Fan Fiction
Quick answer: Fan fiction is new storytelling built inside someone else's fictional world. Learn its history, legal edges, craft value, and how the skills transfer to original work.
Fan fiction is fiction written by admirers of an existing work, using its characters, settings, or world without the original creator's involvement, usually shared freely within a community of fellow fans. In other words, it is storytelling that begins with 'what if' aimed at a world someone else built: what if these two characters met earlier, what if that death never happened, what if the villain told the story.
The practice is far older than the internet, but online archives turned it into one of the largest bodies of narrative writing on earth, with its own genres, jargon, and etiquette. For a craft-minded writer, fan fiction matters twice over: as a genuine literary tradition, and as the most popular apprenticeship in fiction writing that has ever existed.
A tradition older than the term
Readers were writing unauthorised Sherlock Holmes stories within years of the originals, and when Conan Doyle killed the detective in 1893, the public's refusal to accept it prefigured every modern fandom campaign. Literary history is full of the same move performed at the highest level: Jean Rhys's 'Wide Sargasso Sea' (1966) gives a life and a voice to the first Mrs Rochester from 'Jane Eyre', and it is routinely taught as a masterpiece. The method, entering another author's world to ask the question that work never asked, is identical; only the copyright status and the shelf differ.
The modern form crystallised in the 1960s, when 'Star Trek' fans circulated home-printed zines of new adventures, and exploded with the web. Archive of Our Own, the largest current platform, hosts millions of works and won a Hugo Award in 2019, a mainstream acknowledgment that the community had built something of real cultural weight. Commercial publishing noticed too: E. L. James's 'Fifty Shades of Grey' began as 'Twilight' fan fiction before being rewritten with original names.
What fan fiction teaches, and where it limits
As an apprenticeship, fan fiction is unusually efficient. Because the characters and world arrive pre-loaded, the writer practises scene construction, dialogue, pacing, and emotional escalation without simultaneously inventing everything, the way a music student practises technique on existing tunes. The built-in audience supplies what beginning writers almost never get: immediate, plentiful feedback. Many working novelists trained this way and say so openly.
The limits are equally real. Fan fiction lets you skip the hardest skills of original work: establishing characters from nothing, making a reader care without borrowed affection, and building a world that stands alone. A writer who never leaves the borrowed house may never learn to pour foundations. Legally, fan fiction occupies a tolerated grey zone; most rights holders ignore non-commercial work, but it generally cannot be sold, and contests and magazines, Writory's Short Story Contest included, require original characters and worlds for exactly that reason.
Transferring the skills to original fiction
If you write fan fiction and want to cross over, transfer deliberately. Take the emotional dynamic you love writing, the rivalry, the slow-burn trust, the found family, and rebuild it between characters you invent, because dynamics are not copyrightable and they are where your real skill lives. Practise openings hardest: fan fiction rarely needs them, so write ten first pages that make a stranger care about a nobody within three paragraphs.
The trap to avoid is filing off serial numbers too lightly, renaming characters while leaving their borrowed world intact. Beyond the legal risk, it shortchanges the craft: original fiction's power comes from specifics generated by your own premise. Ask what your version is about that the source never was, the way 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is about empire and erasure, subjects 'Jane Eyre' could not see, and build outward from that answer.
Fan fiction, pastiche, and authorised continuation
Pastiche imitates a writer's style and may use entirely original characters; fan fiction borrows characters and world and may ignore the original style completely. The centre of gravity differs: pastiche loves a voice, fan fiction loves a cast. Authorised continuations, the estate-approved new James Bond or Poirot novels, are commercially published fan fiction in method, distinguished only by permission and payment.
Retellings of public domain works form the respectable fourth corner: once copyright lapses, anyone may publish their version, which is why bookshops carry endless Austen sequels but no legal 'Harry Potter' ones.
What poets can take from this
- Treat fan fiction as deliberate practice: pick one craft skill per story and drill it.
- Study which of your scenes readers respond to; the dynamic, not the characters, is your transferable asset.
- Practise cold openings separately, since borrowed worlds never teach them.
- Keep fan work non-commercial and respect archive and creator etiquette.
- When going original, start from a question your source could never ask.
Try it yourself
Take a fairy tale in the public domain and write the story its least-considered character would tell: the miller who traded his daughter, the grandmother before the wolf, the second stepsister. Give them a want the original tale ignored, and let it complicate the famous plot.
Questions
Is fan fiction legal?
It occupies a tolerated grey area. Non-commercial fan fiction is generally left alone by rights holders, and some explicitly welcome it, but selling work based on copyrighted characters requires permission. Work based on public domain sources is fully legal to publish and sell.
Can I submit fan fiction to writing contests?
Almost never; contests require original work for legal and fairness reasons. You can, however, submit stories that reuse public domain characters, or original stories built on the dynamics and skills your fan writing taught you.
Has fan fiction ever become professionally published work?
Yes, most famously 'Fifty Shades of Grey', which began as 'Twilight' fan fiction and was rewritten with original characters. Many working novelists also credit fandom writing as their training ground.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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