: Re: Fan Fiction: a crutch or a good start? Writing is writing, but I am not confident enough to take on creating a whole world from scratch. Will writing fanfic or writing in other shared world

@Nimeshi163

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Someone asked in reddit whether fan fiction can be "taken seriously". Here's what I said - much of the same points as others are saying:

Go ahead and try. Simplest advice I can give is just that.

But if you really want to get ahead with writing, go ahead and try some more stuff.

The only big problem with fan fiction that I've seen is that you're always in someone's shadow. Here's the Great Author, there's the Fan. And the Fan has to make a choice: Are they going to remain a Fan forever, or try becoming an equal to the Great Author. And the Great Authors are just fine with someone else becoming as famous and awesome as they are, but they're not cool with them doing that with their intellectual properties. Hence, fan works are likely doomed to obscurity. Fans tend to stay in their place, whether that's appropriate for them or not. In a more sane world, open universes would be the norm and fans would always be equal to other people writing stories based on those universes, but we're not living in such a world.

This isn't to say that writing for someone else's universe would be too bad in principle. It's just like writing things based on real world and history: it may need interesting research work to make your story fit with the rest of the established world.

And as far as trying stuff goes, designing worlds from scratch isn't very difficult - and can be quite rewarding.

And as far as not having confidence trying to design worlds from the scratch goes: The dirty secret of world design is that a) it's really not that difficult and b) it's almost criminally fun when you get started. And like characters, the milieu will just keep growing when you tell the tale - it's useless to design everything in advance.

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