What Is Fan Fiction?
Quick answer: Fan fiction is original writing that borrows characters, settings or worlds from existing works. What fan fiction is, its history, terms and why writers do it.
Fan fiction is fiction written by fans using characters, settings or worlds from an existing work they did not create: a novel, film, television series, game or even the public lives of celebrities. The writer supplies new plots, new relationships, new endings, sometimes whole alternate universes, while the borrowed elements do the work of instant recognition. It is almost always shared free in fan communities rather than sold.
Dismissing it is easy and lazy. Fan fiction is one of the largest bodies of narrative writing on earth, and for many working novelists it was the training ground where they learned scene, dialogue and audience before ever inventing a world of their own.
Older than you think
Writers have always continued other people's stories. Unauthorised sequels to Don Quixote appeared in Cervantes's lifetime, and he retaliated in his own second volume. Sherlock Holmes pastiches began while Arthur Conan Doyle was still writing. The modern fan culture, though, crystallised around Star Trek in the 1960s and 70s, when fans typed stories into photocopied zines and mailed them to each other.
The internet turned that trickle into an ocean. Archive of Our Own, the largest dedicated archive, hosts well over ten million works, is run by a nonprofit, and won a Hugo Award in 2019. Whatever one thinks of any individual story, the ecosystem is a genuine literary culture with its own genres, editors and etiquette.
The vocabulary, decoded
Fan communities evolved a compact technical language, and knowing it helps you read the terrain. Canon is everything the original work established; fanon is what the community collectively invented and now treats as true. AU means alternate universe, the same characters relocated to a coffee shop or a space station. Shipping is writing romantic pairings; a crossover splices two different source worlds together.
Beta readers, a term now standard across all fiction writing, came out of this world: volunteer editors who critique a story before posting. Fan fiction normalised the idea that amateurs owe each other craft feedback, which is arguably its biggest export to mainstream writing culture.
What fan fiction teaches, and where it stops
Because the characters and world arrive pre-built, fan fiction isolates specific muscles: plotting, scene construction, dialogue, emotional escalation. You also get something professional writers rarely get, fast, voluminous reader response, comment by comment. Several bestselling authors started here; E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey famously began as Twilight fan fiction before the borrowed elements were stripped out.
What it cannot teach is the hardest skill: making a reader care about people they have never met. Writers who move from fan work to original fiction usually report the same shock, that the free ride of recognition is gone and the first thirty pages must now do all the work. That is a skill you only build by practising it.
The etiquette that keeps the ecosystem working
Fan communities run on norms that outsiders trip over. Tagging is the load-bearing one: works are labelled for content, pairings and tone so readers can steer precisely, and mislabelling is treated as a serious offence because the whole archive depends on trust. Concrit, constructive criticism, is welcome in some corners and firmly invitation-only in others; read the room before critiquing.
Two other norms matter. Do not show fan work to the original creators or their actors, a boundary that protects both sides legally and socially. And credit travels downward too: remix, translation and podfic, audio recordings of stories, all ask permission of the fan author first. None of this is law, but communities enforce it more consistently than most laws get enforced, and a writer who learns these habits early carries useful professional instincts into every other writing space they enter.
Common mistakes and misconceptions
The commonest misconception is that fan fiction is all one thing, and that the one thing is bad. In truth the quality curve looks like every other slush pile, mostly rough, with a startling top end. Another misconception is that writing it is either fully legal or fully forbidden; the reality is a tolerated grey zone with real limits, which deserves its own answer.
The practical mistake for ambitious writers is staying too long. If your goal is original publication, treat fan work as the gym, not the sport: at some point you must write characters nobody has heard of and submit them where nobody knows your handle. Original contests and magazines only accept original worlds.
What poets can take from this
- Use fan fiction deliberately: pick one craft muscle per story and train it.
- Read the top-rated work in any fandom before dismissing the form.
- Learn community etiquette; tagging and content notes are house rules, not suggestions.
- Keep your original ideas separate; do not waste your best premise on borrowed characters.
- When you switch to original fiction, budget extra effort for openings, since recognition no longer carries you.
Try it yourself
Take a story you love and write a 600-word scene from the point of view of a character who appears in it for less than a page. Then rewrite the same scene with the names, world and identifying details replaced by inventions of your own, and note what stops working.
Questions
Where do people publish fan fiction?
The largest archives are Archive of Our Own (AO3), FanFiction.net and Wattpad, alongside countless community spaces. Almost all of it is posted free, since selling fan work based on copyrighted sources crosses a legal line.
Can fan fiction become a published book?
Only after the borrowed elements are removed or the source is out of copyright. Fifty Shades of Grey and Cassandra Clare's early career both show the pattern: the fan version is scrubbed into an original work before commercial publication.
Is writing fan fiction good practice for new writers?
Genuinely, yes. It offers fast feedback, a built-in audience and low stakes, which is ideal for learning scene and dialogue. Its limit is that it never exercises the skill of making readers care about brand-new characters.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.