: Re: How to continue someone else's story gracefully, with fan-fiction? I've been juggling some ideas for NaNoWriMo and one of them is a Doctor Who story. Now I've not read a great deal of fan

@Lee1909368

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Keep in mind that Doctor Who is not written by one man. The list of screenwriters is actually very, very long: List of Doctor Who writers. You might argue that, to a certain degree, most of them actually wrote fan fiction, since they were not the original creators of the series, but fan fiction that became canon once the episodes were filmed and aired ;) Actually, both "new series" Doctor Who writers Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat wrote fan fiction about the time lord earlier in their careers, before they became the main writers for the series! And I bet they're not the only ones.

But the trick to writing good fan fiction is to get to know the characters and the world they belong to extremely well, and then staying true to them. Most bad fan fiction, aside from those that are bad simply because of poor writing, grammar and such, is bad because the characters are out of character. They do things that original characters would never do. In worst cases, it's a completely different character that only wears the original character's name. For the truly worst example of it, check out the Internet's worst fan fic: My Immortal rehost. So if, for example, you'd have the Doctor sleep around with every female he comes across, be sure you'd get flamed by Doctor Who fans, because chasing skirts is simply not something that the Doctor does. It's just not in his nature. A good fan fic, IMHO, is the one that stays true to the characters (plus, of course, that the story itself is well written).

If you do, however, really really want to have our favourite time lord turn into a skirt chaser, you'd have to give it a believable reason that is possible in the universe he is in. For example, he could become infected by a weird alien virus that makes him horny. Or he got hit on the head and forgot who he is - not very imaginative examples, I know, but it's not as important for the reason to be imaginative as it is important for it to be possible according to the rules of his world. Just as long as there is a reason. Having a character do something out of character out of the blue is a bad thing even for original fiction, and it's especially bad for fan fiction. There's nothing more irritating in fiction from an inconsistent character.

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