I know most writers of my age got their skills from fanfiction, but if I ever let that fanfic shit slip onto my real ass, serious ass writing...if you could read my shit and go "oh yeah they read homestuck or watched Sherlock" or whatever ... id jump
I don't know how to disagree without sounding patronizing, but I honestly feel like I gained a maturity level when I realized that nothing can be divided into "real, serious writing" and whatever the other option is (fun writing? stupid writing?). I know it's standard to do this with literary fiction vs genre fiction, and people objecting to the former and preferring the latter is stereotyped as defensive anti-intellectualism, but it's one of those things - in my experience - where there's an anti-intellectual version that you then get past (going, "aha, literary fiction is actually good! people just pooh-pooh it because it's not immediately accessible!"), and then you come along back to the value of all stories in the end.
The thing is, there's stuff that's very obviously "fanfictiony" - the italicized oh, gratuitous character parallels, the AO3 "house style" - and then there is stuff that fanfiction does genuinely teach people to do better.
One thing that has started to make me go, "Oh, this person's from fandom," is when a romance actually feels earned, makes me care about the characters, and is integrated into the plot, for instance. I find that trad romance, as a genre, is so focused on the formula that it makes the individual characters flat and uninteresting. Often other fiction doesn't spend much if any time on the romance, expecting you to just get that two characters having to work on the plot together and being attractive will make their love convincing, and/or making only one character's arc important and having the other follow along as a reward. Whereas books like A Marvellous Light or Winter's Orbit manage to do things that are so common in good fic: making the romance build specifically on the individual characters' traits so that it's not cookie-cutter, and making the beats of the romantic and character development work in harmony with the beats of the plot so that neither is just an appendage.
Ultimately, a number of fanfiction tropes and tendencies are fanfictionish because they spring from fanfiction, not because they're inherently lesser building blocks for writing that only amateurs who don't care about quality would use. There is no reason to be ashamed of having written fanfiction or of having people guess that you've written it.
worth repeating:
Ultimately, a number of fanfiction tropes and tendencies are fanfictionish because they spring from fanfiction, not because they're inherently lesser building blocks for writing that only amateurs who don't care about quality would use. There is no reason to be ashamed of having written fanfiction or of having people guess that you've written it.
I think I'd add that writing and reading a lot of fanfiction in addition to original fiction soothed my nerves about "nothing new under the sun." It's okay to re-use tropes and settings and concepts because that is all storytelling ever is. Writing is unique because of the voice of the writer.
