YouTube has been serving me videos about the fanfiction to published pipeline. (This is what I get for watching a bookbinding video that used a popular HP fanfiction that was recently published as original fiction.)
I get why people talk about fanfiction as a place to learn craft because you do! You absolutely learn about pacing, dialogue, structure, characterization, revision, audience awareness, and how to finish a full narrative. A lot of writers learn by doing, and fanfiction gives people a low-barrier way to do that.
Hell, I am a much better writer today than I was five years ago and I’m better today than I was even one year ago.
But I hate in these videos that that becomes fanfiction’s value.
Because then the value of fanfiction is still being measured by how close it can get you to “real” fiction. Fanfiction becomes valuable only because it might someday be original fiction. It becomes something you outgrow.
And IMHO that misses the point.
Fanfiction is not valuable because it teaches you how to write original fiction.
Fanfiction is valuable because people love characters and worlds enough to keep talking back to them. Fanfiction is a conversation. It is your interpretation. It is desire, grief, anger, repair, obsession, devotion, and community. It is our way of saying, “This mattered, and we are not done with it.”
It is valuable because it gives us community. People who see the characters in the same and different ways and feel like there’s more to explore or learn.
Sometimes fanfiction is technically excellent. Sometimes it is messy. Sometimes it is indulgent. Sometimes it is better than the canon. Sometimes it is twenty thousand words of two characters finally having the conversation canon denied them (hello all the fic-it fics)! Its value does not depend on whether the writer eventually publishes it as an original work.
I think the “file off the serial numbers” conversation reveals the problem. If a fic can be stripped of names and setting so easily that you can no longer tell what source material it came from, then maybe it was not actually very good fanfiction. Maybe it was original fiction wearing borrowed names.
IMHO good fanfiction leans into the source. It understands the characters, their emotional logic, the absences, the contradictions, the things canon said and the things canon could not or would not say.
I’m not saying fanfiction has to be a copy/paste of canon, but you should be able to recognize the characters. The point is the characters.
That does not mean fanfiction can never become original fiction, because of course it can! Writers transform things. They take skills from one form into another. But “this helped me learn craft” is not the same as “this was only worthwhile because it helped me move on to something legitimate.”
Fanfiction is not lesser.
It does not need to justify itself by becoming something else.
Anyway, I literally wrote a fic called Filing Off the Serial Numbers. It is about fandom, writing, collaboration, AO3, and storytelling. I wrote it because my feelings about fanfiction changed since I was younger.
I love fanfiction because I love the characters and I love the community.
turnnoffyourmind
amandla
stormborns
origamiaround
