Fan-fiction has not been on my map for very long. It only came to my attention a few years ago.

One of my friends reached into my overnight bag at a sleepover and found a notebook in which I had written a story about what would happen in the final Harry Potter novel (as it was coming out that summer) and was over the moon with degrading comments.

“You don’t really think this stuff is going to happen do you?” she asked. As if my ideas and theories about a fantasy story were too “out there”.

Her sister, who came in a moment before, told her to calm down. “She’s just writing fan-fiction,” she told her younger sibling.

After the sleepover had ended, I went home to research this thing called “fan-fiction” and I found myself enthralled in so many fandoms that I had no idea anyone else even liked. I developed a new vocabulary of fan terms like “cannon”, “shipping”, and “OTP”. But I never really read it for enjoyment. The most common fan-fiction stories were of Harry Potter and, though I wrote it, I never wanted to read something unless it was by J.K. herself.

Years later, in college, I was in a Genre writing workshop class lead by one of my favorite professors. I learned very quickly that the class was actually about fan-fiction. This made a lot of my classmates very angry. Not a lot of people enjoyed fan-fiction. And I can understand why.

The bottom line is that there were so many people around me that felt that fan-fiction writing wasn’t real writing. If you can’t come up with your own characters and your real worlds, then you’re just not a good enough writer to design it yourself.

I wouldn’t say that they’re wrong exactly. I think it’s an important skill of any writer to be able to imagine worlds and write believable characters that people will connect with and care about.

But does that make fan-fiction a useless art?

I say no. I think fan-fiction is both useful and fun. I used to believe that fan-fiction was just a creative outlet in order to get more about the characters we love, even though the scenarios would never happen. But it’s so much more than that.

As it turns out, I found myself looking at fan-fiction this summer. My favorite show, Once Upon A Time ended on an unsatisfying note. The fandom went crazy wondering what would happen next and how the new group of villains would work to fuck up the perfect little world that we want our favorite characters to stay in.

But that never happens. So fan-fiction gave fans a more immersive way to discuss and flesh out theories about the next season during the four months we wouldn’t be able to watch the show progress. There were hundreds of ideas and stories about the next season that I could read. And every idea was better than the last.

Along with fan theory, fan-fiction is a way to practice several different points of writing. Character development and world building is important, but what about character relationships? What about plot furthering? What about dealing with trauma, action, and everything that happens within a work of literature? Fan-fiction is a tool where you can practice these points without worrying about building new characters and a new world for them to live in.

Fan-fiction is not my favorite reading material, it never will be. But it helps so many writers get started on their journey to creating their own work. And it makes sure that fandoms may never truly die.

So all hail the disclaimer, and keep stealing those characters.