I used to love watching Voltron, a Netflix original fantasy show, on the weekends. I was sure that two of the characters would get together at the end, since they had so much romantic tension between them. However, I was left disappointed when a completely new love-interest for one of the characters was introduced, and the ship that I once thought obvious became out of the question. I ached to see more of their playful bickering and how they resolve clashes in their personalities, both of which I found through a popular fanfiction site – Archive of Our Own. I read countless Voltron fanfictions and devoured so many different possible endings. I saw how each character reacted to situations never talked about in the actual show.
As I read more fanfiction, I realized that I learned so much about writing from it. When I started to create my own fanfiction, it not only became a fun pass time, but it’s a great tool for me to improve my storytelling.
When I was excitedly asking my friends if they agreed with a specific character couple, I found out that my friends supported and read fanfiction of that couple as well. We exchanged good fanfics of many fandoms that we discovered and eagerly discussed the tension between two characters or the cliff-hangers at the end of a chapter.
However, I also got a couple of weird stares from my classmates. They thought fanfiction was cringy because it’s about romance, or they thought that it was low-quality since it’s written by amateur writers.
However, fanfiction gave me an outlet for any ideas that sprung up about a character relationship in a fandom. Rather than just imagining a plot in my head, I realized I had a place to put all these thoughts down.
These new ideas sparked my interest in writing fanfiction myself. At first, every sentence I wrote got deleted within a minute, and I was too focused on my storyline being perfect. Dialogue was the hardest part for me to write, since I had to nail the character’s vocabulary and diction. In one of the fanfictions I worked on, I wrote letters exchanged by the two main characters. It was really difficult for me to keep the letters candid and consistent with the characters’ style of speech. It took a lot of rereading and editing the dialogue, but each time I rewrote something, it became easier the next time. I also learned to do quick character studies before writing a section involving them, and making sure I knew their backstory really helped as well
As I kept writing fanfictions, however, I learned that making mistakes while exploring the characters and stories is what helped me improve my writing. I wasn’t stuck on one single sentence anymore, and my creativity flowed with ease.
Fanfiction is also so much fun to create because I could write about characters I enjoyed in an endless amount of situations. I could also pick the length of the fanfiction, which helped me keep realistic goals. I was able to consistently get words down on the page when I wrote fanfiction, which was such a big contrast from when I wrote my own stories from scratch.
The biggest thing that kept me from writing my own original content was having to grapple with world-building and come up with character personalities. Both of these things require a lot of time outside of writing the actual story, so by the time I figured out the culture of the species living in my fictional world, I had lost a lot of interest in the story itself. Since writing about other fandoms gave me the basis of the story, I now focus on keeping my characters consistent and building an emotional and entertaining story.
I’ve learned so many things since I started creating fanfiction, and it showed. When looking back on my older stories, it was so rewarding to see how much my writing has improved.
