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By Chris Meadows

ksdragon io9 has a feature naming 12 established SF & fantasy writers who got their start writing racy (often “slash”) fanfic. It is a fascinating article, but not something you should read at work.

Marjorie M. Liu, who wrote X-Men fanfic before being tapped to write several official X-Men projects, says:

I had been writing original fiction and poetry since I was tiny, but with fan-fiction, I could post it on the Internet and no one knew who I was. It was purely anonymous. I wasn’t being judged, or graded, or hemmed in — and wow, what a freeing experience. So in that sense, it helped my skills as a storyteller because I was able to experiment with different styles and ways of writing, without fear of retribution.

The nice thing about fanfic is that half the work is already done for the writer. The characters, settings, and situations exist. All the writer needs to do is to come up with new events and write about them. This allows the writer to concentrate all his efforts in getting the mechanics of writing down.

I wrote a lot of fanfic myself back in the day—and as recently as a couple of years ago, I was co-writing City of Heroes fanfic with Mercedes Lackey. We had a lot of fun. I can’t say I’ve ever written any “slash”, though.

I covered fanfic in one of my “Paleo E-Books” columns, and also mentioned tools for downloading stories from select fanfic websites into e-book format.

 
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