5 Reasons You Should Be Writing Fan Fiction

As I mentioned yesterday in my accountability post, for the next little while I’m setting aside my work-in-progress and picking up my Final Fantasy III/VI novelization fan fiction. Now here’s the thing… There are a lot of writers (and readers) out there who think very poorly of fan fiction. They think its not “real” writing, or they associate it with a bunch of creepy, sweaty fanboys/girls sitting in a dark room, plucking out a wish fulfillment fantasy where a disturbingly perfect character who just so happens to have their exact name gets it on with Buffy or Edward Cullen, or one of the My Little Ponies (*wigged-out-shudder*). And yes, that stuff does exist, and there’s a special place for it far, far away from me, but there is also a lot of good fan fiction out there if you care to look for it, and I personally believe that fan fiction serves several very important purposes in the writing community.

1. It gives you a break and let’s you enjoy writing for a while.
Even those of us who love writing with all out heart and soul want to smash our computer against a wall and/or burn all our notebooks every now and then. Things happen (writer’s block, bad critiques, lost work that wasn’t backed up, etc) that enrage us and make us want to give up on writing forever. That’s where fan fiction can be helpful; it’s easy (because the world is already created for you), it’s fun (because you get to write your favorite characters), and it keeps you moving forward. You might even find, while writing fan fiction, that you come up with a great idea to continue that original fiction you so recently considered tossing off a cliff. Seriously, give it a try…you might find that writing a bit of fan fiction considerably lowers your writing-related stress.

2. It gives you practice and let’s you get the “bad” out.
Yes, I’ll admit it, a lot of the fan fiction out there is beyond awful. But have you ever heard that oft-repeated adage: “Practice makes perfect”? Lame, perhaps, but true. No one ever wrote a masterpiece on their very first try. With the vast, near limitless options to toy with, fan fiction offers you that ability to keep practicing and practicing and practicing, which can only help you become better. Scrawling fan fiction helps you to get down your bad writing, see that it’s bad, and then make it better. Any writing will do this, of course, but fan fiction makes it easier because instead of struggling with your one story over and over again, or constantly wracking your brain to come up with new ideas, you can just jump in someone else’s sandbox and play away.

3. You can just jump in someone else’s sandbox and play away.
Some people say that nothing worth doing is easy. I beg to differ. Yes, effort is a big deal and most things in life are going to be difficult, but sometimes, to keep ourselves from going mad, we have to find the easy out. Fan fiction is that in spades. This is a whole world that has already been created for you, with established characters who have already had tons of work put into them. All you have to do is think of something for them to be doing. That’s it. Play away. Have some fun! Explore! As children this is how we learn and grow, but as adults we forget the importance of real play. Take a page out of the book of babies and toddlers and learn via good old fun and exploration!

4. The community is extremely powerful.
There are lots of websites out there for sharing fan fiction, but the one in particular that I use is FanFiction.net. It’s a great site with a great community, and chances are if you share something there someone is going to find it, read it, and comment on it, and that is pure gold for a writer. We crave feedback, even if its not necessarily good feedback. We want to know, at the very least, that someone is reading. Fan fiction is wonderful for this because of the vast numbers of people who enjoy it. For example, years back I wrote a Harry Potter fan fiction featuring the Marauders. I finished that story years ago, and to this day I get the occasional review landing in my inbox. It might not sound like much, but a single review on a story you wrote ages ago can really mean a lot when you’re currently struggling with your current works. Community is important to keep a writer sane and moving forward, and the fan fiction community is a surprisingly strong one.

5. It keeps you writing.
When you’re a writer (or you aspire to be) actually writing is the most important thing to do. In this brave new world of writing conventions, social media, and author platforms, writers tend to forget that the real deal is putting words to paper. Fan fiction helps with this. Any kind of writing – even the creepy kind I mentioned earlier that I have a restraining order out against – is worth doing if it keeps you putting words to paper. There is no writer without the process of writing, so whatever you can write to keep that process moving forward is a good thing to write.

So now that I’ve thoroughly convinced you, what are you waiting for? Fan fiction could be just the thing you need! I know it’s what I need right now, so I’ll see you all on the other side of a new chapter of Returning Hope.

Things I Know About Kids – Learning

First, I feel I should point out that I have done no real research on the topic of learning capabilities in small children, nor have I read any research done by others. What I know I’ve learned from my own daughter, and to a lesser extent my niece and the children we see at playgroup.

With that aside, what I know is that we as a society have a bad habit of underestimating small children. We follow guidelines that tell us what skills our kids should know and by when, we buy age-specific toys based on assessments made by the companies who designed them, and we get upset if our kids haven’t learned a specific skill by a specific time, even if they’ve become quite advanced in a different skill in the meantime.

In other words, we group all children together, expecting them to learn and grow at the same rate, and limiting them by focusing on only the skills we’re told they should have by now. I personally think this is very silly because, while you shouldn’t push your children to “learn learn learn learn learn!!!” you should always encourage them to go further and further.

I’ll give you an example. My daughter has a wooden alphabet puzzle. The back of the puzzle board states that the puzzle is for ages 3 and up. At the time we purchased the puzzle I thought that “ages 3 and up” couldn’t possibly refer to any kind of safety issue because the puzzle pieces are quite large, and a quick examination showed that there is no way the pegs could possibly become disconnected. When the safety check was all clear we gave our daughter the puzzle to play with…at the time she was just under a year old. Yes, we gave our one year old a toy that someone, somewhere, decided was meant for three year olds and up. We weren’t pushing the learning toy on her, and we certainly didn’t expect giving it to her to make her a genius or anything; we just figured it was a good, educational toy that she’d enjoy playing with. But here’s the thing…she caught on pretty fast. It only took her a few weeks to be able to locate where the pieces went, and by the time she was just under a year and a half old we had her telling us what all the letters were as she was doing the puzzle. It didn’t take long after that for her to understand that letters naturally went in a particular order, and if I wrote down letters she’d tell me which ones came next.

There were other factors that contributed to her success, of course… For one thing we took the time to sit with her and tell her what all the letters were. For another she also regularly watched a Sesame Street special that teaches kids the alphabet. But the point of the story is that if we had set the puzzle aside, assuming that she wouldn’t be able to understand it until she was at least three years old, she might not have caught on to the alphabet so soon. If we took it upon ourselves to assume that the Sesame Street special was too advanced for her, she wouldn’t be THIS close to being able to sing the whole alphabet song at less than two and a half years old (imagine me holding my fingers a few millimeters apart).

Again, I’m not saying my kid is a genius, but I can absolutely say with certainty that she has advanced faster than expected because we don’t hold back teaching her new things just because she’s still young. We make sure her toys are safe, and if we buy her something meant for older kids (Ninja Turtles action figures and My Little Pony sets come to mind) we make sure to remove any small pieces she might decide to swallow for fun. Once those two things have been accomplished, we let her play with what she’s interested in, and we encourage her to learn new things. In fact, she and her soon-to-be-four-year-old cousin can work my Samsung Galaxy Tab2 better than some adults I know.

Kids are sponges, they really are. We regularly take this into consideration when taking care not to transfer bad habits, but we rarely think about it when considering teaching and learning practices. Encourage your kid to learn, and (as long as safety permits) let them decide what toys and programs are appropriate for their age group. They’ll thank you for it later.