when i was in elementary school i loved to write and my favorite assignments were the creative writing ones and, since i was a precocious reader, i would always incorporate elements of what i was reading into my stories. reading the prisoner of azkaban? suddenly a big black dog was attacking my protagonists. my protagonist goes to a zoo? suddenly a giant snake attacks him (i was big into harry potter, if you can’t tell). this continued until fourth grade, when we were given an assignment to write an original story, and i wrote what i considered to be an original story *heavily based* on a book i’d read recently, and absolutely loved. heavily based as in anybody who had read the book would immediately been able to tell i’d ripped it off.
but i couldn’t help it. the book so sparked my imagination that i had to write my own idea of it. i was 9, and my intention obviously wasn’t a cynical copyright cash grab. i just loved the idea so much i wanted to explore it on my own.
my teacher didn’t notice, and loved it so much that she read it out loud to the class, and i was over the moon with pride, until i came home and showed it to my mom, who immediately recognized the source material. “you took this from **** didn’t you?” she asked, and suddenly i was crushed. it hit me that i had done something Bad. i had stolen somebody else’s idea, because i didn’t have any of my own. after that, i slowly began to put away my writing tools. i kept reading, but i lost the confidence to write (part of which came from getting older and losing all that childhood confidence to puberty, but i digress), and even though i later realized that i hadn’t actually done something so terrible there, the idea stuck with me that i could never be a *real* writer, because i didn’t have any ideas of my own. I just wasn’t creative enough.
Anyway, a few months ago i was reading Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’, and it details his childhood and adolescence, how he went from being a kid who loved stories to an adult who made a profession in them. Well, i read and discovered that King basically spent his whole childhood just writing the stories he saw on the big screen. He liked dracula? he wrote a dracula story. frankenstein? same deal. he was writing exactly what he saw and read because - and this is what i now understand - that’s how children learn to write. we copy, and absorb, and then eventually we make our own. we write what we love, even if its an exact copy of that book or movie, and then eventually we make it different. there’s nothing new under the sun, and we create from what we see. stephen king basically wrote fanfiction as a kid, even if he didn’t call it that.
so if you think you’re not creative enough, or you’re not a ‘real’ writer, because you write fanfiction, just remember that’s what part of writing is. all ideas are parts of other ideas. nobody can create in a vacuum.
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