Any Fanfiction Writers/Readers?

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I read a lot of FanFiction, mostly for Doctor Who and Torchwood. I've written a few too, but nothing that I have ever posted online. I don't think I am a very good writer, I mostly write them for myself.

I'm gonna be "that guy" and say don't. You're better off writing your own stories. I mean, if you're creative enough to come with your own plots and storylines, then you should be creative enough to come up with your own characters and world to put them in. Maybe I'm just a grump, but it bugs me when I see people squandering their talent on stories that they can never publish or even take credit for because they belong to somebody else. IMO, fanfiction is only good as an exercise. Writing a story with someone else's characters can help hone your skills, in that you have to write an engaging story without breaking any of the rules set forth by the author/scriptwriter/director/whatever. The problem is that once people start, they show no interest in ever moving on to better things.

I keep um-ing and ah-ing about diving into the world of fanfic. I'm not so into the shipping side of things (though I get why many people are!) It's more the times when someone's got a whole new slant on a character, or even on the whole fictional world. The ideas bubbling around my head are often "New Adventures of..." featuring minor characters and set after the main events of the book/show/film.

Quite a number of younger published authors in SF/Fantasy happily admit they've written fanfic- this gets mentioned a lot on podcasts. Either when they were starting out, or as an ongoing "guilty pleasure" to relax from their novels. Mostly women, so far as I've heard, but the male co-writer of my favourite webcomic started out in fanfic. He remains the only person whose My Little Pony fanfic I would actively search out.

I have a hard time believing this. Copyright infringement is a weapon the publishing industry loves to use, and if they so much as think an author representing another company is playing with their toys they'll bring hell down on you. Authors aren't even allowed to look at fanfiction of their own stories because if they end up using something one of their fans used they could get sued for it. The only way this would possibly work is if they were completely and 100% anonymous-- and I'd doubtful even of that. Too risky.

^Just because someone writes fan-fiction doesn't mean that they automatically post it somewhere on the internet.

Put it this way, none of the authors in question were in a hurry to share their usernames.

And there can be reasons for that. Fan fiction can be a great way to explore yourself or work through things that you wouldn't publically broadcast to the world with your legal name attached - and usually get surprisingly supportive responses from the community. Yes, it would be great if everyone was creative enough to completely come up with all-original material...but a lot of us simply aren't. This argument reminds me of something from a 'music business' course from college (about demos and auditions going nowhere): unless you're really deluding yourself, you probably are pretty talented. In fact, you may be very good at what you do. Problem is there are about a million other people at about your skill level and what they're looking for isn't 'very good' - it's 'exceptional'. What I'd like to know is how people get recruited to write novels for pre-existing fantasy or sci-fi series; that's technically fan fiction, too, but you can make real money writing it!

I'm working on a fanfiction now, but uni takes precedence so it probably won't be finished for a while.

It's one covering the major events of Giovanni's life including reinterpretations of events seen in the games. For example, when Red defeats him at Silph Tower, police ambush him and he jumps out of the building. From the top floor. Draw your own conclusions to whether or not he survived.

Yesssss! My dream job would be writing Doctor Who spin-off novels.... Apparently, between 1996 and 2005, BBC Books' writers stable somehow got taken over by a fan group from Australia. Quality control was all over the place, but some off-the-wall brilliance happened too.

That would be awesome! I would definitely read them, I love the spin-off novels and I have a ton of them

I'm not sure, but Neil Gaiman might have written a couple Doctor Who novels.