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angriest's posting Why Fanfic Makes Us Writers yet, because I'm still catching up on the postings which inspired it, as well as the responses.
Just one which caught my eye comes fromhoshikaze, who has quit fanfic for original work, and who comments: "You have that much more to plan out with original fiction." I've spent a decade ruefully learning this lesson.
But it's not the worldbuilding. When you write a Doctor Who novel, even with the series' inbuilt flexibility and the publishers' willingness to experiment, you already have a compelling mental picture of the plot and the characters' choices. You know instinctively how it's going to go. I wasted a lot of time - years, really - doing intricate worldbuilding, when what I needed to know was how to plot.
More generally: most fanfic is unreadable rubbish, but this is also true of most of the slushpile. Hence, derivativeness is not the problem. (IMHO, the problem is navel-gazing, whether on the part of fanfic communities or wannabe professionals.)
angriest's posting Why Fanfic Makes Us Writers yet, because I'm still catching up on the postings which inspired it, as well as the responses.Just one which caught my eye comes from
hoshikaze, who has quit fanfic for original work, and who comments: "You have that much more to plan out with original fiction." I've spent a decade ruefully learning this lesson.But it's not the worldbuilding. When you write a Doctor Who novel, even with the series' inbuilt flexibility and the publishers' willingness to experiment, you already have a compelling mental picture of the plot and the characters' choices. You know instinctively how it's going to go. I wasted a lot of time - years, really - doing intricate worldbuilding, when what I needed to know was how to plot.
More generally: most fanfic is unreadable rubbish, but this is also true of most of the slushpile. Hence, derivativeness is not the problem. (IMHO, the problem is navel-gazing, whether on the part of fanfic communities or wannabe professionals.)
