Fanfiction is a story featuring characters, settings, and even plotlines invented by other writers. Writers have been responding to and engaging with texts they love for centuries – John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a retelling of the creation story, James Joyce took Homer’s The Odyssey and set it in Dublin in Ulysses, and Dante combined elements from the Bible and Greek mythology in Inferno. While writers have always been writing ‘fanfiction’, its popularity surged massively with the growth of the Internet. Millions of people began publishing their stories on fanfiction sites like Wattpad, AO3 and FanFiction.net. Some of these stories entered the mainstream when they were picked up by publishing houses.

People love reading and writing fanfiction because it’s the perfect combination of staying in a familiar literary world and exploring new possibilities. There are limitless what ifs in fanfiction – what if Harry Potter chose to be in Slytherin and ended up on the dark side? What if the world of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson collided? What if I were a character in my favourite book? Fanfiction is like a playground for writers, especially those just starting to write. They can ‘play’ with familiar characters in a world they know. 

Since fanfiction is often read by others, people also have the opportunity to receive feedback and improve their writing skills. Creating a well-written piece of fanfiction requires just as much, if not even more, skill as writing any other fictional story. Writers need to come up with imaginative plotlines, while at the same time maintaining the tricky balance of not going out of character and developing their own characters. 

For students who are intimidated by writing, fanfiction is a fun place to start. Just choose a story that you enjoyed, come up with a what-if scenario and let your imagination run wild!