Member-only story
How the Phenomenon of Fanfiction Reveals What Audiences Want
Four truths I learned about storytelling from fanfiction
Like many Millennials, I have spent a good deal of my teenage and college years (and, okay, still up to today!) reading internet fanfiction and first cut my creative writing teeth with fanfiction. While fanfiction often gets a bad rap for being poorly written (some is, some’s brilliant), there are a lot of lessons a storyteller can learn from fanfiction, both from the areas it is strong and the areas it is weak. And here I am to tell what I’ve learned, from both the stories themselves and the social phenomena surrounding them.
Character is king
Screenwriter Matt Bird said in his book The Secrets of Story that (paraphrasing) “people come for the concept, but stay for the characters.” And I would like to add onto this insight that if they like the characters a whole, whole lot they then turn to fanfiction to get even more of them!
The majority of fanfiction is character-focused. Within the fanfiction community, people will read about the same characters over and over again: about their romantic relationships, family and friend relationships, dealing with the trauma they experienced in canon or transplanted to an alternate universe to see how the characters would…
