Fanfiction: Feeding Your Brain

Good evening everyone and welcome to The Magical Mystery Blog.

As many of you may or may not know, I write fanfiction. I used to write fanfiction heavily as a teenager for venting, character exploration, and to hone my writing skills. This past year I returned to writing fanfiction after a long hiatus and I still question why I left writing fics. Tonight, I’m going to share with you the reasons why you should write fanfiction.

5. Boosts Your Writing Skills

The more you write, the better you will be. I never believed this back then, but I find that the statement holds true. What’s even better about writing fanfiction is that you receive comments and critiques on your works. When you publish your fanfiction on sites like fanfiction.net, archiveofourown.org, or wattpad.com, you are sharing your work with the entire world. That is a ton of people to stumble upon your work, read it, and offer you some helpful feedback.

Furthermore, researching characters, their flaws, their disorders (if they have any), and their unique traits will help you in character development. What you experience through writing fanfiction you can use later on when writing your more serious works such as character creation, character development, plot development, and so many other useful and necessary writing features.

It’s all right if you’re possibly terrible writer at first, but when writing fanfiction and receiving critiques, you will be better in due time.

4. Writing Exercises

I actually use fanfictions as a writing exercise for my more serious works that I would like to publish someday. By writing fanfiction, it allows the gears to start turning, ideas to start forming, and something wonderful to begin. What’s even better is that there’s no limit to fanfiction for writing exercises – you can create a fifty word drabble or a sixty thousand word chapter fic. You can also choose various categories that your piece fits. By crafting fanfiction, you expose yourselves to various genres, characters, and plots which you can utilize for more writing exercises.


3.Venting

They say writing is the best medium because you’re physically typing out what you’re feeling. The emotion rushes from your brain and to your finger tips and from them emerge words that fit exactly what’s on your mind. You can be as raw and as rough as you like when you’re writing fanfiction as a means of venting. Plus when your internal storm has passed you can look at what you have created and edit it so that it’s better or leave it as is and bear your soul to the world.

2.Exploration

A while back I read an article on how women used fanfiction to explore their sexualities. Like men who view porn, women used fanfiction to explore themselves. They believed porn to be unrealistic and fanfiction to have more realism. Like porn, fanfiction became taboo – something forbidden, but enticing. Its taboo, but understanding nature encouraged women to write fanfiction, to further explore their sexualities, to comprehend what the body can and cannot do when it came to sex, and to understand how things worked. Fanfiction for them was something easier to hide as opposed to pictures of lewd acts on a screen, thus allowing fanfiction to be read anywhere. Fanfiction became a safe haven and allowed readers and writers to utilize research of biological sexual functions and incorporate them into fics to further understand their characters and themselves as well.

From crafting sexual fanfictions, writers and even readers can live out their private sexual fantasies. It’s a way for them to experience (or imagine) things that they cannot do in reality for whatever reason. They also write fanfiction to further explore other sexual orientations like homosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality, and so many others just to appease their appetite and curiosity. Fanfiction became an educational escape to further understand themselves and enjoy literary porn. 

1. Building an Audience

So you want to be a writer. That’s fantastic – now where’s your audience? Drawing an audience to your work is not the easiest thing in the world – unless it deals with something that’s already incredibly popular. Enter fanfiction – where by crafting stories regarding popular characters you can build an audience. By building your audience with work regarding characters they adore, readers will grow accustomed to your writing style, and may enjoy it. When you publish more serious pieces (like an original short story), the readers will recognize you because of what you have written on fanfiction and will already be familiar with your writing style and want to read more of your work. Yes, it may not be about the 10^th Doctor having intercourse with Captain Jack Harkness, but it will be something new and original for them to enjoy as fans of your work.


Thank you for reading tonight’s entry. If you enjoyed it, feel free to share, subscribe, comment, and/or critique.

So tell me, do you write fanfiction and why?