Short stories and Other Whatnots

THE MYSTERIOUS LAND OF FANFICTION

Wattpad, FanFiction.net, MediaMiner.org, Tumblr and even sometimes… BlogSpot. These 4 websites are the ideal havens for Fandoms.

Fandoms: Commonly known as “Fan Domain”. A Fandom is a certain community whose lives revolve around a certain band, book, movie, TV show or actor.

To get the main idea of Fan fiction, you have to get yourself familiarized with a few common terms used while writing or thinking up a good story line.

First is AU, AU means Alternate Universe. Let’s say you’re making a Fan Fiction for the Avengers, if you want your Fan fiction to be unique creating an Alternate Universe can be an option for you. A certain writer on FanFiction.net wrote a Fan fiction where Loki and Tony Stark are best friends and in the middle part of the story, they slowly become lovers. I don’t think Stan Lee would be happy about that.

Moving on, next Fan fiction term is Cannon. It means to say that it already happened in the actual real story. It’s like you want to continue what the real author left off, you want to continue it. Cannon can be also used for characters, like Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley, they got married and it actually happened in the books so it is indeed cannon but if you say that John Watson and Irene Adler got together that is certainly not cannon for it never happened

Next we have Ships or shipping. This term can be used on cannon relationships or a pairing of characters you want to get together in a relationship. For example, you ship yourself and Zayn Malik, that relationship never happened but you want it to happen anyways. Another, you ship Jane Foster and Thor, that relationship actually happened so it’s cannon and a primary ship of the Fandom of Thor.

Next we have Crossovers. Crossovers are pretty self-explanatory, you take one Fandom and another Fandom and you merge them together to make your own story.

And there we have it; those are the basic terms you need to know before writing Fan fiction. Now let’s get ourselves known to world of Fan fiction. Whenever you’re somewhat unsatisfied with what an author wrote, writing Fan fiction can help. You want to be best friends with Harry Potter and live in the magic castle of Hogwarts? Write a Fan fiction about it. You want to be an Avenger and protect the world? OH MY GOSH, WRITE A FAN FICTION ABOUT IT.

Of course, there are boundaries. Certain authors don’t like it when their work has been somewhat “plagiarized” or “creative raped”. Authors like George R.R Martin (author of A song of fire and ice), doesn’t like Fan fiction and see it as “poor exercise to aspiring writers”. So if the author says no, you better take it as a no.

When writing Fan fiction, do it right and by that I mean proper grammar, spelling and all that. When writing Fan fiction, write good story lines that won’t make the real author hunt you down along with his/her fans because that is not a pretty picture. When writing Fan fiction, have some integrity. Before writing Fan fiction, you should always write a disclaimer saying that you have no rights to this and that and so on and so forth. When writing Fan fiction, don’t go overboard. Make the fan fiction believable; make your readers question themselves whether they’re reading the actual book or the parody of it.