Original fiction vs. Fanfiction

I didn't know what to call this thread lol sowwy. :c

I know there's a lot of fanfiction writers here, so I wanted to ask... have you guys ever written original works before? For those that do the opposite (write original fiction), same question... but change original to fanficton. XD

Bonus questions: Why do you write original fiction/fanfiction? If you've never written either/or, why?

I have written fanfiction before in the past, but I realized how terrible I am at ideas. I'm not as creative with it as I wish to be. I think a lot of this is because of my varying learning disabilities though. I don't seem to process information that I need to. I do a lot of original fiction instead because I feel like I can be more creative and be able to express myself better. :3

I've written some original work before, but they're not all that good. None of the characters feel developed and the pacing/plots for them are all over the place. Those stories came from inspirations from other works, wanting to try my hand at writing. When I did start writing Pokemon, the world is already there for me but I created my own characters so I got a better handle at character development. I then branch out to other fandoms where writing canon characters is the norm, though sometimes I just throw in an original character if there's a need for it.

I'm kind of the opposite where I have more ideas for fanfiction than original work as mentioned in Aisu's thread. I guess it's because I would love the original source's world and characters and want to expand its universe. I might like to try original writing eventually, but I have nothing at the moment.

For actual writing work I had ever achieved, it was always fanfiction based on certain exisitng ideas and fictional franchise.

However, it is not like I can't think of any original fiction that no one had never done before. In fact, in the past there were quite a few original ideas came up inside my head where I think "This will turn out to be a great story!". But at the end of the day, I didn't jot down a single word even that is just a draft outline. I think it is just simply I am not passionate enough to do so.

If I don't love a work to death already, I won't even start to spend such hell lot of time to write it out. So from the moment I start writing anything, I knew I must had love that specific idea to the point of treating it as important as my life.

I've written in the pokemon universe, but not much. I struggle so much with not adapting and mistreating a setting until it's mine, that I'd rather write original fiction. I can mangle my own characters, and make fundamental changes to them, but doing so to existing characters defeats the point of writing fanfiction.

I write waaay more original stories than fan-fiction, but I guess it's not apparent here :P So the way fan-fiction mostly goes for me is taking an idea I couldn't flesh out as something on my own and adding the -pokemon/naruto/blahblah tag to it and things awkwardly slip into place.

I've dabbled equally in both, though recently it seems like my longer-running fanfiction is slowly turning into original fiction thanks to headcanon accretion. Like, are aquatic bird dragons that can control light and have telempathic musical abilities still latis?

...Aaanyway, I like fanfiction because I can just slam out a story without needing to do a lot of worldbuilding, and I like original fiction because it gives me a finer sense of control over everything. That simple, really.

I've written a few original short stories and short chapter stories that I haven't posted here, but they were all back when I was in high school so I'm a little worried to look at them again. The chapter stories in particular I'm embarrassed to think about now because their settings and sci-fi concepts were so poorly conceived. It's tempting to think that I started gravitating toward fanfiction because it was easier to work with established, solid worldbuilding, but I don't think that's quite right because when I started writing fanfiction exclusively I still thought those original chapter stories had good settings. Rather I think the reason is because I was more emotionally invested in the Pokemon and Digimon worlds than in the worlds I came up with myself, and I felt a strong urge to expand on those established worlds in some way, and tell stories in them that they don't tell in the games or cartoons.

txteclipse said:

I've dabbled equally in both, though recently it seems like my longer-running fanfiction is slowly turning into original fiction thanks to headcanon accretion. Like, are aquatic bird dragons than can control light and have telempathic musical abilities still latis?

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I find myself running into this problem as well, especially when I write for Digimon (which fortunately has a much more inconsistent and therefore malleable canon). I try to keep myself in check by having my headcanon stuff be a response in some way to existing canon. It's tricky, trying to figure out which headcanon things are "This is how I think Pokemon could work," vs. "This is something I want to put in a story of some sort." But yeah, I feel you there.

Ice said:

I've written in the pokemon universe, but not much. I struggle so much with not adapting and mistreating a setting until it's mine, that I'd rather write original fiction. I can mangle my own characters, and make fundamental changes to them, but doing so to existing characters defeats the point of writing fanfiction.

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For characters at least, one of the nice things about Pokemon is how much room there is for characters beyond the canonical ones, to the point where a lot of writers basically never touch Ash and company or Red and company. The Pokemon species themselves and other parts of the setting are vulnerable to mistreatment as you describe though, lol. On the whole I think Pokemon fandom is pretty receptive to loose interpretations of canon in fanfiction (at least in the sliver of it that I've encountered).

I tend to write stories which don't use canonical characters, so you could say I gravitate more towards original fiction in some ways. But I think my point is moot because most of my stories are character-based rather than plot-based, so they focus more on how people relate to people (or sentient beings to sentient beings) rather than how the environment/world affects the plot. For the most part you could even write my stories as original "fantasy" fiction with a bit of tweaking because they don't lean too heavily on canon.

txteclipse said:

...Aaanyway, I like fanfiction because I can just slam out a story without needing to do a lot of worldbuilding, and I like original fiction because it gives me a finer sense of control over everything. That simple, really.

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Ironically enough, I like fanfiction because of the amount of untapped worldbuilding / storytelling potential some canons have. Imo headcanon is just a way of bringing depth and consistency to an unruly canon.

Miz en Scène said:

Ironically enough, I like fanfiction because of the amount of untapped worldbuilding / storytelling potential some canons have. Imo headcanon is just a way of bringing depth and consistency to an unruly canon.

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For me it's more a matter of having some predefined material for your reader to latch onto. Using shared knowledge of canon to your advantage as a writer is probably my favorite thing about fanfiction. Like, I can drop a Pidgeot in the middle of a Championship battle against Blue with no setup. People familiar with pokémon will immediately have a particular reaction to that, and I know what that reaction will be because I would respond similarly. It's like a meta-language. There's flavor and nuance that you can exploit solely because you and your reader are already familiar with the material.

Then there's just the sheer unbridled untapped potential, which I think is what you're getting at. There's...over 700 pokémon now, with more on the way. You could write endlessly about even a single species as my writing is a testament to. Throw in six regions, about a bazillion human characters, and a canon that is ridiculously receptive to modification and you've got the story equivalent of primordial soup. You can do practically anything with pokémon and get away with it if you've got the writing chops.

I've never really tried fanfiction, mostly because I don't really have any good ideas or enough knowledge on the worlds I'm interested in to write something worthwhile. I mostly do short stories right now along with the RPing. Still running on that friendly advice. I tried to tackle an original world a couple of times about two years ago now I guess. I didn't really know how to tackle something of that scale or even really write halfway decent at the time so I just kind of flopped about and hoped that what I was writing was going in the direction that I desired. And now due to a mixture of laziness and having something of a more manageable size for my level, I'm getting better at multiple things. Might try restarting that original some day once I actually figure out chapter by chapter what I want and not just a beginning and end.

I primarily write original works. I don't really feel comfortable writing the characters of others since I don't feel like I can do them justice or write them the way they were intended to be written. I don't mind exploring original stories in existing worlds but you still don't have the same freedom and control as you do with something that's completely your own.