I got very wise advice from my friend, to post not only stories here, but also some “backstage” for each of them like for example the process of writing.
For a long time, I have been wondering where to start and then it came to my mind, that thought FanFiction community is pretty wide and most people already know what this thing is, I have encountered many who never even heard the term. That’s when I remembered a presentation I once prepared for my students at the Culture Animator course, which was simply explaining the term and guiding them through this incredible world of writing. I started from just a few words: NEW ADVENTURES OF WELL KNOWN CHARACTERS.
This was the beginning, and now I will walk you through this vast world filled with adventure.
According to Wikipedia, Fanfiction is a type of fictional text written by fans of any work of fiction where the author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties from an original creator as a basis for their writing. Fanfiction ranges from a couple of sentences to an entire novel, and fans can both keep the creator’s characters and settings or add their own. Fanfiction is a form of fan labor.
Fanfiction can be based on any fictional (and sometimes non-fictional) subject. Common bases for fan fiction include novels, movies, bands, and video games.
To me, however, it’s much more than that. It is a whole new world filled with adventure. While writing the author can join his favorite characters and lead them into new situations, sometimes even different realms (AUs). The writers have completely endless possibilities and only their imagination is the limit. Fanfiction can be a way to relax, to ease the tension, or even a kind of self-therapy. It’s creating a new world or entering an already existing one. Characters from their favorite movie, show, or book can be put in new situations and joined by newly created ones (OCs). Have a big vivid imagination? Pour it on the paper or into a Word file! Enwind into your own brainwaves and create something new, something you’d like to happen to your favorites. There’s only one rule: HAVE FUN!
I remember my first fanfiction ever written. It was in my third grade and the teacher gave us homework to write a story based on our favorite book or movie. Obviously, she had no idea what fanfiction was, since it was long before home Internet was a common thing (the late 1990s in Poland), so she just called it “a story based on book or movie”. I really wanted to write something based on my then-favorite movie “Anastasia”, but I didn’t realize that I could check the director of it in the end credits, and it was required to include the director of the movie or author of the book, on which we were basing our stories, but I was lucky to have a novelization of the movie. The joy was endless because I could freely write what I wanted. I was off to work. Probably a week later the story was ready and I was incredibly proud of myself. The story had (at least I thought so back then) a good plot, really cool characters, and was in the fandom I loved. Of course, the term fandom wasn’t anything known to most people back then. Yet, I didn’t think of that much. What a ten-year-old would worry about, would be if the story would be well received by a teacher who basically hated them. To my surprise I got A+, and that meat even more than it would be at any other classes. This was my first adventure with fanfiction. And the rest is something for another post.
