Fanfiction

I ran into someone recently who talked passionately about all the fanfiction he wrote.  This, in his opinion, was proof that he was a great writer.  I don’t think he took it well when I told him that I thought he was fooling himself, and no one was going to take his fanfiction seriously.

Look, I get it – we love diving back into our favorite stories to see them exist in situations we would like to see, but there’s something mind-numbingly lazy about expanding on someone else’s work.  After all, we didn’t create that universe; all we did was take a ride around it.  The characters are already established and most readers know how the rules work.  So long as you can find fans of the original work, and your writing isn’t just God-awful, you can get people to read it.  It takes almost no real effort to find an audience, because you aren’t creating anything new you have to sell to others.

This is one of my great gripes with all of the expanded universe stuff in everything from Star Wars to Star Trek.  Yes, there are a few gems – like Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire trilogy – but most are simply relying on your nostalgia to draw you in.  By using the same characters just in different situations based off of a universe the author didn’t create, the writer is tacitly admitting he or she isn’t creative enough to develop anything new.

Sure, I realize this may be an unpopular opinion with the writing world, but this dearth of creativity is hurting the entire reading world.  We’re seeing remakes and rewrites of classics, and some authors are just leeching off of name recognition to put out books that couldn’t sell unless the original author was famous.  Yes, there will be some stinkers when folks come up with new ideas and stories – there always are – but we always have to sift through garbage for good stuff.  Does anyone think that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was the only new idea in 1997?  Or that CharlaineHarris’ Dead in the Family didn’t have to compete with truckloads of garbage?

To me, writing fanfiction is a sign of insecurity, as if you’re so unsure about your own imagination that you have to try and borrow someone else’s.  Let us what’s in your imagination.  If you never use it, how will anyone know you have one?