A brief introduction

I came to be aware of the phenomena of fan fiction through a twitter post within the last year. It seems I've been out of a major loop. Fan fiction, also known as Fanfic or FF is the act of taking characters and/or settings from published books, movies, and TV and creating new works. These works tend to be published on the internet and are often read by fans of the original work. According to Wikipedia, however, the term fan fiction originated within the science fiction community to describe amateur but completely original works written in the science fiction genre.

Fan fiction has gained in popularity in the last 3 or 4 years, largely as a result of enthusiastic Harry Potter fans, but there are many, many fanfic stories available on the internet. Don't want your favorite story to end? Don't like the author's treatment of your favorite character? Have a great idea that would make the story better, or just different? If so, begin your own Fanfic story.

Some folks are probably thinking back to their high school literary magazine and the many, absolutely talentless poems and short stories held captive between the covers, and to some extent you may be right. I'm sure there are a lot of poorly written and conceptualized fanfic stories floating on the interweb, but there are a number of really great Fanfic stories too. Some of these authors have their own fanbase now who are writing Fanfic based on their Fanfic stories.

A very popular example of Fanfic (although I never thought it as such until this project) is Tom Stoppard's “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Stoppard took two minor characters from Shakespeare's “Hamlet” and made them the focus of his new work with knee-slapping results. There have been countless reworkings of Rowling's Harry Potter series, Meyer's Twilight series, and many sci-fi stories. Interested in reading some Fanfic yourself, be sure to visit fanfiction.net, harrypotterfanfiction.com, trekfanfiction.net, or fictionalley.org.