Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 15 - I'm your Biggest Fan

I don't read a lot of fan fiction, by which I mean I don't read any.  Some people totally get off on re-imaginings of their favorite fictive universes and characters, but I've never been one of them.  Rather than decry the enterprise as a whole, I'll say that when it comes to evaluating the quality of one piece of homoerotic Star Trek vampire slash over another, it just  isn't my thing.

Personal bias aside, I do have a thing or two to say about it, and while I certainly won't come out and advise any writer not to write fan fiction, I'm going to have to advise a great deal of caution.

First, the good:

Fan fiction is outstanding exercise.  Of six critical elements (plot, character, theme, setting, dialogue, and narration), the beginning writer can plug in any five and set to work creating something unique with the sixth (or vice versa, for that matter).  A writer who wishes to hone his dialogue writing ability might try transcribing a conversation between, say, Quentin and Benji Compson in which they discuss exactly which trees Caddy smells like, or imagine writing the adventures of Rick Deckard as he goes to, shit, I don't know, buy an ice cream sandwich and winds up finding out that the Good Humor man is really a replicant.

Fan fiction can be a ramp up to creating your own work with your own original characters, setting, etc.  In this case, FF serves as training wheels while the author finds her own voice, and learns to work at her own pace.  I've said before that imitation is not only the highest form of flattery, but also one of the best teachers, and in this case the writer puts herself very much in the position of the original author and hopefully learns a thing or two while there.

It's not like Fan Fiction is something entirely new, either.  While most articles on the subject point to the 1960's as the birth of modern FF, I think the spirit of the thing goes back further.  I would argue the case that John Milton's Paradise Lost arguably qualifies as one epic piece of FF, filling in the gaps of Genesis and further exploring the characters involved.

But even giving up that particular example, the ever-popular serial form requires a hardcore devotion to original source material, be that serial a TV series, movie sequel, or comic book.  It's not like the Newsgroups of the 1990's invented the concept of giving more to the reader who is left wanting it.

But, now for the bad.

"Leave 'em wanting more" is an old entertainment axiom for a reason - not only will leaving the audience wanting more fuel your own reputation (e.g., it's a good career move), but doing so is an essential part of the creative exchange.  Any story should leave questions unanswered - that's what stimulation is all about, and if you are to write a stimulating story, so too must you leave something for the reader to chew on. 

When you indulge in fan fiction, you're attempting to satiate that hunger, be it your own or that of your reader.  In the best possible circumstances, your own work will in turn ask more questions than the few it answers, but in the worst case you will actually complete the errand with which so many FF writers charge themselves:  you will tie up the loose ends.

If you truly like a work, it's worth considering that those loose ends were left dangling for a reason - perhaps what was written wound up on the cutting room floor because it destroyed the pace, or made obvious what should have been subtle, or what have you.  At the end of the day, so much fan fiction is a lot like Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho:  it didn't do anything that the original didn't do better. 

Another worthy consideration is that of your own readership  Oftentimes, it's other fans, and just as likely this roster includes other fans penning fan fiction.  Some of it's good, but like the performance art movement, most of it is somebody in a diaper fucking a rotten side of beef wrapped in an American flag and calling it "The Battle of Bunker Hill."  It's not interesting, it's certainly not canonical, and at the end of the day it's all forgettable exempting the smell. 

You're known in part by the company you keep, and if the company you keep writes nothing but Mary Sue Twilight stories, you're going to be lumped in with that crowd whether your stuff is any good or not. 

The final peril of FF is that the ramp which you've used to build up your style will become a crutch. An old prof of mine once asked a fellow student who was himself committed to H. Beam Piper's Fuzzy universe just how much of his intellectual capital he wished to invest in that particular project.  In other words, how hard do you want to run at another's race?   Then again, my friend is in talks to get his own Fuzzy book published, but for every one of him I've known dozens more who could wax poetic about Dr. Who and little else. 

Fan fiction is at its best when it answers the questions that the original work didn't even ask, explicitly or implicitly, and at that, only when the question is compelling.  One of the falling off points, for me at any rate, of the continuing Star Wars novels (those set after the fall of the galactic empire) was that the only questions so many bothered to ask was "what's next?"  The follow-up question to any work should be compelling in and of itself, either because it's a real good and driving question or because the question is so off-beat and quirky that it approaches the subject material from a new, possibly parodic, angle.   Don't ask "so what happened to Luke and the gang after Endor," ask "who was the janitor that found Luke's hand at the bottom of that shaft in Bespin, and what did he do with it?"