Hannah J Boddy

Occasionally, fanfic discourse drifts aimlessly across my timeline and I find myself ravelled up, reading arguments about whether fanfiction counts as truly “writing”.

And I firmly believe that it does.

Not just because if you are crafting words and putting them in a deliberate order, then what else could you be doing? The use of language in a written form is writing, whether well done or incredibly poorly done, and so technically, yes. Fanfic is writing. But also, fanfiction does require all the skills of an author of original fiction – they need to craft a narrative, they need to maintain tension, they need to create situations in which there are interesting and engaging events happening to their characters. Whether a fanfic writer is amending a pre-existing plot or stealing characters and plonking them into an entirely new world, they still need to have the ability to engage a reader, and surely that’s at the heart of all writing.

We write in order to make our audiences feel something. I don’t think writing is less worthwhile if the only aim you have is for your readers to have fun – sure, commentary on society is held in much higher regard, but escapism has its place too. Fanfiction is an amazing place to start figuring out how to do this insane hobby of creating imaginary worlds and making your imaginary friends suffer as much as possible. It’s a comfortable place to be – if you love fiction enough to want to craft fanfiction about it, then you know the setting and the characters well before you begin to write, and so all you need to focus on is the shaping of the words and the plot. You can adapt as much or as little as you want so that you can focus on the parts of writing that you most want to – whether because it’s easy, or because it is hard.

So, in the same way that I don’t think breathing subconsciously is cheating, I don’t think that writing fanfiction is a lesser form of writing.

Just because bad fanfic exists, it does not mean all fanfic is bad. Just because traditionally published work has been vetted by an editor, it does not mean that it is good. Writing is a skill and a craft, and practising it, in whatever form you choose to practise it, will improve the ability to write so that whether you write fanfic or original fiction, you get better at doing it well the more that you do it.

After all, ‘good’ is subjective. To a degree.

Fanfiction also gives space for silliness that often gets culled from traditionally published works – I’ve just been reading through an old fanfic, and my god, the chapter titles are absurd and I love them. I’m sure if I wrote this as not-fanfic, these would be reduced to simply numbers. Lame.