How Not to Write - Training Creativity... Through Fan Fiction?

I am currently working on my fifth novel manuscript. I have a little grey book with notes for more than twenty other novels, some of which are bound to be series. I’m not even going to talk about short stories.

To an extent, ideas have become a pain in my ass. It’s tough to pick a new project, or stick to the current project, with so much fizzing around up there.

A Twitter colleague asked me recently:

— Nadine Avola (@NadineAvola) February 9, 2020

Giving me the perfect opportunity to self-aggrandise, so thank you, Nadine. And I asked myself, how did this start? Where did this come from?

I took a moment to think and I realised that the answer wasn’t what I expected.

Fan Fiction.

When I was younger, I wrote a lot of fan fiction. Reams and reams of fan fiction. I believe a ‘redundancy’ is the collective noun. My poison of choice was video games. Not just because there’s a lot in video games, but because there’s a lot missing. You play a game for hours and find out a decent amount about the universe and the player characters (usually), but others will leave a mark on you while only passing through. They are the ones who are ripe for fan fiction.

A lot of that early work was crap. Some of it was actually alright. Call it my apprenticeship in writing, before the thought of going pro had registered as plausible. I hope I got better, because it’d be pretty depressing to go backwards.

In a way, it was a long-term writing exercise. I tried to get all my dross out through writing fan fiction so that my professional work could really shine. What better way to do that than by writing something I loved?

Fan fiction isn’t popular with ‘real’ writers. I suspect it’s because you have to do it unpaid. I picked up some very important skills writing fan fiction and I’d like to share those, so that maybe you can find some value in this derided art form.

Skill #1: Research

Believe it or not, writing fan fiction requires research. If you want to set a story in an existing fictional universe, you need to know the universe. To write the characters, you need to know the characters. The good news is, once you’ve sorted out the broad strokes, what you make of the inferences is up to you!

But this means actually paying attention. Watch the movie. Read the book. Play the game. Take copious notes. Pepper your fiction with references to the source material. It’s how you make a story immersive, how you make a universe feel lived-in.

The same applies for original writing. Find out what your universe is, who your characters are, and research them. Build yourself a list of references to pepper your story with. Remember, you’re writing fan fiction of your own universe.

Skill #2: Assumed Knowledge

What’s the point in retreading old ground? No point in telling people things they already know. That’s why an important skill when writing fan fiction is to assume knowledge. Don’t recap the movie/book/game for the reader. They already know it. And they love it! That’s why they’re here.

The same is true for original novels. Your universe needs to feel organic, so you can’t explain how every little thing works. How often do you describe to yourself how your cell phone works while using it? Likewise, is your starship pilot going to explain to himself how his hyperdrive works in the course of switching the thing on? Probably not.

Assuming knowledge is a great way to draw people in. An unanswered question is a hook. Look at this exchange from Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Recently Appeared Villain: I’m Gabriel Roman.

Nathan Drake: Yeah, I know who you are, asshole.

Apparently Gabriel Roman: Manners, young man. This is just business.

Three lines that tell us so much. Nate and Roman have never been formally introduced. But Nate knows Roman and doesn’t have a high opinion of him. What kind of reputation does this guy have exactly? Where did Nate hear about him? We never find out. Likewise, Roman’s response reflects his entire outlook on the confrontation. But that assumed knowledge adds more depth to the universe than if Roman had sat Nate down and told him his life story (which there wasn’t time for anyway, because then the shooting started).

Skill #3: Searching for Show

Fan fiction is quite well-known for its abundance of ships. People love to write romance stories. The more implausible and tenuous the better. Believe it or not, there is a skill associated with this.

Fan fiction is wish-fulfilment. But good fan fiction is always grounded in the source material. Which means you need to find evidence to prop up your supposition. It never needs to be explicitly stated if you can find a detail that adds weight to your argument. And finding these details is good practice for learning how to show instead of tell.

Even the gentlest nudge can lead a reader in the right direction (or, at least, an interesting new direction), so looking for gentle nudges can help you get better at encoding them into your own work.

Skill #4: Character Consistency

This one gets a little awkward in fan fiction. People’s views of characters can be wildly different. But, as with Skill #3, keeping characters consistent is a simple matter of finding evidence in the source material.

A good method is to watch how a character behaves and make notes of their behaviour. What makes them angry? What makes them sad? What drives them? What are their flaws and their strengths? Open-ended games like Fallout are great practice for this because they put you in control of the character’s temperament and decisions. You get to decide what is ‘in-character’ for your character.

Try this. Take a character from your original story. Play them in a Fallout game. What do they do? Who are their friends? Their enemies? How do they react to things? This will help you build a behavioural framework to take back to your original work. Now you’ll know exactly what that character will do when a new situation arises. You might even learn something new about them along the way.

Skill #5: Stories are Everywhere

One thing you learn while writing fan fiction is that stories are everywhere. This goes double for video games. Every house in the zombie-infested city, every settlement in the nuclear wasteland, every poor soul come to raid the Darkest Dungeon, is a new story. The difference between games and every other type of media is that I can stand around soaking up details while I put that story together.

Fallout 3 is a great example of this, because the developers loaded the game with little stories. When you find an adult skeleton hugging a teddy bear in a child’s bedroom, that’s a writing prompt right there.

You can carry this mentality forward into original writing. Every book you read, movie you watch, game you play, think ‘what was missing?’ What interested you about it, but didn’t go far enough? Chances are, if you wanted to see more then so did someone else. And that’s the seed for something new and original right there.

Fan Fiction for Mindfulness

Ultimately, fan fiction is just a bit of fun. Its people writing about something they love. Something that has captured their imagination. Copyright law means they can’t make money on it, which is how you know it’s coming from a place of passion.

If you can colour in for mindfulness, if you can garden or sew, why not write fan fiction? You’ll probably never get it published, so go wild. Do what you want to do. Work on your writing skills in an environment without pressure. Hone your craft and have fun at the same time. I feel like it worked for me.

Also, I lied. I still write fan fiction. I’ll probably never stop.