Fanfiction & Original Fiction
Jan. 7th, 2015 04:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
in_the_blueBecause of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scribble_myname I've been thinking a lot today about fanfic vs. original fic, and which I prefer writing and why. Normally I'd post a writing process thing over at Wordpress, but since all my fellow RPers are here (and RPing is a form of writing fanfic), I thought this might be a little bit interesting to y'all.
With fanfiction, our worlds are not so big. We're constrained by the universe the characters come from, someone else's vision that as viewers/readers we get to interpret. Fanfic is a great way of letting us expand on those worlds, but we're still bound (at least in the type of fanfiction I write) to the original creator's rules. Our characters have the personalities they were given, the world works the way it was intended, relationships are already established. My first fanworks were for Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E. when I was really little and didn't even know what a fandom was, but the first time I sat down to write a fanfic was after I'd read some of the Harry Potter books. I used to have a website with some of those fics on them, and I'm sure glad they aren't around any more.
I've always written original fiction in parallel with fanfiction, but they use different parts of my brain. As much as I enjoy dabbling in someone else's world, I love creating my own worlds and characters. I think I'm a better writer of original fiction than I am of fanfiction, even if not all of my original stuff is better. They're apples and oranges, really. With original stuff I get to create it all from scratch. There are no rules to adhere to, no predefined sets of circumstances. No one can tell me if the heroine gets to go with Character A or Character B (although I've had some pointed comments about potential shipping wars *cough*). The characters get to define what happens to them instead of the other way around. Even when I'm working from an outline, character decisions trump everything. That's the only way I can keep them real and honest.
For me, that's harder to do with fanfic. I can try to push a character in a certain direction, but unless I'm writing a fix-it fic I tend to adhere to the occurrences in canon. But with my own stuff, nothing's cast in stone and everything is mutable and up for grabs, and it's such a delight to see it all come together that I can hardly stand it. I could probably say I live for those moments and I wouldn't be lying.
For the record, I still love doing both. Of course there's a caveat: the more original works I come up with, the harder it is for me to go back and write to someone else's rules. Yuletide was difficult for me this year. Fortunately my assignment was to write for Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, which is about as wide open as a premade world could be. Even with all the suggestions and prompts from my recipient, this still felt more like writing something original than all the Bebop fics I wrote last year.
How about you guys? What are your experiences with this sort of thing?
scribble_myname I've been thinking a lot today about fanfic vs. original fic, and which I prefer writing and why. Normally I'd post a writing process thing over at Wordpress, but since all my fellow RPers are here (and RPing is a form of writing fanfic), I thought this might be a little bit interesting to y'all.With fanfiction, our worlds are not so big. We're constrained by the universe the characters come from, someone else's vision that as viewers/readers we get to interpret. Fanfic is a great way of letting us expand on those worlds, but we're still bound (at least in the type of fanfiction I write) to the original creator's rules. Our characters have the personalities they were given, the world works the way it was intended, relationships are already established. My first fanworks were for Star Trek and Man from U.N.C.L.E. when I was really little and didn't even know what a fandom was, but the first time I sat down to write a fanfic was after I'd read some of the Harry Potter books. I used to have a website with some of those fics on them, and I'm sure glad they aren't around any more.
I've always written original fiction in parallel with fanfiction, but they use different parts of my brain. As much as I enjoy dabbling in someone else's world, I love creating my own worlds and characters. I think I'm a better writer of original fiction than I am of fanfiction, even if not all of my original stuff is better. They're apples and oranges, really. With original stuff I get to create it all from scratch. There are no rules to adhere to, no predefined sets of circumstances. No one can tell me if the heroine gets to go with Character A or Character B (although I've had some pointed comments about potential shipping wars *cough*). The characters get to define what happens to them instead of the other way around. Even when I'm working from an outline, character decisions trump everything. That's the only way I can keep them real and honest.
For me, that's harder to do with fanfic. I can try to push a character in a certain direction, but unless I'm writing a fix-it fic I tend to adhere to the occurrences in canon. But with my own stuff, nothing's cast in stone and everything is mutable and up for grabs, and it's such a delight to see it all come together that I can hardly stand it. I could probably say I live for those moments and I wouldn't be lying.
For the record, I still love doing both. Of course there's a caveat: the more original works I come up with, the harder it is for me to go back and write to someone else's rules. Yuletide was difficult for me this year. Fortunately my assignment was to write for Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, which is about as wide open as a premade world could be. Even with all the suggestions and prompts from my recipient, this still felt more like writing something original than all the Bebop fics I wrote last year.
How about you guys? What are your experiences with this sort of thing?
