I have a confession: I love writing fanfiction.

It started out as a fun way to work with already developed plots and characters. I discovered fanfiction when I was 8 or so and gobbled it up (almost) more than real fiction. As time went on, fanfiction became a way for me to work with original plots and original characters in already developed worlds. Eventually, I transitioned to just fiction writing.

I stopped writing fanfiction when I was 14 or 15. I don’t know what it was about high school, but I was bursting with original angst that no fandom could contain. I had fun writing my own stories and characters for a while, but something was lacking: a platform to share my original work on. Every time I had written a fanfiction, I had published it on Fanfiction.net, where my stories would receive minimal, or lots of, praise and suggestions. It was a cool feedback process and essential to my development of a writer. I would sometimes share my stories with my friends, but they were all too shy or scared to tell me what they really thought, instead opting for an “I liked it! That was good!” (Which of course went straight to my ego, but didn’t help me get any better.)

For a while in high school, I turned to poetry as my new outlet of writing. I represented my high school at the Teen Arts Festival at the local college and was published about 20 times in my high school’s literary journal. It was way cool, and great for my ego.

But then college happened.

I was a professional writing major, which meant my writing focus turned to academic research papers, press releases, and other (boring) forms of writing. I took a few creative writing classes, but they weren’t as fun as they were in high school and focused more on the process of writing than actual writing itself. I found that it was a lot less creative. Although, I guess, it was making me become a better writing, I was also much more critical of myself. I realized I couldn’t write poetry to save my life and stopped. My fiction skills seemed juvenile compared to what my classmates produced, so I stopped. I struggled with getting published in my college’s literary journal, so I stopped submitting a lot of pieces.

Basically, I stopped writing for fun.

In my junior year of college, I decided to reread the Harry Potter series for fun. And all of a sudden, I was struck by an OC (original character) begging to be written about. But I couldn’t. Fanfiction? So lame. But this OC’s voice was so loud that I had no choice but to sit down and write about her. So I did.

Yep. 21 years old and writing fanfiction. Again. And you know what? I had a BLAST doing it. I learned to love writing again. I am a much better creative writer than I give myself credit for (even though my reviews on Fanfiction.net didn’t necessarily reflect it). I pushed myself to write challenging and interesting characters that could potentially be integrated with the Queen, JK Rowling’s, work.

I guess in the end it doesn’t matter what you write, as long as you’re writing!