juice | how to
Find Your Geek Prose Discover the path to publishing as a fan fiction and Wattpad writer in seven straightforward steps from an unapologetic fan-savant By EVANGELINE BRENNAN
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Orange Appeal | 2020
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K, I’ll admit it, I’m a FanFiction and Wattpad writer, so I may have some bias when it comes to the fandom community but, for years, I had this internalized embarrassment over having been a fan fiction writer. For Wattpad, it isn’t met with nearly as much stigmatization, except when these books later reach mass-market audiences and can be dismissively written off as “a Wattpad story,” supposedly synonymous with being cliche and formulaic. In a way, the writing community can be cruel sometimes, and it often gives fan fiction writers a bad reputation, but there are many benefits to becoming a fan fiction writer before making the leap into traditional publishing. In recent years, I realized that writing fan fiction gives you a start in writing. It provides you with a world that fans can already recognize and are comfortable with and it challenges you to imagine these characters in new ways. There is so much freedom a writer has, they can choose to follow the original plotline, or canon, and show it from a different perspective. They can place the characters in an alternate universe, or AU, or change their personality drastically to make them stronger, darker, or otherwise different. Fan fiction writers throw a grenade into the works they love but, not necessarily as a way to pick apart the stories, but as a way to make them live on, past the moment the last page is read or the screen fades to black. For some creators, this work is unusual to view, to have their characters re-imagined, to have the threads of their works picked at until it unravels and can be re-stitched. For others, they got their start on sites like FanFiction.net and ArchiveOfOurOwn.org. At one point in time, it was their bread and butter, sustaining, inspiring, and teaching them until they wrote work of their own. In an interview with The News Tribune in 2012, Marissa Meyer, author of the best-selling series The Lunar Chronicles, said “By writing so many [fan fiction] stories, that’s how I learned the craft of writing. The great thing about fan fiction is that you get instant feedback. I learned to take criticism.” You learn to develop a story and submit yourself to the eyes of your fellow fans. Meyer, in her time on the site, wrote 39 Sailor Moon stories and it is still posted on FanFiction.net under the pen name, Alicia Blade. It is Wattpad, then, that can become another stepping stone in developing one’s writing by allowing a new writer to develop a full story of their own for the first time. If you are one of the fan fiction or Wattpad writers that hopes to one day traditionally publish your own series, consider these steps. Step 1. Have an idea. Scratch that. Have multiple ideas. Know what makes your characters who they are. What do they like? What are their goals in life? What makes their blood boil? Why do they do what