Batblog

My Fanfiction Experience

You know something I'm actually kind of thankful for? The fact that I never had an internet connection as a child.

You see, while I never had the compulsion to do much writing back then, I did do a lot of daydreaming. Usually it would be me thinking up my own stories in settings that I liked (so, basically "fanfiction," although that's a term I wouldn't learn until years later), and all of it was terrible. All of it. Like, literally the worst kind of Mary Sue self-insert dross you can imagine, which is why I'm glad I didn't have an internet connection; I might have actually ended up writing some of that awful mess down and putting it where other people could see it.

No, I wouldn't get an internet connection until about the age of twelve, when I was finally starting to grow a sense of self-awareness. That's about when I finally became aware of the concept of "fanfiction" - that is, stories written by amateurs within established settings - and, at first, I thought it seemed like an awesome concept. After all; no single writer or team could ever explore all the possibilities most settings have to offer, so why not leave it to the fans?

Well, because most of those fans are terrible writers, for one. I learned that pretty quick.

And also because most of the possibilities those fans seemed preoccupied with exploring were more along the lines of "what if these two characters who hate each other fell in love?", "what if these two characters who aren't gay were gay and fell in love?", or, best of all, "what if these two brothers who hate each other and aren't gay fell in love?" (thanks for those images, Inuyasha fandom).

So, needless to say, my initial impressions of fanfiction as a medium were not good. I ended up doing what most people on the internet seem to have done; pushing fanfiction off to a healthy distance, turning around, and walking away while only rarely throwing a few curious glances backwards. That few times I have looked back, I've rarely found anything capable of making me want to explore the medium further; in fact, fanfiction writers seem to have added "what if I took this fun series and stripped away all the things that make it fun?" to that list of "possibilities" it enjoys exploring.

And now I'm writing my own fanfiction, and for one of those series I used to do most of my stupid childhood daydreaming for to boot; Redwall.

Why? Well, I already wrote a blog entry all about why ("Why Would You Do That?" ), but basically the main points were that I want to teach myself the basics of storytelling in a familiar setting where most of the world-building work has already been done for me, and because I just really like Redwall and want to try to write the best story possible in that setting. I don't expect many people to bother looking at it, and I absolutely get why; most fanfiction is awful. The entire medium is a massive minefield of poor grammar and self-insert wish fulfillment nonsense, so I'm writing The Krimson Traitor more for my own benefit than for the benefit of any sort of audience, because there probably isn't going to be an audience.

And, of course, at the same time as I'm working on my fanfic, I'm developing my original settings and putting out original short stories in those settings; things which I can see gaining an audience. Then, once The Krimson Traitor is done and over, I can use the experience I gained writing it to start up work on an original novel, and, whether The Krimson Traitor ever gains an audience, that original novel will be all the better for all the lessons I learned writing my fanfiction. That's the plan, anyway.

And, in case you're wondering, no; the plot of The Krimson Traitor isn't inspired at all by my childhood daydreaming. My daydreaming was mostly about this female albino rat (whose name escapes me now, but it was probably something pretty ridiculous). No, The Krimson Traitor is, like, about this... Silver fox, whose name is Nihil... Dammit!