Writing is an acceptable pastime for many people. It’s easy for many to become lost in words of essays, prose and poetry, whether being consumed or created. However, the passive acceptance suddenly transforms into something a bit more confused and judgemental when the topic of fan fiction emerges. One might suppose the newness of it is what seems so off-putting to many, but when taken into perspective, fan fiction has existed for years. While modern fan fiction really started in the 60s with the publications of Star Trek fan fiction, anything that takes pre-existing characters, stories, or universes and modifies it is technically fan fiction, meaning people like Shakespeare are fan fiction authors.

I discovered fan fiction when I was twelve years old. I was at the height of my Star Wars obsession, and digging my hands into anything I could find, including the many novels that belong to the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It was absolutely thrilling to read, and it got my mind whizzing and my hand itching to create my own characters. So I did, until I found my real interest, not so long later, was writing about my favorite character instead (namely, Han Solo, and I wrote exclusively about his relationship with Leia).

Six years later, I don’t write fan fiction nearly as much as I once did. All in all, I’ve written somewhere around 100 fics at the very least, and every so many months write something new. And for six years, I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that, because most people assume fan fiction is nothing more than badly written porn by teenage virgins and wistful housewives. I, however, would like to make my case for fan fiction.

Writing has been something I have done since before I could remember. I found a journal from kindergarten at the latest with a story jotted down about Casper the Friendly Ghost (even my start to writing was fan fiction!), and after that is piles and piles of notebooks from elementary and middle school, and folders upon folders on hard drives from middle and high school. It’s impossible to say how much I’ve written, but I’d estimate maybe somewhere around a million words at least, and a good few hundred thousand of those belong to my fan fics.

Middle school was a rough period for me. I suddenly came down with anxiety disorders that completely disrupted my everyday functioning, and writing wasn’t something I enjoyed anymore. I became so anxious and hypercritical I couldn’t write without feeling suicidal, and suddenly my words became darker and darker until they stopped indefinitely.

Discovering fan fiction was what got me writing again. It did some of the work for me. I didn’t have to create a universe or characters or overarching story. I could focus on creating my own plotlines, as well as work on characterization and dialogue. My first stories weren’t anything close to beautiful, but writing them made me happy because I was writing about something I loved, and because I was writing.

In high school, some things got better while other things got much worse. I couldn’t write anything original again for quite some time. However, I joined my friend in our own silly project to write something down about a dream she had, and three years later it’s hundreds of thousands of words long. At one point, I felt a bit discouraged when I realized I spent so much time and energy on something no one was ever going to see, until I looked at what I had written at the beginning and compared it to my writing now.

For the first time in years, I feel confident in myself as a writer. Fan fiction taught me so much about how to be a great writer. By using pre-existing features, I was able to hone in on specific parts of writing, some of which I get complimented frequently on nowadays. Fan fiction taught me how to create atmosphere, how to write realistic conversations, how to craft storylines and characters. I was given room to experiment with my writing style with every one shot I wrote, until I found three different styles I frequently use nowadays. Fan fiction gave me characters I already loved and taught me how to love characters of my own. It was inspirational and motivational, and gave me a way to express myself while directly interacting with the things I cherished the most. Not only did I grow as a writer, but I grew as a person, because I learned how to appreciate the things I wrote and continue persevering in my ventures with writing.

So no, I’m not embarrassed that I wrote 60 different fan fictions about Han Solo and Princess Leia in middle school. And I’m not embarrassed that I write Psycho fan fiction still, because it’s something I enjoy doing and Norman Bates is a character I love to dissect. Taking apart and putting the pieces back together in fan fiction benefits original prose immensely, because we can learn what makes a character or story so interesting and vivid and what doesn’t. Writing fan fiction is practice, and improves writing with each fic.

Go ahead and continue judging me for writing and reading fan fiction regularly. Sure, there are plenty of bad stories out there, but it doesn’t mean the joy or meaning behind them is any less, and it certainly does not reflect poorly on everybody else. No one is as judgemental of any other form of creativity, so why not give fan fiction a chance?