What is fan fiction?
“Fan Fiction” is fiction based on a television series, written by fans. Fanfic by and large is not scripts but prose. While some have chosen to write their fanfic in teleplay form, those are few and far between. Pieces range in length from vignettes (1000 words) to short stories to full blown novels (50,000+ words). There has been fanfic in media fandom for decades, collected in APAs (Amateur Publishing Associations) and circulated through the post, and more commonly in “fanzines” not-for-profit anthologies of short stories, poems, novellas, and novels usually accompanied by fan artwork, published by fans and sold through the post and at conventions like MediaWest, an annual ‘zine con in the Midwest. Many professional authors (Jean Lorrah, A.C. Crispin, Peter David, and Susan Garrett, to name a few) had their start in fanzines. Since the web hit big in the early 1990s, fanfic has spread through the on-line media fan community like wildfire, even moving from tradition genre subjects (SF
Fan fiction itself is a story written by a fan using the world of a published book, or maybe a manga, movie, TV series, or cartoon. Lots of Kingdom Hearts stuff, too. I write lots of fanfiction for Danny Phantom. Harry Potter has a lot, too. I’ve been on http://www.fanfiction.net/ for a while now, and watched the Twilight section grow steadily. You know how popular Harry Potter is, right? It’s got 383,162 stories at the time I type this. Twilight has 52,131. Last time I actually checked, about 6 months ago, it had only a little over 20,000. That is a LOT. And that’s just that one site! Of course, writing isn’t something you’re automatically good at. There are quite a few no-nos in fanfiction writing. A lot of those stories aren’t pleasant to read. Maybe they’re written in chatspeak (text talk), or the person writing doesn’t use proper convention (grammar, punctuation, capitalization, separating paragraphs). Or maybe it’s just one
