March 9, 2025: Fan Fiction

I must admit that my opinion of fan fiction has recently undergone a slight shift.

I used to dismiss the genre with a shrug of my shoulders and a smirk. The purist in me did not believe that “real writers” should hijack the work of another writer. That building your story on the foundation of another author’s work was not real writing and bordered on plagiarism.  The fact that legal copyright issues prevent people from profiting through fan fiction, supports the position that this is not “real writing”.

However, through my work with our elementary student writing club, I have come to appreciate Fan Fiction in ways I did not anticipate.

Most weeks when our student writers come into my classroom after school, they grab a seat, eat their snack, open their laptop, and start working on whatever writing project is most pressing for them.  A few are working on pieces for a Spring Writing Contest, a couple are working on nonfiction articles about topics of interest to them, two are collaborating on a play, one is working on a letter to the editor of the local paper, and several are working on fan fiction pieces.

My fellow club sponsor and I assist wherever needed. Sometimes that might be reading and giving feedback, sometimes helping to brainstorm, or even answering a specific question about punctuating dialogue.

What I have noticed, is that the students working on fan fiction pieces need less support.  They ask for help less often. They seem stuck less frequently.  And their pieces are much more voluminous. Their stories are several chapters long and into the thousands in word count before they ever ask for feedback.

That is not to say that these stories are always of high quality. Sometimes they ramble, often they are choppy, or difficult to follow if you are unfamiliar with the original work.

However, I have come to appreciate the positives.

The positives for students working on a fan fiction piece:

-       The characters have already been developed and so the initial planning and preparation is not as challenging.  They know the characters’ back-stories, they are familiar with their personalities, preferences, and traits that will impact how they act in their story.

-       The story lines in the original piece give the student writer many choices and ideas for possible plots to the narrative they want to write. This seems to translate into fewer instances where they get stuck.

-       Most student writers who select to work on Fan Fiction do so because they LOVE the original work. That passion carries over and can be applied to their own writing.

-       Their writing fluency benefits!  While word count is not the ultimate goal, research tells us that writing fluency is an important part of growing as a writer. That “brain-dump”, or first-draft… getting it down on paper. Seeing the words, sentences, and paragraphs grow helps the confidence of these budding authors.

While Fan Fiction is certainly not my choice of genre, I will support and encourage any of my student writers who want to jump into it.