Is it better to write fan fiction or original fiction? What does better even mean in this context?

After having written both, I don’t have an answer. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. One thing’s for sure—you won’t get rich either way.

Let’s start with fan fiction. To some extent writing fan fiction is easier. The world building has been done for you. The major characters are there for you to use. The cost of this is that you have to remain within the original continuity, and this can make plotting more complicated than it would otherwise be. You can’t change existing characters in any major way. Mind you, there’s a way around this. You can label your story AU, indicating that it takes place in an alternative universe. For example, I wrote a fic called Western Castle which takes the characters from the TV show Castle and plops them into the wild west. That was fun.

Writing fan fiction can be a very sociable activity. You end up making online friends with other writers. Your stories reach lots of eyeballs. In my case, many more eyeballs than peruse my original fiction.

When writing original fiction, there are no rules. Well, except for the norms of whichever genre you’re writing in. You can use any setting, any characters, at any point in time—past, present, or future. In my experience, writing your own stories isn’t as social an activity as writing fan fiction. You can always join a writing group, of course, but I haven’t gone that route because for me, writing is and will remain a hobby, not a putative profession. I write sporadically, sometimes with only a paragraph to show for myself after a week. Hmmm. That could be why my last novel took three years to write ….

The reality is, there are many thousands of self-published authors and it’s almost impossible to get noticed. Whether or not that’s okay depends on your motivation for writing in the first place. For me, getting my book up on Amazon is the culmination of that writing project. One hopes for many readers, but, at least in my experience, many readers are people who know you in real life and are kindly supporting you.

To close, I have to say that I enjoy writing both kinds of fiction. Most of my writing these days is original. My last fanfic was a Doctor Who story that I’d been saving up in case Big Finish asked me back. They haven’t—at least, not yet—so I wrote it anyway and the good folks at The Doctor Who Project posted it for me.

Much to my surprise, I currently find myself taking a break from my next novel and writing one more Castle fanfic, just when I was sure I’d written my last one. I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ll post about it when it’s done. Until then, happy reading and writing!