Fan fiction and You.

[Farseer]

Ah, another aspiring writer. Be sure to let us know of any progress, I'll be sure to read it if you manage to get it published. (Btw, this is not meant as a slight towards your writing abilities - getting published is very hard. Even a book like Harry Potter has been rejected multiple times.)

I have a few things in the works but the one that niggles most is that which I spoke about in my previous post. I have written it in both third and first person (I'm thinking that first person works best for what I'm trying to do with it) but am still trying to work out a few other things. My target audience is young women in their teens who either don't particularly like to read or who can't manage anything too complex. Sadly, this happens to be most of the young women I know. This being the case, it will be as unlike Harry Potter as is possible to get and most likely never published!!

It is very personal but, in this, I am following the old writing advice of "write what you know". I don't know anything better than my own life so I thought it was as good a place as any to begin, and I think I have an important story to tell...despite the hazards of sometimes heading along that road.

To be honest, the writing of it is more for me than an audience (therapy? ). That is not the case for the other projects though, one of which is a picture book that I have written and am now working on the illustrations for (not because I am talented in the area of art but because I'm an independent, pig-headed perfectionist who couldn't stand having someone else do it for me!). Everything I've done so far is utterly 'Australian', be it historical or modern...again, I'm going with what I know.

Nothing of what I do is a priority but I am more than a little aware of Robin's advice that we should write 'now', not later, because we may lose the story we should have written now or even 'back then', or the story we tell now will be different to one we may have told when we were younger. We change and thus our perspective or the slant of our storytelling style changes...

Not for one second am I confident enough in either myself or my writing to believe that I could ever be published but I have written a few successful and even "award-winning" things here and there (nothing major so not worth bragging about!), and so I'd like to find out if that success can possibly slide over into the world of fiction. If I want it enough, I guess I will continue to work at it.

As for the therapy theory... this might be true in some cases, but scratch "apparently" - I am 99% positive that the story is meant to be arousing.

Given the few cases I have stumbled upon in search for other things, I can't help but agree here.

Of course, disliking fan fiction does not mean that it is all badly written either. Some, or even most, of it may be very well written from a writing viewpoint. As danieladamsmith has said though, far better for such creative talent to be put toward an original work or even a "retread" (such a perfect word! ).

I couldn't stand the Beatles, the Stones OR David Bowie, so I am sure I would much rather listen to your orginal stuff any day, danieladamsmith!