Hi guys,
Was inspired to start this thread by a mention of fanfic over in the Growing Up Aspie Female thread.
I LOVE fanfic! I find it a lot easier to write than original fiction. I can write well in terms of stringing words together pleasingly, but find coming up with storylines very difficult. I find it a lot easier within an existing framework. Plus my obsessions heavily focus on TV shows etc...
I started writing fanfic when i was just a little kid, before I'd ever heard the term. I did a massively long and complicated Dangermouse epic which is now (fortunately) lost to the mists of time. I've graduated from that through Rocky and Bullwinkle and The Chipmunks (oh the shame...) to Doctor Who and more recently started some Goodies and ISIRTA fanfic.
I used to when I was a kid -- wrote something or other based on Voltron at about age... I dunno... seven or eight, perhaps.
Had an idea recently. (Literally "dreamed" up, so to speak.) It's more the kind of story I'd like to read, perhaps. So I write because if I hadn't started I would not have been able to concentrate on anything else.
Writing lots of original stuff too, of course. With Sci-Fi or Fantasy universes.
I love to write fanfiction. Mostly for Invader Zim, though I have done for other shows. I like to have crazy pairings that make no sense, but are fun to write.
I have been wanting to make a Smithers/Burns fic for awhile, too.
Saying that a story should stop where the author choses to end it, is like saying that we should have stopped adding onto the periodic table of elements when Dmitri Mendeleev died.
Gadzooks, that's the most beautiful summation of Why Fanfic Rocks that I have ever seen. I may well borrow that in future.
Since I started this thread, I've done that old-obsession-returning thing and am back to Dangermouse again in a big way. Yes, at my age. Tch. Anyway, if you happen to drop in on fanfiction.net I'm known as Ethel The-Aardvark...
Novels, eh? Good for you. I'd never be able to write a piece that long - while I can string the words themselves together pleasingly, anything over 1,000 words and my less-than-great plotting skills start to poke through the holes.
It's hard to draw a line between what's fanfic and what isn't, sometimes. For instance, quite a few people who went on to write proper, officially sanctioned Doctor Who books started out in unofficial Who fanfic. Is one story Real Fiction and another by the same person A Soulless Uncreative Rip Off just because the former has a BBC logo on it somewhere?
I s'pose for me that writing fanfiction -- whether it's based on myths or on other stuff -- is more an outlet for obsessions than anything else because otherwise I can't think about anything else (and occasionally can't even focus on my other writing.)
Same here. A lot of the fanfic I "compose" (as in come up with) I don't even write down, it just swirls around in my head when I'm in insomniac-obsessive mode and 99% of it genuinely is utter rubbish.
The 1% that IS worth typing out, I until recently just whacked it on my hard drive, never to be seen again. Occasionally a piece might be circulated via "anyone want to read our Goodies fanfic? PM me for a copy" type posts on forums. Just recently I got all brave and started an account on fanfiction.net, and I've put 4 bits up there so far and had surprisingly nice things said about them.
I think some parts of the fanfic community are very nice, and quite forgiving - and I like Nyanchan's point that for a lot of writers it's about the FAN side of things, not necessarily being the world's best writer. Some fanfic writers are brilliant wordsmiths. Most aren't, they just have a really cool idea involving the Doctor taking Leela to the ballet, and want to share it with the rest of us.
I wrote an Invader Zim / Frankenstein crossover fanfic for my creative project for Gothic Literautre. It was pretty cool.
Go on, Shamshir, it's excellent fun...
Having had a look at the Dangermouse stuff over on fanfiction.net, it's quite interesting the different 'sorts' of fic people come up with.
1. Stuff that's just like the show as on TV. There's surprisingly little of this.
2. Stuff with a vast array of original characters. To the extent that occasionally they should come with a chart to keep track of who's who! (Well, for the benefit of people like me with ADHD, at least.)
3. Canon-warping stuff. Mine fits into this category - stuff like how established characters met, what happened before the TV series started etc.
There's some new fic just appeared there which looks very promising, but it's different again in that it's much more 'real world', with guns and blood and guts and stuff, as opposed to the original series where the only thing Dangermouse EVER pointed a gun at was... a stick!
OK, it was a magic talking stick.
But it was still a stick.
Sorry! It may well be something I've done - there seems to be something about that particular site's interface that I just can't 'get'. I've hung around there so much lately I should be a pro at it by now, but I still can't navigate properly and my stories are all dreadfully formatted. It's just me having a brain-fade, I'm sure.
This is me:
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/1410647/Ethel_The-Aardvark
This is completely OT, I'm just extraodinarily tired, high on chocolate and adrenaline, and after some sympathy...
My special treat for myself, a 12-disk set of every Dangermouse episode ever, arrived this afternoon. I had dreams of this afternoon being spent in front of the telly (OK, computer actually) with a bowl of soup and a cup of tea, listening to the rain and indulging in my latest obsession.
Instead, literally as I was unlocking the door to get into my house after getting the DVDs out of the mailbox, I got called back into work straight away to deal with an emergency. It's gone eleven pm and I'm still here, and started work at five this morning.
Waa waa, poor me, etc.
Ah, it's all good... I spent all morning playing with the DVDs, and after hearing some fans whinging that they're a bit cheap 'n' nasty, I was pleasantly surprised to find all sorts of easter eggs and extras and things. Now I have lots of fab ideas for new fanfic, if I ever get time to actually write it down.
That's a tricky one - there's some stuff on fanfiction.net that's just so totally brilliant (no, I DON'T mean my own!) that it really does deserve to be officially recognised and published somewhere it's going to be seen by more than a couple of net-savvy geeks and bored web surfers. But there's also stuff that should be taken out and shot. And when it's your own stuff, it can be really really hard to judge whether it's 'worth' sharing or not.
Necrobump to share the fact that there are nearly a thousand Jane Austen fanfics on fanfiction.net, and nearly 1,200 Shakespeares.
Well, I thought it was amazing. Doctor Who and Harry Potter are pretty obvious, and I'm still shocked that there are people other than me in the world who'd consider writing fanfic for Dangermouse or Sesame Street.... but Jane Austen? Shakespeare
That's wild.
Off to read. BRB. In a week!