On Fanfiction

Last week, courtesy of Facebook, I learned about a fanfic called My Immortal. It is widely, and rightly, regarded as being among the worst fanfics ever written. For a couple of hours, a friend and I regaled ourselves reading through it, laughing, reading especially heinous passages aloud, and generally celebrating our superior intellect. While I'm not anywhere near to endorsing either My Immortal as good writing, I am going to take a moment to build a mild case for why I was too hard on it and why we can't simply write off all bad writing as being without value. If nothing else, we need to acknowledge the value that it has, or at least ought to have, for the author.

Like many young nerds with an active online life, I tried my hand at writing a fanfic when I was in high school. And like many young fanfic authors, my story was a self-insertion. I could try to defend myself on the grounds that I was not making an effort to radically disrupt an existing canon or that my character avoided most of the teenage author Mary Sue pitfalls; but that doesn't change the fact that it was generally a poor story (no matter what the other members of the message board I posted it on said).

After a couple of hints and a lot of stalking, I recently found a similarly dreadful fanfic that a good friend wrote around the same time period. While I was gently teasing her about it, we came to the shared conclusion that neither of us really regretted writing these things. Why? Because we learned a lot about writing. We learned about persevering and finishing a story -- my story was 13 pages, hers a whopping 60. We learned the basics of how characters interact and how to build drama. And, in looking back, we learned how *not* to do a whole lot of things and a bit of valuable humility.

I have legitimate hope that the author of My Immortal eventually got over her angsty teenager-ness, kept writing, and uses the reaction to her (fortunately anonymous) early writing as motivation to improve. Writing is hard. I doubt that anybody can do it well without lots of practice; and for lots of people, working with an established, familiar setting is a nice crutch for flexing creative muscle and learning the basics of style and form. I may be mildly embarrassed by my character story, but no more so than I am of many of my old essays or even half of what I write on this blog; and I am in no way ashamed that I wrote it. In fact, I'm mostly ashamed that I haven't done more fiction writing since. If I were to somehow crank out another 13 page story, even if it were just as bad as that first one, I'd be damn proud of myself.

So, try not to be too hard on the poorly assembled day dreams of aspiring writers. We all need to start somewhere, and so long as you reach a point where you're willing to accept the flaws that exist in what you've made and learn from them, there is no shame in trying.

On a final note: no, I will not share my story with all of you. Near as I know, only two people outside the original community it was written for have read it; and I'm happy to keep it that way. If you know way too much about my message board junkie days, you might be able to track it down, but after some searching of my own, I can tell you that Google won't make it easy for you.