Now, I have become a better writer through my fanfic. That's a given. Not because it's practice for pro, but because it's writing, and the more you do of it, the better you'll get. But I can't cite anything I've done in the last five years or so, because it's all fan work, and I think that's silly and insulting to fanfic, since it doesn't treat it as legitimate writing experience.
Yes, that's exactly what I thought was ridiculous even as I was telling the person that putting fanfic in her cover letter might make a bad impression on a potential agent, because it was exactly that--as if it was something she should be ashamed of, when there's no reason to be.
I feel the same way about tie-in novels that I've done--though quite arbitrarily those can help me because they are published, even though they are so close to fanfic in terms of what they are. And like fanfic, they are writing and so are good practice as writing. But there's not this logical progression from fanfic to profic--I don't like it when people act as if once you get to a certain level of skill in fanfic you're supposed to "graduate" to original work, when a good author might prefer to simply write better fanfic.
Unfortunately, people are always going to try to rank these things. Recently somebody referred to tie-ins I've done as "formatted" novels in order to basically make it clear they were like paint-by-numbers and not original like her picture books (which all had the same formula, interesting or not). She also described them as "writing" with the quotes to again make it clear that I was as an amoeba to her great skill. There's that same kind of attempt at snobbiness about fanfic--and it's just as ridiculous there. That's another reason why it's probably imoprtant that fanfic writers learn to have a healthy pride in their own work, so they know this kind of stuff is untrue.
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Yes, that's exactly what I thought was ridiculous even as I was telling the person that putting fanfic in her cover letter might make a bad impression on a potential agent, because it was exactly that--as if it was something she should be ashamed of, when there's no reason to be.
I feel the same way about tie-in novels that I've done--though quite arbitrarily those can help me because they are published, even though they are so close to fanfic in terms of what they are. And like fanfic, they are writing and so are good practice as writing. But there's not this logical progression from fanfic to profic--I don't like it when people act as if once you get to a certain level of skill in fanfic you're supposed to "graduate" to original work, when a good author might prefer to simply write better fanfic.
Unfortunately, people are always going to try to rank these things. Recently somebody referred to tie-ins I've done as "formatted" novels in order to basically make it clear they were like paint-by-numbers and not original like her picture books (which all had the same formula, interesting or not). She also described them as "writing" with the quotes to again make it clear that I was as an amoeba to her great skill. There's that same kind of attempt at snobbiness about fanfic--and it's just as ridiculous there. That's another reason why it's probably imoprtant that fanfic writers learn to have a healthy pride in their own work, so they know this kind of stuff is untrue.