The human mind is truly limitless when it comes to creative potential. Whether it be through arts like painting and sculpting, telling stories through books and poems or visualizing dreams with movies and videos, we all have something creative in us that we want to share. As a writer I hold this belief above almost all others and I do the best I can to understand and help others to release their creativity through writing. There is one form of writing that I typically steer clear of though and that is surprisingly gaining more and more popularity. That would be Fan Fiction.

For those who may be unfamiliar, Fan Fiction is a "genre" of writing where writers take preexisting characters, plots or settings from other works of writing and essentially tell their own stories with these elements. The reason I put genre in quotations when talking about it is that for many writers it is a hotly debated topic if Fan Fiction should even be considered a proper genre.

Fan Fiction has not been around for a long time with the first real accounts of it appearing in the 60's and 70's when fans of television shows (particularly "Star Trek") would create their own magazine stories based on the shows characters and sell them at conventions. It was largely neglected for a long time as the only people who would ever encounter Fan Fiction works would be fans of whatever media was being fictionized. With the explosion of the internet, that has all changed though.

Fan Fiction has taken off at an extreme rate with hundreds of millions of people using free writing sites such as Wattpad and Fanfiction.net to bring their creations to the world and share them with not just fans, but readers in general. Fan Fiction stories rarely gain any real traction but with it now having the entire internet to grow, an advantage few other generes had, it is starting to gain notoriety.

Many popular Young Adult series actually started out as Fan Fictions, some good examples being "Fifty Shades of Gray" which was originally a "Twilight" Fanfiction and the "Mortal Instruments" which actually started as a Fanfiction inspired by a "Harry Potter" tumblr post. So why is this genre so heavily debated among writers? Well, to understand we have to look at the pros and cons of Fan Fiction.

The Pros

Fan Fiction can be pretty easy to write for young authors who are just getting started with their writing. I will admit that the first stories that I ever wrote as a kid and the ones that really got me into writing were "Jurassic Park" stories I would write with friends in the fourth grade. If little-dinosaur-obsessed-me had never tried to make his own awfully wrote short stories about the JP franchise, I would have never got into writing.

Another benefit of Fan Fiction for new writers is that writing Fan Fiction and posting it online guarantees that there will almost immediately be people who actually want to read your work since it is based on something that already has fans. Fanfic writers have fanbases when they haven't even published anything yet.

Yet another benefit that new writers gain from Fan Fiction is that it is easy to post on the internet since there are tons of free writing sites that welcome Fanfic writers such as Wattpad and Fanfiction.net. No other kind of writing has such great platforms to get started on and immediately get attention.

So it sounds like Fan Fiction is a great way for new writers to establish themselves and gain writing skills with little to no expenses. What's the harm in that? Well, the harm comes from the fact that the subject matter they are using is already a thing.

The Cons

Since Fan Fiction is based on original workers it will most likely never be legitimately published or used in anything. In fact, depending on the attitudes of the original writer you have borrowed ideas from, you can end up in huge copyright trouble for trying to publish Fan Fiction. This isn't the case with all writers of course. Many are entirely indifferent Fanfiction and almost never acknowledge it. Some like Star Wars actually encourage it and will even use Fan creations to add to their franchises through their Expanded Universe books. Most major authors though are entirely against Fan Fiction being published and will do everything in their legal power to ensure it does not get published.

This also leads into the other major problem most authors have with Fan Fiction. It's lazy and piggybacking. As Fan Fiction borrows elements from other works, one of the biggest arguments against it is that Fanfic writers barely have to write anything. The real work has already been done for them. This is unfortunately correct the majority of the time. Most Fan Fictions are just writers who really don't know much about writing taking the stories they like and just making minor changes they wish had been there or retelling the stories in some way they like more. Every once in a while you will find a Fan Fiction that legitimately takes an original work and improves it in some way or creates a new story from it that is so different it honestly justifies being made. You will only find it after digging through piles of Fan love stories about characters and weird mash-ups that don't make sense.

So what is your opinion of Fan Fiction? Do you think it should be considered a legitimate genre of writing and given more credit, or is it just stealing ideas?