagination.
A character assembled from a handful of labels will remain no more than a flat type.