For me, it was Warriors, the book series about Clans of fighting cats. For others, it might be Harry Potter, Star Wars, Marvel, Star Trek... The list goes on and on.

What am I talking about, anyways? Favorite fandoms?

Kind of. More than just being a fictional universe that you enjoy, I am referring to the fiction that captivated you to the extent that you wanted to have a hand in that world. Since you couldn't actually live there, you did the next best thing: Writing fanfiction.

I believe that I have the Warriors series to thank for driving me to put serious development into my writing skills. I just couldn't help it—I wanted to make up my own Clans, my own stories about the warrior kitties with funny names.

Really putting effort into these stories probably started when I was 11 years old; I was first exposed to the Warriors series when I was 10. A friend of mine who also liked Warriors agreed that it would be fun to make up our own Clans with new stories, and that's where my experience with fanfiction began.

Fast forward several years, into my high school era. I discovered a website with weekly Warriors writing prompts, and I wrote a lot of one-shots over the course of a few months. Some of my goofiest writing as well as the most depressing came out of that time period.

I also became more invested in worldbuilding, an interest that lasted even after my one-shot fervor had faded. I developed my own system for naming Clan cats, created Clans with unique homes, and made complex characters. At surface level, one might think I was just wasting my time on stuff I couldn't publish for printing. However, the Warriors world provided a safe playground for me to experiment with my writing skills and watch them grow.

I now have a work-in-progress fanfiction that has about 40,000 words, written over the course of the past four years or so. I still continue to work on it occasionally—it's great stress relief! Plus, the storyline that came to life with cats is something that I have begun to modify and improve, bringing it to a form that I could eventually write as an original novel to publish someday.

As it turns out, some of my Warriors short stories have also morphed into publishable form, as seen in Beneath the Old Oak Tree, Beware the Cait Sidhe, and My Secret Place. I still have lots of useful material buried in other full-length fanfics and short stories, which continues to give me exciting challenges in adapting to make them uniquely mine.

From my experience with fanfiction, one thing is absolutely clear to me: The Warriors series, full of faults though it may be, is what led me to discover my joy for writing. Writing Warriors fanfiction launched me into a lifestyle of writing frequently and keeping my eyes open for story inspiration in the strangest of places.

And all this because my great-aunt gave me the first three Warriors books for my 10th birthday.