Fiction? Fanfiction?

I've never really been able to get into fanfiction, for some reason. Even about stories I really enjoy and want more of. Maybe I just haven't read the right fanfiction yet. Either way, I've always been more interested in writing my own stories than expanding someone else's. I take plenty of inspiration from what I read and watch, but it's never felt right to write something I didn't come up with myself.

I can only make oneshots for fanfiction.

Learned my lessons when I tried a longfic back in 2010.

I've never understood the appeal of fanfiction. Writing is like having a magic toybox that can create literally anything you can imagine. Fanfiction is refusing to play with your own magic toybox, and instead going next door to take toys from your neighbor's magic toybox.

I only enjoy fanfics if its a what if of my favorite story. Still, i would love to create something entirely new.

I dislike fanfic, so I write fiction.

CountVanBadger said:

I've never understood the appeal of fanfiction. Writing is like having a magic toybox that can create literally anything you can imagine. Fanfiction is refusing to play with your own magic toybox, and instead going next door to take toys from your neighbor's magic toybox.

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I dunno... I see it as seeing a fantasy/sci-fi world that already exists, and wonder what would have happened if things were different.

Not just in the gooner wish fulfillment way either (though that also plays a small part).

Let's take a popular fanfic world like High School DxD... What if the MC, Issei, wasn't a tit obsessed moron, but maybe a science nerd instead? How would that change the story?

Or maybe we give Issei the good ol' Rudius Greyrat treatment and toss some middle aged man into his body. How would that change the story?

Or we take it a step further, and follow another person in that world instead of the normal cast. Replace him with your new MC. How does this new person change that world? That is what I did in one of my fanfics when he visited DxD as the school principal with a sacred gear. It was a very different take on that world, and I thought it was rather interesting. IMO anyway.

Joyager2 said:

I've never really been able to get into fanfiction, for some reason, even about stories I really enjoy and want more of. Maybe I just haven't read the right fanfiction yet. Either way, I've always been more interested in writing my own stories than expanding someone else's. I take plenty of inspiration from what I read and watch, but it's never felt right to write something I didn't come up with myself.

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You realize every Single Fantasy Element was already invented by someone else, and you are just gathering countless ingredients and throwing them together with new names? Magic, Knights, Academy, Guilds, Monsters. You just come up with new names for the same things. Fanfiction borrows a specific variation of those elements with an established lore. Instead of mixing them together in an original story, you take what's there as a base and expand it. Good fanfiction authors do not simply rearrange but expand the world, like starting the story before the original, expanding or creating completely new characters, places, and stuff like that. In a sense, fanfiction is harder to write because you have to deeply analyze and then obey the established lore. You are not inserting just a single character in the story, you merely borrow the setting.

I bet if you write an original story, I would be able to come up with dozens of things you didn't come up with yourself. You are riding on the shoulders of giants and you are so small that you can't even spot and recognize them, despite them carrying your entire story silently.

CountVanBadger said:

I've never understood the appeal of fanfiction. Writing is like having a magic toybox that can create literally anything you can imagine. Fanfiction is refusing to play with your own magic toybox, and instead going next door to take toys from your neighbor's magic toybox.

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Why play cardgames like Poker? Come up with your own games and come up with a new set of cards while you are at it.

Why cook according to cookbooks or what your mom told you, come up with your own recipe.

Why use Excel? Use pen and paper or come up with your own System.

Fanfic is based on supply and demand and takes something beloved that works and expands upon it. Most of the popular franchises are world-famous for a reason and beloved by many. People want more. You could create your own story, which will most likely be inspired by an amalgam of different stories spliced together according to your own taste anyway and won't be as unique as you might think. Only 1 out of tens of thousands of stories will be unique and add something truly new to the Genre. All others are just barely recognizable unofficial fanfics.

FRWriter said:

You realize every Single Fantasy Element was already invented by someone else, and you are just gathering countless ingredients and throwing them together with new names? Magic, Knights, Academy, Guilds, Monsters. You just come up with new names for the same things. Fanfiction borrows a specific variation of those elements with an established lore. Instead of mixing them together in an original story, you take what's there as a base and expand it. Good fanfiction authors do not simply rearrange but expand the world, like starting the story before the original, expanding or creating completely new characters, places, and stuff like that. In a sense, fanfiction is harder to write because you have to deeply analyze and then obey the established lore. You are not inserting just a single character in the story, you merely borrow the setting.

I bet if you write an original story, I would be able to come up with dozens of things you didn't come up with yourself. You are riding on the shoulders of giants and you are so small that you can't even spot and recognize them, despite them carrying your entire story silently.

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I'm sure you could. My inspirations have made me as much as the food I've eaten (as Emerson says, kinda). But I think there's a pretty clear difference between using genre conventions and writing fanfiction, which is typically bound to another author's interpretation of those conventions. For instance, if I write a story about a brave hero slaying a monster, am I writing Beowulf fanfiction? Was the Beowulf poet, who (in the 10th century) called on an already long literary tradition of heroes and monsters writing fanfiction? Would either my story or theirs be especially unoriginal (or undeserving of the term 'original fiction') because of our participation in these traditions? I don't think so.

And while I'm sure you could write a very solid critical paper about the extension of early medieval literary traditions into modern fantasy and the questions of authorship that arise, I don't feel that's an especially helpful distinction to make outside of academic circles or one that necessitates a minimization of 'originality' in works that use genre conventions to tell stories that aren't directly attached to other literature.

Similarly, I don't think there's much use in arguing which is more 'difficult'--writing original stories or fanfiction. Authorship is hard enough as it is.