This is a bit of an odd chapter, but I've always been the type to throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks. Most of us have heard the word fan fiction, but unless you're part of the fan fiction community, you probably know very little about it. This chapter introduces you to the idea of a fan fiction, if it's something you've heard in passing but are not particularly familiar with.

Most of my stuff is written on the idea that you're writing an original fiction. I will state right now that I am NOT a fan fiction writer. I don't really see the point in fan fiction when you can create something unique and original. However, I also know that fans are fans for a reason, and fan fiction is a way they express their fandom. There are also many benefits to fan fiction that may not seem apparent to original work authors.

So let's start at the beginning...

Before I go into how to write it, I suppose it's a good time to point out what fan fiction is. Simply put, fan fiction is any work of fiction written with the express purpose of displaying an already existing identity or intellectual property. Since fan fiction almost always displays copyrighted content, it is usually free and would be considered quite illegal to sell.

However, don't let fan fiction confuse you with homages, satires, parodies, metaphors, or similarities. Just because you possess a character that is supposed to be someone else's intellectual property does not mean you're creating a fan fiction. For it to be a fan fiction, the fiction A) needs to infringe upon the intellectual property and B) be about the contents of the intellectual property.

Fan fiction works because fan fiction cashes in on the fandom around the source material. You attract readers that you might not have attracted otherwise. Many authors on here will sometimes get angry at the idea that a One Direction fan fiction explodes in popularity with millions of reads after being typed on a cellphone, while some clearly QC'd original work is otherwise ignored. They'll complain about the injustice in the world. They'll complain about how society is getting dumber or how intellectuality is dead.

In truth, a One direction writing isn't good because of the writing, but because of the one direction (although being well written certainly wouldn't hurt either). It's the fans coming to the site looking to read something involving their fan crushes, and they found what they wanted to find. They never would have been interested in YOUR romance story, because they were drawn by their love of One Direction. That One Direction story is popular because One Direction was popular.

This is the advantage of a lot of fan fiction. It brings in an audience. I've experienced this first hand. I've started translating a novel written in Japanese. It's not my original work. It's essentially a fan translation. Because this story is popular, people come to read it. I have over 1 million views on my wordpress because of that translation. That's far more than I'd ever receive from my own original works. In essence, I'm borrowing the popularity of that novel written by someone else in order to bring attention to my own works. That is the power of fan fiction. The more popular the subject you write fan fiction off of, the more of an audience you can expect...

This often takes one of three different forms.

Celebrity Fan Fiction, World Fiction, and Plot Fan Fiction.

This isn't an official division of fan fiction, by the way, merely a division I'm making up on the spot from person experience. A "celebrity" fan fiction usually creates a unique story, but inserts a person into the story. Yes, a person is an intellectual property. 5 Seconds of Summer is an IP (Intellectual property), yes... but so is Luke Hemmings. Luke Hemmings (or at least his studio) owns his own likeness. They can sell Luke Hemmings shaped dolls if they wanted to. You can't.

You can't put Luke Hemmings into a work of fiction you want to sell without the expressed permission of Luke Hemmings and/or his studio. He's an IP. He's copyrighted. However, Fan fiction is not something you're selling. By inserting Luke into your story, you don't have any plans to profit off of it. That's where you can write a celebrity fan fiction.

These take a lot of different forms. Maybe it's a story about a self-insert protagonist having a relationship with one of the guys from a band. Maybe it's a story about the celebrities being entered into a death match. I don't know. The point is, you're inserting a character into your story. Now if you inserted a character called Luke Hyemmin from 2 seconds of Winter, it's now an original work. You're creating a likeness, but not taking his exact form.

If you attempted to write that story and then make money off it, would Luke be able to sue you? That's a tough question, on for the courts to decide. How much are you making Luke in your story like Luke from 5SoS? How much money did you make from this story? How much was he in the story? It would definitely be something that would go to the courts. You'd have to prove you weren't stealing Luke Hemmings intellectual identity. However, likenesses are protected under fair use, as long as you're using that likeness for parody, satire, commentary, or the like.

As I stated before, creating a fan fiction with your favorite celebrities in it will mean that anyone who is a fan of that celebrity may stop in and read your story. You won't need to describe what your character looks like and probably not their personality either. People who are a fan of the celebrity of choice will already know what they look like.

Please note that a celebrity fan fiction is not the same thing as casting. Some Wattpad books will "cast" the characters based on actors. They'll write their story expecting certain actors to fulfill certain parts, and ignore character descriptions in lui of expecting you to imagine the characters they presented as fulfilling those talking rolls. Script writers certainly often write scripts with certain characters in mind. However, to be a celebrity fan fiction, you have to take it a step farther. For example, you can cast Channing Tatum as bad boy love interest Rex Marter, which is just a casting... or you can have Channing Tatum literally in your story, who is your bad boy love interest, and happens to call himself Rex Marter. It's a slight difference, but that distinction can be important.

And despite calling it "celebrity" fan fiction, the person you insert doesn't have to be a celebrity... or even real. You could write a celebrity fiction where you go on an adventure with Harry Potter. Harry Potter doesn't have to be in his Voldemort Universe. You can write a story where he attends your high school, or where he gets teleported to the land of Tolkien (Middle Earth). That one would combine a celebrity fiction with a world fan fiction. Speaking of which...

Sometimes, you want to create your own story, and your own characters, but you want to base them in an already established and existing world. Why does every adventure to Middle-Earth mean I need to encounter Gandolf? Maybe I want to write a story about a couple of dwarves far removed from the quest for the one ring.

By creating fiction in someone else's fictional world, an author doesn't have to waste tons of time focusing on backstory and word building. The world and locations have already been built. In some ways, you gain the opportunity to add to the world someone else built.

However, by very nature, fan fiction is Not canon. That's to say, anything that happens to your story is not something official. However, it can be fun to imagine this world through the point of view of other people. Maybe it'd be nice to see the world of Harry Potter through someone who wasn't the chosen one?

World fan fictions by themselves usually involve keeping the plot intact. This happens either before or after the plot of the story that the fan fiction is being based on. Hogwarts before Harry got there. Twilight after the show down between the Cullens and the Volturi. The story may have still happened, but it's not necessarily part of the narrative.

However, you can also write world fan fiction so that things didn't occur in the way they occur in the original story. A lot of these would include mash ups. World fan fictions can be mashed with celebrity and plot fan fictions. Some people will want to swap or change out characters. Consider the world of Harry Potter, except that instead of Dumbledorf, you have Gandolf. Maybe there is a world where instead of Harry Potter being the chosen one, you have Neville Longbottom. In all of these stories, the plot is being rewritten by swapping either the characters or the settings.

However, many fans are fans for the very particulars of the story... in that case you get...

A plot fan fiction usually follows the same characters from the original source material. They're usually in the same environment, and the plot remains intact. These would be the sequels and the prequels. These stories would often assume that the source material happens exactly as it's explained in the original works, and it's their job to fill in from there.

Some plot fan fictions might just tell you what happens next as a sequel. Some might fill in plot holes. Others might explain inconsistencies or back stories. The point of most plot fan fictions is to fill out all of the information from source material in order to flesh out the story that people loved.

Like I explained above, plot can be mashed up with world and celebrity fan fictions. You can rewrite a story as it happened, with another character. Perhaps it's a story where you self-insert into the story. What would happen if you were present? Maybe it's someone else. How would Harry Potters story differ if Percy Jackson was his best friend instead of Ron?

So, a plot can either be kept intact, filling in the side information, or a plot can be rewritten, changing characters or setting in order to see the characters you love reacting in a different way.

These three can be combined in any number of ways, using 2 or more different source materials if that's what the author wants. Hopefully, keeping in mind the kind of fan fiction you want to pull together will help someone write it. And, if you're interested in reading fan fictions, understand the ways they can differ is also important.

Styles, Points of View, focus can all change from fan fiction to fan fiction. Even two fan fictions telling the same plot from two different authors can have radically different stories based on how the authors write. Like I mentioned in my break down of storytelling, one might focus on action, another might focus on banter, a third might focus on description. Based on your tastes, that means there will be fan fiction you love, and fan fiction you hate.

If you absolutely love the source material, though, then any story that sets to include that material already gains the benefit of being interesting. So, for those of you that have no interest in fan fiction, keep that in mind. Fan fiction already has a fan base. It's the fans of the source material that are looking for more. Don't feel bad your original fiction doesn't have the popularity of a fan fiction. The fan fiction has the weight of all the fans of that story. Which can be great, or limiting, depending on the kind of author you want to be.

This is the ultimate benefit of a fan fiction writer. You don't have to come up with background. When you refer to a character, people already know what that character looks like, you don't have to waste tons of time describing them, or their personality. You don't have to worry about characterization. These characters either already went through a story arc, or will go through one, so they have developed and existing personalities. You don't have to build a three-dimensional character, because presumably the source material already did.

You can say the same with setting. When I say that someone was walking through Hogwarts, you don't need extensive descriptions since you already have a good idea on what Hogwarts looks like. This allows a fan fiction writer to focus on the story, which can be a pretty powerful thing for keeping things interesting and moving forward.

I will add that the two paragraphs above have bothered a couple of fan fiction authors, who feel that by saying you can use preexisting information, I'm implying fan fiction is "easier" than original works and am thus looking down on it. To clarify, yes, you still need descriptions in writing, and fan fiction isn't a get out of work free card. Yes, it can sometimes be even more difficult to make sure the characters act and look like their IP counterpart in order to have a fan fiction anyone would find interesting.

However, I still feel that one of the best benefits of fanfiction writing (whether you choose to use it or not) is the fact that the characters have already been set up and have likely gone through various character arcs. The settings, should you choose the use them, have already been described in detail and repeating it at that same level of detail would just be redundant.

Let's try another example. Why is Avengers a good move? Why was it such a box office triumph? What about the new one, Infinity War? They are such massive, glorious movies because of the movies preceding them. The Marvel Universe was set up in movie after movie after movie, so when you got to the Avengers, we already knew who they were. Yeah, everyone got an introduction, but the story moved forward with the assumption you already had all that rich background and character development. To me, that's part of the power of fan fiction. You can write the more epic stories, you make the awesome team ups, because the groundwork has already been laid. This isn't to look down on fan fiction, this is to push people to excel beyond it.

And of course, fans of the series will be attracted to your story, so there is the potential for a story to get readers by pig-backing of the of the popularity of the source material, but of course, that only works when you pick a source material with a very large fan base. Pick something obscure, and you may end up bottlenecking your fan base to only people familiar with your source. But if you're a fan, that sometimes doesn't matter. If I want to read fan fiction about One Punch Man, I'll look for that, and if you're only one of three people on this site to write a One Punch Man fan fiction, then your story has a very high change of being read by me. And if you're the writer, likely you're already a fan... and you didn't write the story just for other people, but yourself as well, so having a ton of readers may not be important to you. That's the power of fan fiction... it's about the fans.

Anyway, hopefully a breakdown helps you grasp this fairly large group of fan fiction writers a little bit better. Good Luck and Happy Writing!