Fanfiction gets a bad reputation from many, including George R.R. Martin and my own dad. They dismiss it as “lazy. ” As in “go write your own stories you punk kid!”

Let me tell you, there is nothing lazy about writing three 100k+ word novels. And that is exactly what I did when I was in Heroes fandom in high school, along with ~25 short stories, and 5 novellas. I clocked in probably 600,000 words in the span of three years. And you can bet I became a better writer for it.

No, I did not learn how to create believable original characters, but I did learn how to write realistic speech. I learned how to take some deep, meta looks at the psyches of fictional people, and how to write arcs of growth, and how to create chemistry between characters.

True, I didn’t learn how to world build….but I…