Booking Through Thursday

Apparently it's been more than three years since I participated in Booking Through Thursday. A bit boggling to think about. I love this blog (and the associated community of book lovers) so one of my goals for the upcoming month is to start answering BTT questions again.

What do you think of fanfiction? In general—do you think it’s a fun thing or a trespass on an author/producer’s world? And of course, obviously specific authors have very firm and very differing opinions about this, yet it’s getting more popular and more mainstream all the time. Do you ever read or write it yourself?

I unabashedly love fanfiction - and I owe a lot to it.

I discovered fanfiction when I was a teenager in love with J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. I had written some bits and pieces of self-insertion fanfic of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, but I had no idea there were entire communities of people on the internet posting and discussing works of fiction based on other authors' works. I think Fiction Alley was the first place I read Harry Potter fanfic. And it didn't take long before I was writing and posting my own. I had a few friends doing it too and we all shared and reviewed our work together (also my first real intro to beta-reading).

Although I mostly stopped writing fanfic when I got to college (read: I was bored bored bored in high school), I remain a strong supporter of those who are still doing it. I cannot say enough about how writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community helped me as a writer. I learned how to write short stories, how to plot novels, how to edit my own work, how to review other people's work... and most importantly I learned that I love writing and can't imagine NOT writing.

As for fanfiction being a trespass on someone else's world, I don't see how it's any more hurtful than people who do cosplay of their favorite characters from movies and tv (and books for that matter!). Speaking from a writer's perspective, I would be thrilled if someone wanted to write fanfiction of my worlds - how flattering is it that someone got so invested in your fictional world that they wanted to live there too? As long as fanfic writers aren't trying to pass off their work as the original author's or attempting to make money off it, I'm cool with fanfiction.

(And, of course, we've seen fanfiction result in some runaway bestsellers. So... there you have it.)