I've always had mixed feelings about fan fiction. Is it worth reading? Is it even a legitimate genre of writing? So I thought I'd explore a few pros and cons of fan fiction (both for readers and for writers) in this post.
Starting with the cons:
- Because fan fiction is inherently derived from someone else's work, the authors are using ideas that are not their own. Instead of coming up with characters and plots from scratch, they're using someone else's work as a springboard. This can cause problems. There's the obvious plagiarism issue: is the fan fiction author just ripping off somebody else's story? Writers can get into dubiously moral and even illegal territory with fan fiction, especially if they're trying to get it published.
- There is a lot of low-quality fan fiction out there. A LOT of it. Many people who attempt writing fan fiction know nothing about writing but want to invent further adventures for their favorite characters. So the fan fiction they come up with is poorly written. I'm sure this gives them writing practice, but it makes it frustrating to read fan fiction because there's so much poorly-done fan fiction to wade through. (To be fair, there are a lot of original books out there that are also very poorly written. But it seems to be harder to separate the bad from the good in fan fiction than it is in in original fiction. Maybe that's partially due to the fact that far fewer people have read the fan fiction than the original works, so there aren't many people to ask whether a particular work of fan fiction is good or not.)
- A lot of fan fiction is highly innappropriate. What is it with people wanting to take good stories and rewrite them with added sexual content? That seems like a good idea? Really? It frustrates me to find what seems like an interesting spinoff on Pride and Prejudice, only to find the author has given Mr. Darcy a backstory that's indistinguishable from Mr. Wickham's.
Now how about a few pros?
- Famous ancient writers did it. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was inspired by a poem by Arthur Brooke called "The Tragical Historye of Romeus and Juliet." Virgil's Aeneid is based on Homer's Iliad and The Odyssey. It seems to me that most of the Robin Hood stories are fan fiction as well, since they're based off the old Robin Hood ballads or off each other. Come to think of it, Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe is fan fiction. These are books people are required to read in school!
- Fan fiction satisfies a great longing in its authors. Have you ever finished a book and been really sad that it was the last one in the series? I have. When I was six, I started writing a sequel to C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia because I couldn't stand that there weren't any more Narnia books. (Actually, it wasn't technically a sequel since it happened between Prince Caspian and The Dawn Treader. I believe they call that a paraquel.)
- Fan fiction is also a good way to practice general writing skills. Some people that might not otherwise have started writing fiction began with fan fiction. I think that's a good thing!
- Well-done fan fiction can be a lot of fun to read. I read a sequel to Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess called Wishing For Tomorrow. It continues the story of the girls who are in the school after Sara leaves in a really satisfying way.
What do you think about fan fiction? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
(Full disclosure: I am at this time writing fan fiction myself. I'm writing a novel based on Pride and Prejudice set in Colorado in the 1870's. Whether this will ever become a worthy addition to the world's literature remains to be seen.)
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