Like garage bands, not everything is great. Some of it is truly terrible. Some of the fanfiction your kid writes might be terrible. It doesn’t matter.
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In creative writing classes, students are told to write about what they know, while at the same time, fanfiction is often strongly discouraged because it is not considered “real writing.” This is a great way to confuse kids.
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Fanfiction – the practice of writing stories featuring familiar characters from books, comics, television, or movies – is nothing new. Retelling stories predates the tradition of bard-telling, passing on news from town to town. Even today, you can find dozens of books and movies based on Cinderella with a shoe in your shoe.
The subtle difference is that most fanfiction picks up a story after it has ended, or takes the characters into imaginative “what if” worlds. Fanfiction was once confined to photocopied fanzines or passed around among friends, but it experienced a renaissance in the early 1990s with greater access to the Internet. Suddenly, stories could be easily shared via mailing lists and BBSes. Communities dedicated to fandoms like Star Trek and The X-Files sprang up.
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Browsing the fanfiction platform Archive of Our Own, one gets the impression that the world of Harry Potter is currently the most described. But the universes of Marvel and Star Wars, the television series Supernatural and the anime series My Hero Academia also offer tens of thousands of stories to browse through.
For many years, fanfiction had a bad reputation, considered low-brow literary piracy. It was the embarrassing cousin of geek culture, full of plot holes, childish fantasies, and shallow archetypes. But writers—and the subfandoms they created—got something out of it. They got to immerse themselves in the stories they loved. They got community. They got recognition, which sometimes led to growth and significantly improved writing skills. The best rose to the top.
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The rumor that Twilight’s glittery vampire saga began as fan fiction has been debunked, but the genesis of the Fifty Shades of Grey books was Twilight fan fiction. According to Business Insider, Twilight became the inspiration for several other published novels.
The writers don’t copy, they emulate. They are the garage bands of the literary world. And like garage bands, they’re not all great. Some are truly terrible. Some of the fanfiction your kid will write might be terrible. It doesn’t matter.
They learn language and storytelling from a world they are passionate about. They share it with their friends. If you’re lucky, they share it with you. They hold on to their fantasy worlds a little longer. There aren’t many downsides.
As with anything that exists on the internet, guardians should be aware of what their children are reading. Websites that host fan fiction categorize the stories in many ways, including labeling them as adult content. You may not want your child to read stories inspired by Fifty Shades. When teens submit work, families should make sure their privacy is protected and talk about what kind of feedback they might receive from strangers.
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