Spring Flowers Of My Truth

I’m writing this article today because of this YouTube video: The Case For Fan Fiction

Since there are more authors coming forward in telling their reader base: ‘Yeah, I wrote fan fiction and it helped me learn how to write better.’…I feel strong enough mentally now to come forward to tell my piece. To allow my spring flowers to come up from the earth to see the light of day.

Fan fiction to me is an outlet to help jump start or a warming up period to writing something original. To get that feeling of the pen between my fingers. To feel the pen moving across the paper as words drip onto the page one by one. To make limber my fingers at the keyboard to type as smoothly or as awkwardly as possible. (With the joy in knowing the spell checker will always be there)

Writing fan fiction is a glorious way to practice, not just in the basic structure of sentences and word usage, but in the process that little is talked about – practice in remembering a whole story and the character(s) formations within. It takes a lot of work to flush out a whole story even if its based on someone else’s previous or current prose. Sometimes, but most often, getting your mind to wrap around the complexity of character development, plot and subplot structure and basic other story beats, there is a lot to hold onto. Writing fan fiction in the character types you loved such as, for example of my own works: 1980s My Little Pony, Dragonball Z and New Kids On The Block (Real Person Fiction), helped me understand the complexities of juggling all of these critical writing structure needs.

Learning what I watched and read of the above examples of cartoon, anime and real life people that I aspired to, I was able to flesh out fairly well constructed original stories. All the while keeping in mind the basic principals of what made those cartoon fictions and real life people who they are and what they became. Coming up with original characters is hard work, but there are times that writing fan fiction helps you understand the structure of a character(s). Fan fiction is just that important to us writers.

Now, here it is, more and more professional authors are coming out expressing that they got their start by writing fan fiction when they were teenagers. All of us writers also got our basic start in English classes and Creative Writing classes all throughout our early school years, some as far as college. However, when in between writing class assignments, spring break and summer break, what do we do? We write fan fiction to keep our skill in top shape. We keep writing no matter the subject manner as long as it is something we love and can mold to our own enjoyment.

As for my own fan fiction, I have a few, but two of them that I posted live, are made with a twist. My Fan Fiction (Mythian) “The Island”, it all came from dreams that I put together. I would wake up from the dream with a ‘…To Be Continued’ nearly each morning. I would pick up right where I left off in the dream. Finding at least thirty dreams that made up the whole of The Island, I didn’t start writing it down until 2005. The dream had kept itself hold up for so long, that I’m surprised I remembered it so perfectly to be written the way it was.

“The Nightmare” worked the same way. Dreamed it constantly every few days for a whole year. Psychologically I was trying to come to terms if being a New Kids fan was worth my time and effort. Later, wrote it down completely in 2005 or so to keep a record of its originality. Years later, I placed this into my third manuscript, but shortened it to fit my needs for that collection of characters.

On their own, The Island and The Nightmare would never do well by themselves. The way my mind constructed these dreams the only smart place for them was to weave them into my current novels. As for the My Little Pony and DragonBall Z fan fiction, they will stay right where they are and will never be changed to suit my original works. They were for warm up and practice and I love the time I put into them.

The importance of fan fiction writing can take you farther than you realize. The trick is, how do you weave your dreams into something original that will help you grow to go farther as a writer? That’s totally up to you.