I really don't understand the fanfic as practice for profic argument either. I mean, I can see the connection--plenty of people, especially kids, might start out writing stories about their favorite characters and later on write original work. Other people enjoy writing original work and fanfic as two different things. Some people just like writing fanfic. But it seems incredibly silly to me to describe fanfic as some sort of stepping-stone to original work because-hello? You can write original work right from the start. If you want practice for original work you should write original work.
Similarly, I don't think fanfic's necessarily such a great practice even for the kind of profic that's book based on the series of which you are a fan because that does a totally different thing. It's true some fanfic writers have crossed over into that--I think Star Trek writers did, definitely. But a lot of fanfic is by definition the kind of thing that can never be part of even the supplementary canon of tie-in books.
In writing my comment I was actually thinking of someone who was seeking an agent and asked my advice on cover letters etc. She mentioned in her cover letter than she wrote fanfic just as part of her explanation of what writing she did, since she was just starting to try to write professionally, and I told her that my instinct was to leave that off because it probably wouldn't impress the agent and might count against her in ways that saying she wrote original, unpublished short stories woudln't.
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Date: 2005-01-20 07:49 am (UTC)Similarly, I don't think fanfic's necessarily such a great practice even for the kind of profic that's book based on the series of which you are a fan because that does a totally different thing. It's true some fanfic writers have crossed over into that--I think Star Trek writers did, definitely. But a lot of fanfic is by definition the kind of thing that can never be part of even the supplementary canon of tie-in books.
In writing my comment I was actually thinking of someone who was seeking an agent and asked my advice on cover letters etc. She mentioned in her cover letter than she wrote fanfic just as part of her explanation of what writing she did, since she was just starting to try to write professionally, and I told her that my instinct was to leave that off because it probably wouldn't impress the agent and might count against her in ways that saying she wrote original, unpublished short stories woudln't.