So... fanfics!

[Steve]

Given Chuck occasionally references fanfic writers (and is one himself... note to self: I really need to read "Unity" one day...), I figured I'd start a thread to see if anyone here partakes in reading and/or writing fics. Do you have preferences if you do? Canon-compliant fics? AU fics? Fics that explore time periods only seen in references or fluff? Crossover fics? (Crossover fics are my thing, I'll admit.)

There are also things like shipfics and hurt/comfort fics, but they're not my thing, so I won't bring them up.

Anyone who knows me from Spacebattles or Stardestroyer.net knows I'm a fairly prolific fic-writer, so I'll abstain from mentioning my work until some other people comment upon the subject.

[The Romulan Republic]

I've written several (thus far incomplete) fanfics over on the Stardestroyer.net forums. I'm mainly a crossover fic fan- there is so much potential in crossing over two or more series, in terms of the contrasts, parallels, and how they play off each other. But then, my primary introduction to the world of fan fic was via the Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate.

I also find that fan films tend to have a higher ratio of quality to shit than written fan fic, I suspect because the time, cost, and effort that goes into making a film weeds out a lot of the lazy and/or incompetent writers, and those who are just interested in writing cheap porn or pushing their personal ax to grind.

I generally dislike:

-Shipping fics, particularly non-canon shipping, because a) very few writers handle the subject matter well, and b) the shipping usually takes over, at the expense of other elements of the story.

-Character-bashing/whitewashing fics. Just lazy, ham-fisted writing. Goes for any time the author uses someone else's setting to push an obvious agenda of there's/ax to grind.

-Authors using characters as mouthpieces for their personal views (see above).

-Authors who change a major element of canon without an explanation for it in-story. Particularly if they try to hand wave it with some variant of "Its fan fic, so I can do whatever I want", and/or treat their change as if it is part of canon. Writing fan fic does not mean you get a pass on misrepresenting other peoples' work, or on being a lazy hack who ignores continuity.

Edit: Although in all honesty, I'm probably rather guilty of these mistakes myself, at times.

[King of the owls]

I sometimes dabble in fan fic writing. I rarely finish them or publish them because of my schedule but I have fun writing them.

When to comes reading fanfics as long the writing is good or the characters are well thought out/in characters.(Or a decent portrayal of how that character would be in a AU setting.) or the plot interests me then I'll give it a chance. I do tend to gravitate towards m/m ship fics since well I am gay man and sometimes slash fanfic is the best place to find decent male/male romance.(Not all the time of course but still.)

[MissKittyFantastico]

I started out with Warhammer 40k writing backgrounds for my armies, but I was young so they were dreadful (although there was one I did for Nano one year that I'm still kind of fond of, a first-person life story of a Sister of Battle).

A few years after losing interest in 40k I kind of stumbled sideways into Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic (prompted by Amber Benson singing Touch-a Touch Me at a Rocky Horror event, I ended up throwing together a whole Sunnydale Rocky Horror thing - funnily enough, Tara wound up not doing that song; also, lyrics are difficult, mine were not good), then - I forget why - after posting that to a Willow/Tara Yahoo fanfic group, and reading several others, I suddenly though '...so what if Tara's a nightclub singer in 1930s New York, and Willow is The Shadow?' I'd followed (but never wrote) Xena fanfic prior to that which gave me the notion of Uberfic as a defined 'genre', and since I'd really never found canon Sunnydale a very interesting setting to begin with, and just wanted more Tara, that was a good fit. So the next few years were a series of 'Here's a movie or tv series or video game I like, but wouldn't it be better with Tara in it? Yes it would, and here's how it would go...' I also got involved with a collaborative project to make a sequel series to Buffy, called 'Watchers' - initially to help with photoshopped images for the episodes/stories, but I ended up dipping into writing as well during the two years I was doing that. (Unfortunately, at the time I had an ageing CRT monitor, so looking back on what I thought were pretty decent images at the time, man did I get the contrast levels wrong between elements because my screen was dark and I couldn't tell the difference.)

I flatter myself that my writing got better as I went along (I mean, it had to be better than the 40k days) so I don't mind sharing that I made a website for Willow/Tara uberfics - mine and others - and it's still here. I took a few years off due to real life derailing a lot of things, but last year got back to the 'Tara is She-Ra' series, like so (that's where my avatar comes from), and since then I've been writing various short stories whenever the mood takes me, or there's a holiday (ghost story for Halloween, Tara cosplays as Samara for N7 Day, that kind of thing; gotta think of something for Christmas). The Willow/Tara scene is understandably quiet these days, but back in the day I spent most of the time I wasn't writing keeping up with all the other uberfics doing the rounds.

Speaking of N7, during my 'hiatus' I did spend a couple of years doing forum roleplay in the Mass Effect setting (Cerberus Daily News, if you're curious), which I suppose is basically collaborative Original Character fanfic. That encouraged a trend I'd developed during some of my longer Willow/Tara fics (primarily 'Hellebore') of exploring all sorts of random details of the setting just for their own sake; ended up making up so much extra background for my character I made a wiki just to keep it all handy for reference. I still add to it now and then, even though I'm done roleplaying - just throwing in random mostly-asari-related ideas for fun's sake. I've never read much Mass Effect fanfic though, of any sort - if we're being honest, I'm not that interested in stories about the game's characters (I mean, I know their story, I 'wrote' it when I played it), and so far as CDN went I had this notion that reading other people's threads about what their characters were up to with each other in private would constitute OOC knowledge, so I tended not to read them on the basis that Daia (my asari) wouldn't know about those events.

[Darth Wedgius]

When it comes to reading fanfics, it doesn't matter to me that they're non-canon, or even contradicted by later seasons of a show. As a famous philosopher once said, "Hey, none of this stuff ever really happened." Staying true to the characters matters to me, and one of the stories I inflicted on the world was from seeing one too many "Character XXX turns out to have been evil all along" stories.

I've written a few, mostly to get useful criticism to improve my writing skills, but I didn't get much of that and, when I noticed I wasn't improving, the writing bug more or less went away. I don't regret writing them, but there just wasn't much drive to continue on as "not bad" indefinitely

The fanfic writing I do nowadays is liable to stay in my head. There's parts of a Star Trek story in there that I might write someday (what I'd hoped STD would be more like), but it works best as a series of stories (overarching story, secrets revealed, character development, etc.), and I don't yet have enough actual story for most of them.

[SlackerinDeNile]

I too am not a fan of shipping fics, just not my kind of thing really. Nothing wrong with them or anyone who likes them, I'm just not a romantic.
HOWEVER, I don't mind fan-fics that are centered around a fan-preferred relationship if they involve a good story and character interactions, for example some of the many Garak\Bashir stories are incredibly interesting, despite the obvious homo-eroticism that might put a lot of people off.

I enjoy fanfics with a lot of thought, depth and imagination put into them, particularly ones that expand on situations and eras discussed in a particular universe but never truly elaborated on. For example, I read a very engaging one that covered the entirety of the Dilgar war in the Babylon 5 universe.

I enjoy some bad fanfics in a guilty pleasure sort of way, as most of you probably do, such as ones where the writer is unaware of the absurdity of the scenarios they are writing about or the immaturity and\or stupidity of their characters. Fan-fics for F.E.A.R, League of Legends, Halo and many other video games are great for this.

As for crossover fics, they're just like any other fan-fic to me, they can be good, bad, or so bad it's good. I find it lazy and generic when a writer creates a crossover fic where all the characters do is discuss or argue over the aspects of their respective universes, what's the point? At least have an interesting scenario for them to team up or fight over.

[PlasmaHam]

Never written fanfic before, I am a good writer, but I am simply not creative enough to put anything compelling together. Plus with the general constraints of work and college, I don't have much time to dedicate to it. I'll put together small things in my spare time, but purely for my own purposes of practice, nothing worth publishing.

I generally read crossover fanfic. It's just more interesting to me, seeing characters and environments interact that you will never see done outside of the rare crossover novel or comic. StarCrossed, an unfortunately never completed ST/SW crossover, is one of my favorite of the genre, and fanfics in general. Though personally, when it comes to crossovers I don't like it when the author pulls the "They've always existed in the same continuity, you just never knew before now!" trick. Just seems to cheapen the actual crossover via lazy retcon, especially when it doesn't make much sense given accepted canon for one or both of the crossing sides.

I'll read other fanfics as well and enjoyed them, though I generally avoid shipping ones. All that I've read or glanced over have been rather pathetic, and even if there are some legitimately good shipping fics, I'm just not interested in the genre.

[PerrySimm]

There's some really good stories out there from folks that take the work seriously. For settings like Voyager and Enterprise, literally any level of effort is more than what happened on the actual show! Good fanfic really puts the lie to the claim the "original" author has some kind of monopoly on storytelling.

[Steve]

Well, it's been a week, so I'll speak about my experience. Specifically, I love crossovers because I love the idea of exploring how the characters might react to these sorts of situations. Additionally, I like to explore the nuts and bolts of how merging these settings in some way might work. Most of my stuff has been about interuniversal travel being possible, and with it the formation of an "Multiversal" community of states and nations and species, etc. What I mean is showing things like, oh, a science conference on Vulcan that includes attending scientists from, say, the Asari or the Minbari. Or how the Federation and the InterStellar Alliance might co-exist, or how they'd interact with the Citadel species of Mass Effect. Would Ferengi merchants or the Orion Syndicate or the Brakiri flout the Citadel Council and trade with the Batarians? Imagine things like how the Klingons might influence the Krogan or vice versa, or how they would view each other. How would the Asgard or the Goa'uld react to these societies (and vice versa)? What would happen if the Doctor met Q, or the SG-1 teams encountered Lorien?

That I often add original creations to these multiverses is to further increase the possibilities. While you can run the risk of making OCs feel like Marty Stus/Mary Sues if you make established characters too friendly/admiring of them, it gives a chance to explore these characters from a unique perspective.

I'm currently writing one such "Multiverse" setting right now, a reboot of a fic called "Undiscovered Frontier" I did when I was a teenager, although unlike some of my prior efforts (the TGG Multiverse being known on Spacebattles and SDN, for one) the "nUF" stories are meant to invoke a TV space opera feel, with the stories organized into seasons and episodes instead of novels and chapters and such, and the action being generally centered around a Cool Ship and the crew running it, with a myth arc and character arcs in the style of my favorite SF shows Babylon-5 and Deep Space Nine. Although seeing the episodes' word counts go up and up as I work my way through the series is getting a little scary...

[The Romulan Republic]

There's some really good stories out there from folks that take the work seriously. For settings like Voyager and Enterprise, literally any level of effort is more than what happened on the actual show! Good fanfic really puts the lie to the claim the "original" author has some kind of monopoly on storytelling.

I generally try to respect the original canon, unless its something I find blatantly offensive, or self-contradictory. And even then, I'd potentially prefer a good retcon/alternate interpretation to outright ignoring/contradicting it. I will often disregard a large EU or similar expanded universe, though, for the sake of practicality. For example, in writing a Star Wars fic, I'll generally take the view that films and maybe TV shows are canon, everything else is take it or leave it as it suites my story. Though a lot of that is just me being lazy about research.

Of course, when writing a crossover (which is what I usually prefer) or an alt. universe story, things will generally change. However, it pisses me off to no end when writers cherry-pick what they're going to change randomly, or to fit a particular agenda/ship/ax-to grind. Especially if its to use someone else's characters/settings as mouthpieces for their views, especially if they falsely present such changes as if they are consistent with/part of the original canon, and especially if they try to excuse inconsistencies with some variant of "Its fanfic, so I can do whatever I want."

That's lazy, insulting, and dishonest.

Their are... different ways to handle an alternate universe fic, but the key is to have any changes flow logically from one another, and be consistent with those aspects of the setting that remain the same. To simplify things, I tend to prefer having a single point of divergence, some minor little thing that changes, and then explore what follows from that change. I tend to prefer "This is the starting point, now where does it lead", as opposed to "This is what I want the end point to be, now I do I justify it." Mostly, I suspect, because I've seen far too many awful, contrived shipping fics which did the latter, twisting everything horrifically in order to justify the ship.

Of course, probably everyone has a story they want to tell, an end point in mind. Me too. They key, though, is to establish a plausible/interesting starting point, and then try to work as much as possible from the premise forward, rather than from the end point back. This may require you to adjust or abandon early preconceptions. Such is the price of writing consistently.