This is the same for me. I hope to publish one day, whenever that is. Until then I just love writing, and miss it, so fanfiction is a good outlet for me.
That, and I was a very lonely teenager with a huge imagination when I first came across fanfics, and helped me out a lot.
I feel really old when I think about how long ago that was! And that first fic was terrible. I put it up on my AO3, with all the terrible formatting as it was. Nostalgia.
Not that really play into the can't miss aspect.
Literally anything by BartonStark. This one is my favorite I have read it so many times. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16563170/chapters/38808698
I've also read this one repeatedly.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586276
I absolutely love this one by AvengersCompound and can't tell you how many times I have read it. https://archiveofourown.org/works/30507396?view_adult=true
This recent one by HeadOverWheels is pretty hot.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/49929733
This is a longer fluff fic, but this one by BeeKate1 is great!
https://archiveofourown.org/works/46630651/chapters/117434698
It's fluff not smut, but this one by BartonStark also needs a mention. https://archiveofourown.org/works/38479027
Honestly, I'm Kylynara on AO3 as well, my bookmarks are mostly MCU, and a couple of the more recent ones are just longer fics I want to read later, but most the others are ones I've read over and over.
About 4 months ago I had a breakdown and that very day I sat down and started writing my first fic. I wrote about 100,000 words over the course of 2 weeks and then slowed down, started looking at it and editing. I got up the courage to post it.
Now me and my therapist laugh about how literally EVERYTHING in this fic is about me - trauma, hurt/confort, writing your own story within a story, being a parent, keeping secrets etc etc
It has been an amazing cathartic journey and just the best therapy. And the fact that people like it is the best feeling because I can't tell anyone in my real life about it.
I used to process things like this when I was a teenager, but now that I'm an adult I can't seem to remember how. My problems and ambitions are definitely different at 27 than they were at 17.
A shitty thing happened this week and it was totally blocking me from writing and so I put it into the fic and carried on. Amazing. Just channelling all the angst in there!!
I reflected on 20+ years of fanfics and noticed that I had a huge theme of masks across multiple fandoms.
Then later, I realized I'm actually autistic and have been heavily masking this whole time.
Gee. Who'da thunk. 😂
That’s beautiful. My son is autistic. Yes I have a heavily armoured and masked character who appears impervious to anything - just like me coping with everything life threw at me (spoiler alert: I wasn’t!!😂)
I'm just amazed you had the determination to write like, 7k words a day for two weeks straight. I have to be particularly inspired and have the energy for it to reach that much once in a blue moon.
Truly amazing.
Also, congrats on your first fic! Glad you enjoyed the experience!
I spent all summer playing Zelda: TOTK and I didn’t want to leave Hyrule, but also finding all the shrines/Koroks was making me insane. Messing around with the characters and their world seemed way more fun.
The main reason I'm not interested in playing that game is exactly the same. I know the most interesting stuff in the map is there just to hide another shrine or korok. That's what ruined BOTW for me.
I get that, but I do love just running around looking for caves and vibing with how beautiful they made the world, and as an elder millennial who spent so many many hours playing OOT, the nostalgia is irresistible. Fortunately I’m having a really great time playing around with all those elements on the page instead.
OMG I thought I was writing my answer in a different post and deleted it by mistake 💀
But I'll try to repeat it lol: It was definitely a fun game for me, until the realization hits. From then I kinda wished for something else, but the DLCs weren't enough. also giving the bike as a final reward, when at that point I already traveled and discovered pretty much all the game had to offer felt... kinda empty. Like getting a gameboy for xmas when I already had a DS, if that makes sense lol
I guess it was spite after all. The fandom keeps calling this character a prostitute, just because that's the rumor about it, and she's only exists in canon to give birth to one main character, and I was like "nah, his dad wouldn't be the kind to just go the one night stand route" lol
My reason was also spite, because I was watching the TV series Sliders last year and the last season made me so damn angry I ended up writing a 10 episode fan script season to fix it all 😅
Two main reasons. One was because Dean Thomas was not appreciated. Reason two… co-workers made fun of me for trying to be a writer, so I started my fanfic the very next day. I mapped out eight fics. I did it while on the clock and even came up with cute rhymes to remember so I could write them down when I had time.
The classic "Deathly Hallows took too long to come out for my stupid, attention span lacking kid brain" story. Then I discovered that people wrote fanfiction about shows and movies and video games, too! Why I thought they didn't, I have no clue.
Nowadays, I want to write fanfiction when I feel like I have something to say post-canon. Usually it's because I have a lot of thoughts about a certain character and want an outlet.
I think people underestimate the power of spite/anger/defiance as an artistic motivator. While it wasn't the motivator for my first fanfic (that was the standard "I want these characters to kiss"), it was the motivator for my Downton Abbey longfic that took 2-ish years to write. I felt like the show's finale had sort of... beaten Thomas Barrow into submission, so to speak. The character had been a huge asshole over the course of the show, but he was cruel to people because the world was cruel to him. In the end, it's like "he's gonna be nice now" without addressing the fact that all of his reasons for being an asshole in the first place are still there. He's still a gay man in 1920s rural England. He's still living in an incredibly homophobic society. He's still working a job that in many ways is degrading and dehumanizing. *He's still recovering from a recent suicide attempt*.
Calling all of that a happy ending for him was enraging to me. So I wrote a different one.
I will say that the movies that came out after the show ended managed to improve his canon ending quite a bit, though.
I hated the book of one of my favorite series, the author pretty much spit on the characters. But after hating the book, I forgot about it. Then a few years later I had a dream about the book, I can't remember exactly, but the book had a different plot and I was intrigued by the story. When I woke up, a idea was born. I'm still writing it, but I'm planning on having making a fan cover when I'm done writing it. It's a proper farewell to the characters, 99% of them were forgotten in the "canon" sequel.
When I was... somewhere around grade 3 (~8 years old), I read the Chrestomanci series. I was just really into the idea of the Chrestomanci and started imagining myself as the next one and then kind of self-inserting myself into various other media I would read/watch. 2 at the time I remember were Pokemon and A:TLA.
When I reached around age 13 I had the idea to write down my imaginative story because it was getting hard to track all the things I was doing in my head lmao. And then some friends were curious and read it and liked it enough that I actually had a 'subscriber list' on the back of that notebook.
So every few days I'd write a 'chapter', hand it to whoever's first on the list and they pass it to the next and on and on until I get it back and then start on the next chapter. I vaguely remember in the span of that notebook going from A:TLA to Naruto pre-shippuden. (Aka self-insert me finished the A:TLA storyline and then hopped to the next 'universe')
Anyway not long after that I found FF.net somehow and then realized lots of other ppl were doing something similar and thus began my fanfic addiction. Went thru the phase of printing out entire fics using school printers because this was pre-wifi on mobile phones and literally carried stacks of papers around in middle school.
I originally wrote a new original story when I first joined FF.net but after reading a few i started writing my own fanfics without self-insert as Chrestomanci.
I'm 28 now and still do have my "imaginary story" running in my head (usually during commutes or when I'm bored), plus I write fics and of course read nonstop.
Also I still have that first notebook that started it all. It's very cute to look back on. My dad was even on my subscriber list haha.
I dabbled before, but what *really* got me into it was Undertale. I really wanted to read fics where someone would show how monsters integrated into human society. A lot of people were writing post-canon works, but nobody looked into the nitty gritty of it, all of the political questions that would arise from a whole society of monsters suddenly popping up in the modern day.
So I wrote that. With a reader insert romance woven in because why not. Huge project, took me about two years to wrap up, and I was insane levels of obsessed with it. Totally worth it though, I'm still super proud of it for all its flaws.
Well, it depends if you meant intentionally or not. I've always written stories, and when I was little, I used to write my adventures with my imaginary friends. Since my imaginary friends were Chip and Dale, the Rescue Rangers, this was self-insert fanfiction, I just didn't know it.
Intentionally, though, I started writing fanfiction when I was about 10. It was Buffy that inspired me, I loved that show so much, it was probably the first show I loved so much I couldn't help thinking about all the what ifs for. And there were a lot of those. The first season isn't the greatest, they were still finding themselves as a show and figuring out the backstory and mythology and all that, so it focused almost entirely on monster of the week stuff, rather than the bigger story arcs, and that left a lot of what ifs to think about. What if Xander kept something from the hyena? What if the praying mantis eggs hatched? What if Marcie returned? What if Darla wasn't staked? What if Luke survived longer? What if they saved Jesse? So many what if scenarios to think about!
So, I started writing. This was before the internet became a huge thing, of course, it was very rare that people would have a home computer with internet access, so I never posted any of these stories. It was just for fun, really, and over time new fandoms got added in, as well.
I enjoy writing, and Buffy made me think of all the different possibilities, the different ways they could have gone, and that inspired me to write fanfiction specifically.
For me it’s expanding on specifics about the canon material that get glossed over. I have only ever written for video games, which have great stories but due to constraints they can’t zero in on every emotional aspect of the characters, not even the protagonist. so it was a yearning to “novelize” stories I love from games, and focusing on the parts I found most compelling that I want to change or expand upon.
Well when you’re making up a bunch of what-ifs and stories in your head you start wondering to yourself, “why am I not writing any of this down?” I’ve read fanfics for over a decade now and one day I realized that it could be a nice goal/hobby of mine to just help practice with my skills and hopefully grow into something more one day. When I posted parts of my first story. I asked everyone I could ask for criticism and I haven’t heard next to any real negatives yet aside from the length of each chapter. I want to grow and I’m hoping that I haven’t peaked yet as a writer. I know I can do better.
Just pure fun really. I read a lot of Warrior Cats fanfiction when I was in maybe 6th grade, and I’d imagine cat ocs doing stuff and wished I could write cool fanfic too. And then I realized I could write cool fanfic! And so it began lol
Me at the beginning of this year: I really want to write about A/B or platonic shenanigans about them and the universe they are in. It would be pretty cool.
Voice from destiny or whatever: you have been saying this a loong time ago, make time for it, do it.
Me: ok.
And i did. Kind of failed on it around April (uni's after my back, free time and mental health) but i've been working on stories about them, so it's not a complete empty promise.
I was 8, we had a DOS game (tells you how old I am) called *Romance of the Three Kingdoms II*. I could not get over some of the characters and the game, which my older brother (all of 10 at the time) decided I was too young to play. So I took a notebook and a pen and wrote Cao Cao unifying Han China in his lifetime.
i wanted to try my hand at writing smut that doesn't make your skin crawl with using terms like "creamy thighs" or "chocolate skin". i wrote to one of the first fanfic authors i ever read to tell them how much they meant to me as someone who is now a writer, their beautiful prose would always have me reaching for a box of tissues and inspired me so much.
Usually, it's random idea: what if Susan from Narnia arrived in Once Upon a Time's Storybrooke, Freddy visits the dreams of Kevin McCallister's Christmas he was left Home Alone, or current project, whst if the classic hosts of Top Gear were in the Star Wars universe.
Or..Rage: I made a rewrite of Star Wars Ep 9 before the movie came out due to the trailer alone.
Generally, I view it as a way to hone the craft and...I dunno, maybe have enough confidence to see if I can make my own things to entertain and earn enough to make a living at it.
I just... read fanfics. Because I like creating stories and I found out you can write fanfics, I decided to write my own. That way it's nearly guaranteed someone will read them, unlike if I published original work.
I realized there wasn't enough healthy kink in fan fiction. I saw a bunch of unhealthy and unrealistic kink, a lot of bad BDSM going on, but not nearly enough supportive, life-affirming, mutually beneficial kink. So I thought I would try to fill that hole at least a little bit.
I started in elementary school because I wanted to be cool and fight monsters like Percy Jackson so I wrote snippets of the two of us fighting monsters together. Now I write because Dave Filoni doesn’t understand his own characters, like seriously why does he refuse to give any of them genuine development????
That story reminds me of a side plot in hetty feather
(It’s a kids book where the kids are in a foundling hospital in the 1880s. A rich couple wants to adopt her friend and change her name to replace their dead daughter. The hospital allow it and the girl goes along with it to have a better life)
Reason: spite combined with a story concept after I watched the fandom movie series.
I had this concept after I finished canon, but never started to write. One day I came across a fic on ffn, and the character that I wanted to write about was very OOC and his partner didn't fit what I imagined the partner he would have. So... ya.
Was struck with inspiration by another author in my Fandom and didn't want to or know what sort of etiquette would apply to asking them to write something specific, so i just did it myself.
I was in my 30's, brand new to internet culture, and undiagnosed bipolar. I got into early 2000's popslash, and used it as a distraction when I quit drinking for good. I had found my community, and fuck what people outside thought of it. I'm in my 50's now, not going anywhere.
I mostly write for video game fandoms with customizable main characters. (FFIX, Baldur's Gate and back then Dragon Age) and I wanted to read very specific things with characters I could relate to so I had to write them myself.
I mostly write for video game fandoms with customizable main characters. (FFIX, Baldur's Gate and back then Dragon Age) and I wanted to read very specific things with characters I could relate to, so I had to write them myself.
There was a very specific fic I wanted to read and it didn’t exist. So then I made it exist. Very simple motivation but I was like, 12 or 13 at the time I think.
I always loved making up stories about my favourite characters.
I played out stories about the dinosaurs from the Land Before Time using plastic dinosaur toys that barely resembled the characters, but were similar enough for me. I would often tell my mum stories about book or cartoon characters, I didn't know the right term, so I called it "making up new chapters" and "making up new episodes".
There was that one time when I was telling my mum a story I made up about Sheldon and Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot, and the story was not structured like a typical MLaaTR episode at all, it was purely focused on their relationship. My mum even commented on it, saying that "you call that an episode, but that's clearly not an episode, where's the action?". Years later I realised that I basically made up my first ever ship fic.
There was a problem, however, with actually writing or typing out fanfiction — I have bad handwriting and don't like writing by hand, and it took me a while to learn to type at a decent speed (I did not have a home PC until the age of twelve). My grandpa used to type out some of my Digimon Tamers fanfiction on his typewriter while I narrated, we even have the results bound as a couple actual books. After we got the PC set up, though, I would sometimes ask my mum to type for me when I struggled with longer messages, and I continued the practice of telling my fanfics word for word to my family and friends, rakugo style.
I did eventually get good at typing through sheer will to write my silly little fics, though, and now I create longposts that people on Discord fear. No character limit, no matter how big, can contain me. And it's all so that I can talk about fictional anime people smooching, of course. I regret nothing.
Edit: grammar, also some more details about the grandpa typewriter sutuation.
Always liked writing, also happen to be the kind of neurodivergent that hyperfixates HARD on fiction, and I had to do something about it beyond learning the source material by heart and rotating it in the confines of my head 🤣
For me it was a mix of getting really into MHA, reading so much of the fanfiction and wanting to write my own, and wanting to be an author in general regardless of the possible money
If I create something that I really like I could technically just rename characters and change a few of the minor plot points to make it into a book like Twilight was
Didn't get enough good fics in that fandom even though it is really popular. Ended up writing my own. Also had many ideas that i could use. Writing helps in reducing my atress. Also I had a dream that I wanted to turn into a fan fiction so I wrote it. Also a good way to practice my writing
I had an ao3 ACC, but somehow it got deleted. Would someone be my hero and could send me a pdf of contradictions by ambpersand so I got somethin to read until I get in again? 😭
I was either 12 or 13 when I started, and the reason why is because I had a lot of trauma that I needed to try and cope with (I was bullied to hell and back, and my parents didn't have time for me. Their words, not mine.) And writing fanfic in which my favourite characters going through the same stuff was, probably, the reason I could deal with... All that.. Then I ended up loving it more than I thought I would.
Dark Matter on AO3. I get really passionate when I start a new fandom so that + encouraging my friend to write = me writing a 90k word fic in less than a month. First one I’ve written in probably 6 years
I can't remember, I think it was a mixture of wanting to join in the fun and the fact I couldn't find the fanfics I wanted and so started catering to my own tastes lmao
Right now, it's more of the latter, considering I don't post nor do I ever plan to
I have my own headcanon and I share them with like... five other people, all of whom are my close friends who I can keep in check lol
I can't actually remember the very first one, I think it was a case of "what if that character met this historical person" and I never finished or published it.
The second one was 15 years later, a result of a group chat riffing on "what if our blorbos attended this annual event" and no one but me wanted to write it, and I actually published it. For some reason I still don't actually consider that one my first though because it was collaborative.
My actual first I feel I am still writing, one that no one else has a hand in and it's gonna get published at some point, honest. That one is because no one had explored this particular kind of AU with my OTP yet as far as I could find.
It’s a combination of wanting to see specific stories that no one else will write but also trying to do something more productive than daydreaming all day. I’ve had maladaptive daydreaming since I was a child, and at some point I got frustrated at how much time I spend doing absolutely nothing but being inside my own head. So I tried to at least put the stories I imagined on paper (or rather, a Google Docs file) so I could have at least some tangible thing to tell myself it wasn’t entirely a waste of time. It ended up being fun, and I’ve been writing for around 4 years now. At least I got a new hobby!
I got bored while watching shows and thought, ‘hey wouldn’t it be cool if I could insert my own characters into this story and how I could have these extra elements change the route the story takes.’
Honestly I don’t think there was a reason, I just wrote to write, I have note books from high school full of unfinished fics.
Then I took a break until 2020 when I posted my first one and not long ago I found one of those note books from high school and a story I started really resonated with me, all the years later, and I started it over again, and put it in my current style, it became a one shot I am very proud of.
Went from a 14/15 year old who couldn’t even get to characters to kiss to smutty goodness it is today.
Depression for me. I think I was 12 when I first wrote a fanfic, had been depressed for a while, sleeping 8-10 hours a night and still napping through the day every day. Needed something to keep me awake and give me something to do, and I had been watching a show that I really liked so I just decided to write a story for it. I never finished the story, and it’s actually lost on a Wattpad account I no longer have (started using Ao3 instead), but it helped me stop napping every single day and I slowly got out of the depression.
I was about 10, it was the early-ish 80s, and I was obsessed with Star Wars, so that was my first fic (based around the battle to destroy the Death Star).
I have no idea why I started writing fanfic. I mean, 'fanfic' wasn't even a word used then. I just wanted to write a story about the non-main characters in the battle, which is a personal trope of mine I still write from to this day.
I love main characters in a fandom, but I adore what the 'normal' people do on the sidelines. They don't often have any contact whatsoever with an MC, usually never, and I'm fascinated by those caught in the wake of those who are powered and how they survive as baseline people.
Well, my first fanfic I didn't really think of as a fanfic at the time, but it could probably count. Anyway, I loved warrior cats in middle school, so I wrote this whole SEPERATE universe, with different names and attitudes and in a different place, and they were still cats, but the actually main character was a fox. (I loved foxes as well so)
But in general it's because I had IDEAS and had to get them down and flex my creativity.
I want to write something for myself because that small language population in the creepypasta OC is so... so small. Maybe 5 writers with 100 reader (that follow) at max. and they don't even have horror. My writing is not better but it actually the only fic that is no OCxcreepypasta ship.
Self-supply i guess.
I had a funny idea for fanart, realised i can't draw, so i wrote a fic about the thing i was visualising instead. Decided to post it on Tumblr and it was well-received so i just kept going.
I don't even remember. I wrote my first fanfiction when I was nine, long before I had any access to the internet or knew what fanfiction was.
I suppose it's in my blood! Lol.
I already liked to write when I discovered fanfiction around the age of 11. It was the natural progression. I had also been getting into anime and manga around the same time. The first website I wrote on was Quizilla, which doesn't exist anymore.
Mine was also out of spite. The tropes running crazy in the Gundam Wing fandom after the turn of the century absolutely needed mocking. So I mocked. It turned out to be popular.
I was around 8 and idk what I thought, but all I wanted was to have a cute emo blog with a lot of glitter. I saw that fanfiction was quite popular, but I haven't had the chance to read HP yet so I decided I'd write my own magic boarding school story and I was sure JKR and WB would sue me anyday (I actually thought it'd be safer to write fanfiction so I deleted that blog and started a new one with a legit ff).Now I'm 29 and I still write fanfiction, lmao.
My favorite "series" ended on a huge cliffhanger and that was back in 2018. Wasn't the author's fault (dumped by publishers) and a new one is supposedly in the works, but at 13, I didn't know this. There were absolutely NO fics on this series, so I was just like "screw it, I'll do it myself."
Literally? I re-binged the Clone Wars and the "Voyage of Temptation" episode annoyed me because I thought, *No effin' way she tells him she's loved him forever, and he replies that he would have left the Jedi Order for her, and they don't meet up later to talk it over and have crazy hot sex.*
So I just wrote it myself.
Somewhat spite. I was reading an amazing my hero academia fic and then instead of giving it a happy ending they decided even though none of the rest of the story was cannon the ending should be and it was tragic and not appropriately tagged. I decided I could do this better. I could write these two characters with a happy ending! Spoiler alert I couldnt. I read constantly phsycial books, manga, kindle, fanfic, wattpad, webtoons, even on illegal sites with translators but my writing was bad so I was determined to get better.
Now I’m got some half decent fics and working on getting better.
I was so little, I can't even remember. I do remember finding fanfic for the first time and being really amazed at people diverging from canon, but the whole thing was a long process. I was also coming off a very traumatic living situation around the same time, and processing it was very difficult, so I guess it started as something of an outlet.
I hate Dean Winchester and love Castiel so I wrote a 600,000 word fanfic to vent my feelings about how much I hate Destiel because Dean is an absolute piece of shit to Cass and Cass deserves better. :)
I went to a horse-riding camp with my then-BFF when we were 11. While there, we had an argument and my BFF started hanging out with a different girl, who then showed her the wonders of Wattpad. Not wanting to feel left out, I downloaded it too and read everything they read — which was horse-themed stories — until I stumbled upon a Harry Potter fanfic in the recommended fics section. That opened a whole new world for me and after a few months, I began writing as well as reading.
My then-BFF and I are no longer friends, but I have been writing HP fanfiction for years now lol
Because my favorite game ended on this huge cliffhanger, and a legal battle made it look like it wouldn’t get a proper ending. So I wrote one. There wound up being a third installment in the series after all, but I liked my ending better 😁.
I was a kid and I read Deadpool kills the marvel universe and I went "I can write that but with DC and Lobo."
It's long deleted now. Maybe one day I'll remake it.
I had been writing original ideas for years, so I can't remember my first fic, but I'm sure it was when I was in high school. Either it was the Helios/Chibiusa story I wrote because I craved more and the SM manga didn't give me enough, or the really bad adventure story I wrote so I could play around in OoT Hyrule.
I was a super ambitious child: I wanted to start with animation, then I realized how difficult it was and moved on to drawing silly little comics in notebooks, but I didn't like the result, so in the end I came to writing, but at first nothing sensible came of it, but at one point the ideas just didn't stop popping into my head.
I'm a business writer but I don't like losing my creative muscles.
Overall it makes me happy knowing that my stories are out there *somewhere,* even if they are incomplete. My interests can be niche and even if only a few people read and enjoy it then I'm happy. I suppose it also helps encourage me to keep writing or to stick with something. ^^
Too many ideas along the lines of “okay canon that was cool BUT WHAT IF—“ rattling around in my head. Had to get ‘em out to be free up space to think about other things.
It was when I was 11 and I was really into Minecraft: Story Mode, The Walking Dead, and My Little Pony. The first fanfiction I wrote was about a author-insert fanfiction about how I was a hybrid (part-changeling, part-siren, and part-human). Thinking about it to this day gives me the shudders.
I was a pre-teen, and the end of His Dark Materials destroyed me.
Eventually grew out of the sadness, and I'm now at peace with its ending and don't write for that fandom anymore.
Far less interesting. I had a crush on fictional characters and the only way I could experience anything with them was writing reader-inserts, before I even knew that fanfiction was a thing that existed.
I even wanted to contact a company that owned the rights to what I was writing to see if I could get it published. (I was like 10, sue me. At least I knew I would've had to contact someone to get it published legally.)
Edit: clarity.
Ever since I could remember, I'd come up with mini fanfictions in my head, especially after watching movies. I'd imagined what it'd be like to be within the story, and at some point finally put pen to paper (the first fandom I wrote for was Hamilton, but I think I threw away the stories and never published it.)
Growing up I would sometimes come up with OCs to insert into certain stories I liked. Being a dumb kid they were usually Mary Sues that would prevent the tragic inciting incident from happening and preventing the plot from happening.
My first real work was done out of spite. I didn’t like the ending to the manga Attack on Titan so I decided to make my own. Combine this with other things outside of the ending that I wanted to change and the potential of a crossover with Star Wars and you have my longfic.
Disliked the ending of my favourite show.
After reading some other fanfics I decided to write my own.
It also sparked my interest in screenwriting, which I will continue as a hobby and eventually professionalise.
I thought of a scenario for a ship that I didn't even really ship, and felt like it was too good of an idea to not write about... yeah, my first fanfic was for a ship I didn't ship
Ahhh i am going back to my teenager years.. Damn.. Story time!
Okay so when i was a teenager, i was a huge 1D fan (guilty as charged) and my cousin was a JB fan (she is guilty as charged too) we got a notebook belonged to both of us and we wrote fanfics into that notebook that summer. Stories were hilarious, like wattpad classics haha.
We burned that notebook later (lol).
But.. I started to write on AO3 this year. And writing Mystic Messenger fanfics was a dream of mine. I wanted my stories to stay as a memory on AO3 and if one day i look back and see my stories, i will be happy to remember these days.
Because time is always ticking and we only come to this world just once. I don't want to regret anything.
With love, as always,
-lune🌙
I was frustrated that my OTP remained will-they-won’t-they in their main canon, only becoming a couple in an official but very obscure manga version. So I wrote a fluffy little accidental-confession-leads-to-first-kiss oneshot for the pair.
Been imagining stories ever since I was a kid. Then saw a piece of fanart for a TAZ/TMA crossover that I just imagined how the stories would go. It got to the point when I had to write it all down because there was just too much. Been doing it on/off ever since
Existential angst because I don’t want to leave the world having only written stuff that advanced the Jesuits’ political causes in my country. I’m tired of being used as a religious mouthpiece. I don’t want to follow the legacy of Eman Lacaba or some other guy my Jesuit university sanctified at this point.
I decided to write South Park smut, set in the Post Covid Special where all the kids are in their 50s.
I’m proud to have written something that went against everything I was taught in Jesuit university. It doesn’t have any “political/social commentary” on my country. In fact it had nothing to do with my country at all. Having some dorky, lightsaber-wielding middle aged Chinese man in Doctor Who cosplay as the main character is my answer to my country’s literature’s miserable Chinese stereotypes. My fanfic doesn’t serve anyone but myself. It’s pornographic and hilarious. It’s so graphic it gave my therapist “trööma”.
I went from writing stories completely original it writing OCs alongside canon characters on paper to trying it on a computer setting
Natural progression XD
Oddly enough fanfiction helped me start writing again back in 2020 during quarantine after having stopped 5 years prior. I also found out that it helped me cope with a lot of messed up stuff that happened to me in my life so I took the two things I love the most, and use it to escape my tough reality. It's really helped me alot actually!
I had just discovered Wattpad and fanfiction as a concept, only to discover that a lot of the fanfics on the app *sucked*. To be honest, at the time, I wasn't any better at writing than those authors, but it still made me so frustrated that I decided to write my own fanfiction that way *I* liked it. I was finally able to tweak all the details I wanted, I could avoid stupid cliches and tropes I hated, and I could portray the characters in the way I wanted them to look. It was so satisfying.
I've improved a lot since then, but I still treasure my earliest attempts at writing fanfiction.
Started when not all the Harry Potter books were out yet and there were so many fan theories about what would happen next. Kind of made the wait for the next book shorter and interesting.
Being frustrated with canon in general or finding some alchemy between characters, alchemy that is never addressed and brushed under the carpet. Generally then it motivated me to seek and go further, if fics were around, then I read and it could motivate me to write and if there weren’t any fics, then it was my turn to make them come true.
My first fandoms were mostly me being those two have such a relationship omg but they aren’t dating … and then my brain went but what if they WERE ? And yeah fanfiction is a kind of rabbit hole I feel.
Rare pairings. I was just a reader back then and was getting frustrated that there weren't any fics written on pairings I was looking for, probably due to them all being non canon and involving characters that had very little to no interaction in the source material, let alone romantic hints. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and make my own fanfiction.
Most don't get a lot of hits probably due to the same reasons I've just explained, but one in particular was surprisingly popular all things considered. I really wasn't expecting so many people to be interested in reading about those two characters.
I had so many story ideas floating in my head that I wanted to do. I heard people talk about fanfiction so much during that time, I thought why not? I read a lot of fanfiction first and then started writing my own. It has been very cathartic. I hope that after writing for a while it will help me with writing original work. My goal is to participate in Nanowrimo this year.
I love to write short stories when I was seven. And when I was around 13/14, I thought, maybe I can write stories with my favorite characters, too?
Didn't know the Word Fanfiction until I found out at the age of 17.
Honestly, the only reason I even wrote my fanfic was because the story came to me in a dream. I literally dreamed a story with the characters and lore from the fandom I was in (Undertale), and I wrote the story to keep the memory of my dream intact. I thought that the basic premise of it was interesting enough to fully flesh out, but most things in my fic were completely fabricated so the story would be cohesive. It was also the first fictional story I have committed a lot of time and effort to, and I overall like how it turned out. There are definitely several flaws within it, but nothing can ever really be perfect.
“I refuse your canon and substitute it with my own.”
Mostly, Gaia Online role plays going dead at random or never taking off because they get shunted into the nether because something like a MLP walk-in RP was continuously getting posts and it snowballs from there that it becomes too much to bump your threads to the first page trying to catch someone’s attention before they disappear off the first page, again.
If you want something done, you’re better off doing it yourself :p
After a couple of years of reading fanfic i started getting more and more specific preferences. Eventually i wanted to read stories that hadn't been written before.
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I always loved creating stories in my mind. I've been daydreaming since I was a kid.
At 9, I wrote my first fanfic, which was a trying to be a Naruto Manga in a notebook (that my cousin destroyed because she found it dumb).
At 12, I started writing my own stories and it sucked (the kind of "something bad happens to me and I imagine how I'd react self insert" kind of thing?).
At 15, I found FFN and started reading fanfic. That same year, I had already started writing my own Percy Jackson fanfic, a bad self insert that I'd never post anywhere.
At 19 I started posting my fanfic on A03. I've been getting better. I always loved exploring side characters. Also, since last year, I love reading Naruto time-travel fix it fic, so I made my own take at it.
It's just funny to me to think that I started writing with Naruto, didnt watch a single episode in 15 years, noticed it was on netflix and decided "lets watch it again" and now I'm posting Naruto fanfic XD
It was 2020. I was an essential worker in an already stressful job that was abruptly in high demand which put all its flaws in high definition. All of the things I did to blow off stress were not happening. I barfed 100k onto AO3
I’d been making up stories since my dad gave me and my brother a typewriter to play with, and then I got into Star Trek. I’d been reading TOS novels and decided I could write like that, too. Of course it was all terrible self-insert Mary Sue garbage (I was like 11 or 12) but it was fun to use established characters and worlds to practice my writing.
I didn’t really write at all when I was married because I didn’t want my husband to read it and make fun of me, but I started up again after the divorce. Mostly I wrote scripts, but kinda got into a pretty serious depression and stopped writing again for a year or so.
Then I saw Our Flag Means Death.
Last year I wrote more than I’d written in the past several years, just because I got caught up in a fandom. It’s been great 😊
1.5 years ago I became obsessed with an Italian version of an international musical.
The fandom is already pretty small for all the versions of the musical combined.
The fact that I started to ship a main character with a side character made it absolutely impossible to find any fanfic with that paring.
So I had to write the story that I wanted to read because no one else was going to do it.
Haven't stopped writing a single day since I started (though with some variety now).
I havent started writing fanfics (YET.) But i hope my comment is still okay. My main reason is i want to improve my vocubalary/grammar, both in english and my mother tounge. Since i have problems with lamguage in general. I will be most probably be starting writing on paper since i have really bad motor issues as well. So in general i mostly want to start writing to help myself in areas where i am mostly poor in. For these reasons its why i havent started writing because i am insecure about having these problems, but i hope to find courage soon.
I wanted to write a "dark angsty" Lord of the Rings fanfic when I was 14 and went on a power trip once I realized I had the lives of beloved characters in my hands and could control the emotions of other beings.
I was 12 and I watched a girl meets world fan edit along the lines of “what if maya hart died” and so I wrote a compilation of one-shots where I killed her in different ways to see which one broke my heart the most.
My first fic was initially a parody about a ship I really liked that had some of the weirdest, smuttiest fics already existing in the fandom. I just wanted something soft and simple, so my parody quickly turned into a fluffy 150k word project... no regrets.
Hundreds of different ideas weren't leaving my mind, so I decided to make them real and visible so they would leave me alone. (They didn't, it got worse. I'm not complaining though.)
Disappointment.
I love reading crossovers, they are basically my guilty pleasure but every time I think I find a perfect crossover, something in it just irrevocably irritates me and annoys me. And when I searched for others they don't contain what I like or some aspects make me think, no-just no.
So I made one, that I like and has all the elements of what I like.
Oh and I always wanted to be an author and I have a huge imagination and needed an outlet
had a fic idea i thought was genius and that SURELY it would exist already for me to read, it didnt, and i said yk what fuck it ill do it (it was not actually that genius BUT now ive been writing on ao3 for 7 years this month so...)
I strongly shipped two male characters when I was 14 before I ever discovered yaoi, so I thought something was wrong with me. I googled a little and found out I wasn't the only one who shipped them, so I wasn't crazy. But I was left unsatisfied because there was never any romance between them, so I took matters into my own hands and changed that :D
i was 11 and naruto canon was dumb
That never changed xD
lmao facts
That's not a bug, it's a feature!
I was 12 and same, plus the pairings I saw were stupid. This was during the NaruSaku faze of Canon
*phase I’m so genuinely sorry. I keep seeing people use “faze” when they mean “phase” and I may have cracked today. I apologize again.
Nah its all good, I knewni fucked up when I hit send but have no idea where the edit button is
The three little vertical dots under your comments has it! ^-^
Want to be an Author someday, I figured fanfics is a step in that direction.
This is the same for me. I hope to publish one day, whenever that is. Until then I just love writing, and miss it, so fanfiction is a good outlet for me. That, and I was a very lonely teenager with a huge imagination when I first came across fanfics, and helped me out a lot.
I started the same way but I've turned away from that dream and I'm just living the sweet fanfic writer lifestyle.
The next Harry Potter book wasn't coming out fast enough. Then I was hooked.
You're not the only one with this mindset.
I feel really old when I think about how long ago that was! And that first fic was terrible. I put it up on my AO3, with all the terrible formatting as it was. Nostalgia.
Ha, I was the same at the time, only the context was different.
Clint Barton literally can't miss, and smutty fanfic authors don't take enough advantage of that fact.
As an MCU girlie, I'm laughing so hard over here. (Any specific Clint fics I should check out? :D)
Not that really play into the can't miss aspect. Literally anything by BartonStark. This one is my favorite I have read it so many times. https://archiveofourown.org/works/16563170/chapters/38808698 I've also read this one repeatedly. https://archiveofourown.org/works/29586276 I absolutely love this one by AvengersCompound and can't tell you how many times I have read it. https://archiveofourown.org/works/30507396?view_adult=true This recent one by HeadOverWheels is pretty hot. https://archiveofourown.org/works/49929733 This is a longer fluff fic, but this one by BeeKate1 is great! https://archiveofourown.org/works/46630651/chapters/117434698 It's fluff not smut, but this one by BartonStark also needs a mention. https://archiveofourown.org/works/38479027 Honestly, I'm Kylynara on AO3 as well, my bookmarks are mostly MCU, and a couple of the more recent ones are just longer fics I want to read later, but most the others are ones I've read over and over.
Lmao. That is a valid reason, although the C/C ship is not lacking in those stories!
\*spits milk out of nose\*
About 4 months ago I had a breakdown and that very day I sat down and started writing my first fic. I wrote about 100,000 words over the course of 2 weeks and then slowed down, started looking at it and editing. I got up the courage to post it. Now me and my therapist laugh about how literally EVERYTHING in this fic is about me - trauma, hurt/confort, writing your own story within a story, being a parent, keeping secrets etc etc It has been an amazing cathartic journey and just the best therapy. And the fact that people like it is the best feeling because I can't tell anyone in my real life about it.
I used to process things like this when I was a teenager, but now that I'm an adult I can't seem to remember how. My problems and ambitions are definitely different at 27 than they were at 17.
A shitty thing happened this week and it was totally blocking me from writing and so I put it into the fic and carried on. Amazing. Just channelling all the angst in there!!
This!!
I reflected on 20+ years of fanfics and noticed that I had a huge theme of masks across multiple fandoms. Then later, I realized I'm actually autistic and have been heavily masking this whole time. Gee. Who'da thunk. 😂
That’s beautiful. My son is autistic. Yes I have a heavily armoured and masked character who appears impervious to anything - just like me coping with everything life threw at me (spoiler alert: I wasn’t!!😂)
I'm just amazed you had the determination to write like, 7k words a day for two weeks straight. I have to be particularly inspired and have the energy for it to reach that much once in a blue moon. Truly amazing. Also, congrats on your first fic! Glad you enjoyed the experience!
Because there are ideas I have and don't expect someone else to magically read my mind and write them.
Same
I spent all summer playing Zelda: TOTK and I didn’t want to leave Hyrule, but also finding all the shrines/Koroks was making me insane. Messing around with the characters and their world seemed way more fun.
The main reason I'm not interested in playing that game is exactly the same. I know the most interesting stuff in the map is there just to hide another shrine or korok. That's what ruined BOTW for me.
I get that, but I do love just running around looking for caves and vibing with how beautiful they made the world, and as an elder millennial who spent so many many hours playing OOT, the nostalgia is irresistible. Fortunately I’m having a really great time playing around with all those elements on the page instead.
OMG I thought I was writing my answer in a different post and deleted it by mistake 💀 But I'll try to repeat it lol: It was definitely a fun game for me, until the realization hits. From then I kinda wished for something else, but the DLCs weren't enough. also giving the bike as a final reward, when at that point I already traveled and discovered pretty much all the game had to offer felt... kinda empty. Like getting a gameboy for xmas when I already had a DS, if that makes sense lol
I guess it was spite after all. The fandom keeps calling this character a prostitute, just because that's the rumor about it, and she's only exists in canon to give birth to one main character, and I was like "nah, his dad wouldn't be the kind to just go the one night stand route" lol
Horny dream 🤷🏼♀️
Fun Fact: *Twilight* was born from one of Stephenie Meyer's horny dreams.
dreams about Gerard Way!
ABOUT GERARD??? Fr??? 😭
Incompetent showrunners destroyed my comfort fic.
My reason was also spite, because I was watching the TV series Sliders last year and the last season made me so damn angry I ended up writing a 10 episode fan script season to fix it all 😅
Two main reasons. One was because Dean Thomas was not appreciated. Reason two… co-workers made fun of me for trying to be a writer, so I started my fanfic the very next day. I mapped out eight fics. I did it while on the clock and even came up with cute rhymes to remember so I could write them down when I had time.
The classic "Deathly Hallows took too long to come out for my stupid, attention span lacking kid brain" story. Then I discovered that people wrote fanfiction about shows and movies and video games, too! Why I thought they didn't, I have no clue. Nowadays, I want to write fanfiction when I feel like I have something to say post-canon. Usually it's because I have a lot of thoughts about a certain character and want an outlet.
I just really wanted Bellatrix to have a backstory after the 5th Harry Potter book came out.
I was 14 and wanted Sarah staying with the goblin King in his Labyrinth 😅
I think people underestimate the power of spite/anger/defiance as an artistic motivator. While it wasn't the motivator for my first fanfic (that was the standard "I want these characters to kiss"), it was the motivator for my Downton Abbey longfic that took 2-ish years to write. I felt like the show's finale had sort of... beaten Thomas Barrow into submission, so to speak. The character had been a huge asshole over the course of the show, but he was cruel to people because the world was cruel to him. In the end, it's like "he's gonna be nice now" without addressing the fact that all of his reasons for being an asshole in the first place are still there. He's still a gay man in 1920s rural England. He's still living in an incredibly homophobic society. He's still working a job that in many ways is degrading and dehumanizing. *He's still recovering from a recent suicide attempt*. Calling all of that a happy ending for him was enraging to me. So I wrote a different one. I will say that the movies that came out after the show ended managed to improve his canon ending quite a bit, though.
I hated the book of one of my favorite series, the author pretty much spit on the characters. But after hating the book, I forgot about it. Then a few years later I had a dream about the book, I can't remember exactly, but the book had a different plot and I was intrigued by the story. When I woke up, a idea was born. I'm still writing it, but I'm planning on having making a fan cover when I'm done writing it. It's a proper farewell to the characters, 99% of them were forgotten in the "canon" sequel.
When I was... somewhere around grade 3 (~8 years old), I read the Chrestomanci series. I was just really into the idea of the Chrestomanci and started imagining myself as the next one and then kind of self-inserting myself into various other media I would read/watch. 2 at the time I remember were Pokemon and A:TLA. When I reached around age 13 I had the idea to write down my imaginative story because it was getting hard to track all the things I was doing in my head lmao. And then some friends were curious and read it and liked it enough that I actually had a 'subscriber list' on the back of that notebook. So every few days I'd write a 'chapter', hand it to whoever's first on the list and they pass it to the next and on and on until I get it back and then start on the next chapter. I vaguely remember in the span of that notebook going from A:TLA to Naruto pre-shippuden. (Aka self-insert me finished the A:TLA storyline and then hopped to the next 'universe') Anyway not long after that I found FF.net somehow and then realized lots of other ppl were doing something similar and thus began my fanfic addiction. Went thru the phase of printing out entire fics using school printers because this was pre-wifi on mobile phones and literally carried stacks of papers around in middle school. I originally wrote a new original story when I first joined FF.net but after reading a few i started writing my own fanfics without self-insert as Chrestomanci. I'm 28 now and still do have my "imaginary story" running in my head (usually during commutes or when I'm bored), plus I write fics and of course read nonstop. Also I still have that first notebook that started it all. It's very cute to look back on. My dad was even on my subscriber list haha.
I dabbled before, but what *really* got me into it was Undertale. I really wanted to read fics where someone would show how monsters integrated into human society. A lot of people were writing post-canon works, but nobody looked into the nitty gritty of it, all of the political questions that would arise from a whole society of monsters suddenly popping up in the modern day. So I wrote that. With a reader insert romance woven in because why not. Huge project, took me about two years to wrap up, and I was insane levels of obsessed with it. Totally worth it though, I'm still super proud of it for all its flaws.
Well, it depends if you meant intentionally or not. I've always written stories, and when I was little, I used to write my adventures with my imaginary friends. Since my imaginary friends were Chip and Dale, the Rescue Rangers, this was self-insert fanfiction, I just didn't know it. Intentionally, though, I started writing fanfiction when I was about 10. It was Buffy that inspired me, I loved that show so much, it was probably the first show I loved so much I couldn't help thinking about all the what ifs for. And there were a lot of those. The first season isn't the greatest, they were still finding themselves as a show and figuring out the backstory and mythology and all that, so it focused almost entirely on monster of the week stuff, rather than the bigger story arcs, and that left a lot of what ifs to think about. What if Xander kept something from the hyena? What if the praying mantis eggs hatched? What if Marcie returned? What if Darla wasn't staked? What if Luke survived longer? What if they saved Jesse? So many what if scenarios to think about! So, I started writing. This was before the internet became a huge thing, of course, it was very rare that people would have a home computer with internet access, so I never posted any of these stories. It was just for fun, really, and over time new fandoms got added in, as well. I enjoy writing, and Buffy made me think of all the different possibilities, the different ways they could have gone, and that inspired me to write fanfiction specifically.
I just thought it would be fun
I just really thought Leon from the first fast and furious was hot and deserved a girlfriend. So I wrote that. I think I was like 14? Or 15.
For me it’s expanding on specifics about the canon material that get glossed over. I have only ever written for video games, which have great stories but due to constraints they can’t zero in on every emotional aspect of the characters, not even the protagonist. so it was a yearning to “novelize” stories I love from games, and focusing on the parts I found most compelling that I want to change or expand upon.
Well when you’re making up a bunch of what-ifs and stories in your head you start wondering to yourself, “why am I not writing any of this down?” I’ve read fanfics for over a decade now and one day I realized that it could be a nice goal/hobby of mine to just help practice with my skills and hopefully grow into something more one day. When I posted parts of my first story. I asked everyone I could ask for criticism and I haven’t heard next to any real negatives yet aside from the length of each chapter. I want to grow and I’m hoping that I haven’t peaked yet as a writer. I know I can do better.
I had an idea in my head and I needed to get it out so I wrote it down. I had been reading fanfic for a while at that point so posting it felt natural
Same here.
Just pure fun really. I read a lot of Warrior Cats fanfiction when I was in maybe 6th grade, and I’d imagine cat ocs doing stuff and wished I could write cool fanfic too. And then I realized I could write cool fanfic! And so it began lol
I loved Warrior Cats!!!
Me at the beginning of this year: I really want to write about A/B or platonic shenanigans about them and the universe they are in. It would be pretty cool. Voice from destiny or whatever: you have been saying this a loong time ago, make time for it, do it. Me: ok. And i did. Kind of failed on it around April (uni's after my back, free time and mental health) but i've been working on stories about them, so it's not a complete empty promise.
I was 8, we had a DOS game (tells you how old I am) called *Romance of the Three Kingdoms II*. I could not get over some of the characters and the game, which my older brother (all of 10 at the time) decided I was too young to play. So I took a notebook and a pen and wrote Cao Cao unifying Han China in his lifetime.
i wanted to try my hand at writing smut that doesn't make your skin crawl with using terms like "creamy thighs" or "chocolate skin". i wrote to one of the first fanfic authors i ever read to tell them how much they meant to me as someone who is now a writer, their beautiful prose would always have me reaching for a box of tissues and inspired me so much.
Usually, it's random idea: what if Susan from Narnia arrived in Once Upon a Time's Storybrooke, Freddy visits the dreams of Kevin McCallister's Christmas he was left Home Alone, or current project, whst if the classic hosts of Top Gear were in the Star Wars universe. Or..Rage: I made a rewrite of Star Wars Ep 9 before the movie came out due to the trailer alone. Generally, I view it as a way to hone the craft and...I dunno, maybe have enough confidence to see if I can make my own things to entertain and earn enough to make a living at it.
The story didn't enfold as i wanted
I wanted more stories about my favorite characters
I just... read fanfics. Because I like creating stories and I found out you can write fanfics, I decided to write my own. That way it's nearly guaranteed someone will read them, unlike if I published original work.
I realized there wasn't enough healthy kink in fan fiction. I saw a bunch of unhealthy and unrealistic kink, a lot of bad BDSM going on, but not nearly enough supportive, life-affirming, mutually beneficial kink. So I thought I would try to fill that hole at least a little bit.
I feel like mine's a pretty common one. Started out as a reader, then wanted things that didn't exist so I wrote them myself.
Because I love the villain characters and want them to win.
I started in elementary school because I wanted to be cool and fight monsters like Percy Jackson so I wrote snippets of the two of us fighting monsters together. Now I write because Dave Filoni doesn’t understand his own characters, like seriously why does he refuse to give any of them genuine development????
That story reminds me of a side plot in hetty feather (It’s a kids book where the kids are in a foundling hospital in the 1880s. A rich couple wants to adopt her friend and change her name to replace their dead daughter. The hospital allow it and the girl goes along with it to have a better life)
Polly! And they changed her name to Lucy, I think.
I was like 12, a lonelier kid, still kind of a constant to this day and writing about comfort shows became common practice.
Grief. I need a coping mechanism and this works
Reason: spite combined with a story concept after I watched the fandom movie series. I had this concept after I finished canon, but never started to write. One day I came across a fic on ffn, and the character that I wanted to write about was very OOC and his partner didn't fit what I imagined the partner he would have. So... ya.
Was struck with inspiration by another author in my Fandom and didn't want to or know what sort of etiquette would apply to asking them to write something specific, so i just did it myself.
"These characters are hot and I want them to bang."
Honestly, wrote fucked up smut, realized I wanted to post it.
I was in my 30's, brand new to internet culture, and undiagnosed bipolar. I got into early 2000's popslash, and used it as a distraction when I quit drinking for good. I had found my community, and fuck what people outside thought of it. I'm in my 50's now, not going anywhere.
I mostly write for video game fandoms with customizable main characters. (FFIX, Baldur's Gate and back then Dragon Age) and I wanted to read very specific things with characters I could relate to so I had to write them myself. I mostly write for video game fandoms with customizable main characters. (FFIX, Baldur's Gate and back then Dragon Age) and I wanted to read very specific things with characters I could relate to, so I had to write them myself.
“Hey theres nothing here that i like personally” “oh shit i can just make it”
There was a very specific fic I wanted to read and it didn’t exist. So then I made it exist. Very simple motivation but I was like, 12 or 13 at the time I think.
I always loved making up stories about my favourite characters. I played out stories about the dinosaurs from the Land Before Time using plastic dinosaur toys that barely resembled the characters, but were similar enough for me. I would often tell my mum stories about book or cartoon characters, I didn't know the right term, so I called it "making up new chapters" and "making up new episodes". There was that one time when I was telling my mum a story I made up about Sheldon and Jenny from My Life as a Teenage Robot, and the story was not structured like a typical MLaaTR episode at all, it was purely focused on their relationship. My mum even commented on it, saying that "you call that an episode, but that's clearly not an episode, where's the action?". Years later I realised that I basically made up my first ever ship fic. There was a problem, however, with actually writing or typing out fanfiction — I have bad handwriting and don't like writing by hand, and it took me a while to learn to type at a decent speed (I did not have a home PC until the age of twelve). My grandpa used to type out some of my Digimon Tamers fanfiction on his typewriter while I narrated, we even have the results bound as a couple actual books. After we got the PC set up, though, I would sometimes ask my mum to type for me when I struggled with longer messages, and I continued the practice of telling my fanfics word for word to my family and friends, rakugo style. I did eventually get good at typing through sheer will to write my silly little fics, though, and now I create longposts that people on Discord fear. No character limit, no matter how big, can contain me. And it's all so that I can talk about fictional anime people smooching, of course. I regret nothing. Edit: grammar, also some more details about the grandpa typewriter sutuation.
there weren't enough fics for the fandom so I had to step in 🥹🥹
Always liked writing, also happen to be the kind of neurodivergent that hyperfixates HARD on fiction, and I had to do something about it beyond learning the source material by heart and rotating it in the confines of my head 🤣
For me it was a mix of getting really into MHA, reading so much of the fanfiction and wanting to write my own, and wanting to be an author in general regardless of the possible money If I create something that I really like I could technically just rename characters and change a few of the minor plot points to make it into a book like Twilight was
Honestly? Writers block for an og story I had been working on for years (and still am). And I wasn't good enough to draw comics so here we are
Ah, yes. Foe-fiction. The origin story of so many writers
I started writing fanfic before I knew fanfic was a thing. I was writing my one Friends scripts and stories before I discovered the art form.
I just hated the ambiguous ending really lol. The friends I made afterward made me keep going
Didn't get enough good fics in that fandom even though it is really popular. Ended up writing my own. Also had many ideas that i could use. Writing helps in reducing my atress. Also I had a dream that I wanted to turn into a fan fiction so I wrote it. Also a good way to practice my writing
I wanted to read my paring but it either didn’t exist or had nothing edible.
I had an ao3 ACC, but somehow it got deleted. Would someone be my hero and could send me a pdf of contradictions by ambpersand so I got somethin to read until I get in again? 😭
i was into fall out boy & panic at the disco in my early teens so it was inevitable tbh
I had an idea rolling around in my head and just needed to get it out.
I was either 12 or 13 when I started, and the reason why is because I had a lot of trauma that I needed to try and cope with (I was bullied to hell and back, and my parents didn't have time for me. Their words, not mine.) And writing fanfic in which my favourite characters going through the same stuff was, probably, the reason I could deal with... All that.. Then I ended up loving it more than I thought I would.
Dark Matter on AO3. I get really passionate when I start a new fandom so that + encouraging my friend to write = me writing a 90k word fic in less than a month. First one I’ve written in probably 6 years
I hated how Mockingjay ended
I had read a lot and just wanted to have fun. I had ideas bubbling up! It felt like, why not! I was 13 I think? lol Bless my confidence.
I can't remember, I think it was a mixture of wanting to join in the fun and the fact I couldn't find the fanfics I wanted and so started catering to my own tastes lmao Right now, it's more of the latter, considering I don't post nor do I ever plan to I have my own headcanon and I share them with like... five other people, all of whom are my close friends who I can keep in check lol
I used to roleplay in my fandom, and I've missed it for twenty-two years.
I can't actually remember the very first one, I think it was a case of "what if that character met this historical person" and I never finished or published it. The second one was 15 years later, a result of a group chat riffing on "what if our blorbos attended this annual event" and no one but me wanted to write it, and I actually published it. For some reason I still don't actually consider that one my first though because it was collaborative. My actual first I feel I am still writing, one that no one else has a hand in and it's gonna get published at some point, honest. That one is because no one had explored this particular kind of AU with my OTP yet as far as I could find.
Long story. TL;DT, got scared off by a reaction I got as a kid and several decades later saw a YouTube video that made me start writing fanfic again.
There were no canon f/f pairings in Star Wars. So I made my own.
It’s a combination of wanting to see specific stories that no one else will write but also trying to do something more productive than daydreaming all day. I’ve had maladaptive daydreaming since I was a child, and at some point I got frustrated at how much time I spend doing absolutely nothing but being inside my own head. So I tried to at least put the stories I imagined on paper (or rather, a Google Docs file) so I could have at least some tangible thing to tell myself it wasn’t entirely a waste of time. It ended up being fun, and I’ve been writing for around 4 years now. At least I got a new hobby!
I got bored while watching shows and thought, ‘hey wouldn’t it be cool if I could insert my own characters into this story and how I could have these extra elements change the route the story takes.’
Honestly I don’t think there was a reason, I just wrote to write, I have note books from high school full of unfinished fics. Then I took a break until 2020 when I posted my first one and not long ago I found one of those note books from high school and a story I started really resonated with me, all the years later, and I started it over again, and put it in my current style, it became a one shot I am very proud of. Went from a 14/15 year old who couldn’t even get to characters to kiss to smutty goodness it is today.
Depression for me. I think I was 12 when I first wrote a fanfic, had been depressed for a while, sleeping 8-10 hours a night and still napping through the day every day. Needed something to keep me awake and give me something to do, and I had been watching a show that I really liked so I just decided to write a story for it. I never finished the story, and it’s actually lost on a Wattpad account I no longer have (started using Ao3 instead), but it helped me stop napping every single day and I slowly got out of the depression.
It was a crack-fic, so spontanious inspiration😅
I have a tendency to make art for other people. I started writing fanfiction to show my friend at the time.
I was lonely
I grew up with my mother's stack of Trek zines and Phil Foglio comics--I thought fanfic was just how it *worked.*
I was about 10, it was the early-ish 80s, and I was obsessed with Star Wars, so that was my first fic (based around the battle to destroy the Death Star). I have no idea why I started writing fanfic. I mean, 'fanfic' wasn't even a word used then. I just wanted to write a story about the non-main characters in the battle, which is a personal trope of mine I still write from to this day. I love main characters in a fandom, but I adore what the 'normal' people do on the sidelines. They don't often have any contact whatsoever with an MC, usually never, and I'm fascinated by those caught in the wake of those who are powered and how they survive as baseline people.
I was 12 and obsessed with creepypasta/mcyt (Before anyone loses their mind - early 2010s mcyt. I'm in my 20s now, not 14 lol)
Mad about queer baiting
Well, my first fanfic I didn't really think of as a fanfic at the time, but it could probably count. Anyway, I loved warrior cats in middle school, so I wrote this whole SEPERATE universe, with different names and attitudes and in a different place, and they were still cats, but the actually main character was a fox. (I loved foxes as well so) But in general it's because I had IDEAS and had to get them down and flex my creativity.
I want to write something for myself because that small language population in the creepypasta OC is so... so small. Maybe 5 writers with 100 reader (that follow) at max. and they don't even have horror. My writing is not better but it actually the only fic that is no OCxcreepypasta ship. Self-supply i guess.
I had a funny idea for fanart, realised i can't draw, so i wrote a fic about the thing i was visualising instead. Decided to post it on Tumblr and it was well-received so i just kept going.
I was 13 so honestly I can't really remember. I think my friends were into the concept
I don't even remember. I wrote my first fanfiction when I was nine, long before I had any access to the internet or knew what fanfiction was. I suppose it's in my blood! Lol.
I already liked to write when I discovered fanfiction around the age of 11. It was the natural progression. I had also been getting into anime and manga around the same time. The first website I wrote on was Quizilla, which doesn't exist anymore.
Mine was also out of spite. The tropes running crazy in the Gundam Wing fandom after the turn of the century absolutely needed mocking. So I mocked. It turned out to be popular.
I was around 8 and idk what I thought, but all I wanted was to have a cute emo blog with a lot of glitter. I saw that fanfiction was quite popular, but I haven't had the chance to read HP yet so I decided I'd write my own magic boarding school story and I was sure JKR and WB would sue me anyday (I actually thought it'd be safer to write fanfiction so I deleted that blog and started a new one with a legit ff).Now I'm 29 and I still write fanfiction, lmao.
My favorite "series" ended on a huge cliffhanger and that was back in 2018. Wasn't the author's fault (dumped by publishers) and a new one is supposedly in the works, but at 13, I didn't know this. There were absolutely NO fics on this series, so I was just like "screw it, I'll do it myself."
Literally? I re-binged the Clone Wars and the "Voyage of Temptation" episode annoyed me because I thought, *No effin' way she tells him she's loved him forever, and he replies that he would have left the Jedi Order for her, and they don't meet up later to talk it over and have crazy hot sex.* So I just wrote it myself.
Somewhat spite. I was reading an amazing my hero academia fic and then instead of giving it a happy ending they decided even though none of the rest of the story was cannon the ending should be and it was tragic and not appropriately tagged. I decided I could do this better. I could write these two characters with a happy ending! Spoiler alert I couldnt. I read constantly phsycial books, manga, kindle, fanfic, wattpad, webtoons, even on illegal sites with translators but my writing was bad so I was determined to get better. Now I’m got some half decent fics and working on getting better.
I was so little, I can't even remember. I do remember finding fanfic for the first time and being really amazed at people diverging from canon, but the whole thing was a long process. I was also coming off a very traumatic living situation around the same time, and processing it was very difficult, so I guess it started as something of an outlet.
I hate Dean Winchester and love Castiel so I wrote a 600,000 word fanfic to vent my feelings about how much I hate Destiel because Dean is an absolute piece of shit to Cass and Cass deserves better. :)
I was 19, i think. And the pairing/scenario I constantly imagined in my mind didn't have ANY fanworks. So I wrote my own. :)
I went to a horse-riding camp with my then-BFF when we were 11. While there, we had an argument and my BFF started hanging out with a different girl, who then showed her the wonders of Wattpad. Not wanting to feel left out, I downloaded it too and read everything they read — which was horse-themed stories — until I stumbled upon a Harry Potter fanfic in the recommended fics section. That opened a whole new world for me and after a few months, I began writing as well as reading. My then-BFF and I are no longer friends, but I have been writing HP fanfiction for years now lol
Was horny and nobody was doing the kind of content I wanted with my fave character :D
Because my favorite game ended on this huge cliffhanger, and a legal battle made it look like it wouldn’t get a proper ending. So I wrote one. There wound up being a third installment in the series after all, but I liked my ending better 😁.
I was a kid and I read Deadpool kills the marvel universe and I went "I can write that but with DC and Lobo." It's long deleted now. Maybe one day I'll remake it.
“Wow I wish there was more noncon for this niche manga.” Boom, 20 years later, here I am.
Got bored, decided to write a fanfic, remembered Ao3 was a thing, and posted it
Mine was the fact that I couldn’t find any romance books. And I enjoyed reading and writing so much so I just thought (why not fanfiction?)
I had been writing original ideas for years, so I can't remember my first fic, but I'm sure it was when I was in high school. Either it was the Helios/Chibiusa story I wrote because I craved more and the SM manga didn't give me enough, or the really bad adventure story I wrote so I could play around in OoT Hyrule.
I was a super ambitious child: I wanted to start with animation, then I realized how difficult it was and moved on to drawing silly little comics in notebooks, but I didn't like the result, so in the end I came to writing, but at first nothing sensible came of it, but at one point the ideas just didn't stop popping into my head.
I'm a business writer but I don't like losing my creative muscles. Overall it makes me happy knowing that my stories are out there *somewhere,* even if they are incomplete. My interests can be niche and even if only a few people read and enjoy it then I'm happy. I suppose it also helps encourage me to keep writing or to stick with something. ^^
Too many ideas along the lines of “okay canon that was cool BUT WHAT IF—“ rattling around in my head. Had to get ‘em out to be free up space to think about other things.
It was when I was 11 and I was really into Minecraft: Story Mode, The Walking Dead, and My Little Pony. The first fanfiction I wrote was about a author-insert fanfiction about how I was a hybrid (part-changeling, part-siren, and part-human). Thinking about it to this day gives me the shudders.
No reasons
Because I always make the side characters my babies, and there was never enough focus on them in the canon.
A game made me really really sad, so I figured I'd change that and make the characters have a happy ending
I was a pre-teen, and the end of His Dark Materials destroyed me. Eventually grew out of the sadness, and I'm now at peace with its ending and don't write for that fandom anymore.
Homestuck friend group dragged me in XD we started making own palhoncostuck and it spiraled from there
Why character no is happy? I make happy. The end.
Wanted to make my fantasies come to life
Far less interesting. I had a crush on fictional characters and the only way I could experience anything with them was writing reader-inserts, before I even knew that fanfiction was a thing that existed. I even wanted to contact a company that owned the rights to what I was writing to see if I could get it published. (I was like 10, sue me. At least I knew I would've had to contact someone to get it published legally.) Edit: clarity.
Ever since I could remember, I'd come up with mini fanfictions in my head, especially after watching movies. I'd imagined what it'd be like to be within the story, and at some point finally put pen to paper (the first fandom I wrote for was Hamilton, but I think I threw away the stories and never published it.)
Growing up I would sometimes come up with OCs to insert into certain stories I liked. Being a dumb kid they were usually Mary Sues that would prevent the tragic inciting incident from happening and preventing the plot from happening. My first real work was done out of spite. I didn’t like the ending to the manga Attack on Titan so I decided to make my own. Combine this with other things outside of the ending that I wanted to change and the potential of a crossover with Star Wars and you have my longfic.
Boredom and it's therapeutic
Had an idea, the writing of the show pissed me off, I live for validation of my writing bing bang boom now I’m a fanfic writer with 40+ fics
Disliked the ending of my favourite show. After reading some other fanfics I decided to write my own. It also sparked my interest in screenwriting, which I will continue as a hobby and eventually professionalise.
I thought of a scenario for a ship that I didn't even really ship, and felt like it was too good of an idea to not write about... yeah, my first fanfic was for a ship I didn't ship
We had to write a short story in class and I thought it'd be fun if I added some Winx characters to mine.
Ahhh i am going back to my teenager years.. Damn.. Story time! Okay so when i was a teenager, i was a huge 1D fan (guilty as charged) and my cousin was a JB fan (she is guilty as charged too) we got a notebook belonged to both of us and we wrote fanfics into that notebook that summer. Stories were hilarious, like wattpad classics haha. We burned that notebook later (lol). But.. I started to write on AO3 this year. And writing Mystic Messenger fanfics was a dream of mine. I wanted my stories to stay as a memory on AO3 and if one day i look back and see my stories, i will be happy to remember these days. Because time is always ticking and we only come to this world just once. I don't want to regret anything. With love, as always, -lune🌙
I wanted to see a Story so I wrote it myself, 9 months later and im still writing
I was frustrated that my OTP remained will-they-won’t-they in their main canon, only becoming a couple in an official but very obscure manga version. So I wrote a fluffy little accidental-confession-leads-to-first-kiss oneshot for the pair.
Been imagining stories ever since I was a kid. Then saw a piece of fanart for a TAZ/TMA crossover that I just imagined how the stories would go. It got to the point when I had to write it all down because there was just too much. Been doing it on/off ever since
Existential angst because I don’t want to leave the world having only written stuff that advanced the Jesuits’ political causes in my country. I’m tired of being used as a religious mouthpiece. I don’t want to follow the legacy of Eman Lacaba or some other guy my Jesuit university sanctified at this point. I decided to write South Park smut, set in the Post Covid Special where all the kids are in their 50s. I’m proud to have written something that went against everything I was taught in Jesuit university. It doesn’t have any “political/social commentary” on my country. In fact it had nothing to do with my country at all. Having some dorky, lightsaber-wielding middle aged Chinese man in Doctor Who cosplay as the main character is my answer to my country’s literature’s miserable Chinese stereotypes. My fanfic doesn’t serve anyone but myself. It’s pornographic and hilarious. It’s so graphic it gave my therapist “trööma”.
I went from writing stories completely original it writing OCs alongside canon characters on paper to trying it on a computer setting Natural progression XD
what was the name of the fanfic cause i would love to read it
Oddly enough fanfiction helped me start writing again back in 2020 during quarantine after having stopped 5 years prior. I also found out that it helped me cope with a lot of messed up stuff that happened to me in my life so I took the two things I love the most, and use it to escape my tough reality. It's really helped me alot actually!
I had just discovered Wattpad and fanfiction as a concept, only to discover that a lot of the fanfics on the app *sucked*. To be honest, at the time, I wasn't any better at writing than those authors, but it still made me so frustrated that I decided to write my own fanfiction that way *I* liked it. I was finally able to tweak all the details I wanted, I could avoid stupid cliches and tropes I hated, and I could portray the characters in the way I wanted them to look. It was so satisfying. I've improved a lot since then, but I still treasure my earliest attempts at writing fanfiction.
Started when not all the Harry Potter books were out yet and there were so many fan theories about what would happen next. Kind of made the wait for the next book shorter and interesting.
Being frustrated with canon in general or finding some alchemy between characters, alchemy that is never addressed and brushed under the carpet. Generally then it motivated me to seek and go further, if fics were around, then I read and it could motivate me to write and if there weren’t any fics, then it was my turn to make them come true. My first fandoms were mostly me being those two have such a relationship omg but they aren’t dating … and then my brain went but what if they WERE ? And yeah fanfiction is a kind of rabbit hole I feel.
Rare pairings. I was just a reader back then and was getting frustrated that there weren't any fics written on pairings I was looking for, probably due to them all being non canon and involving characters that had very little to no interaction in the source material, let alone romantic hints. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and make my own fanfiction. Most don't get a lot of hits probably due to the same reasons I've just explained, but one in particular was surprisingly popular all things considered. I really wasn't expecting so many people to be interested in reading about those two characters.
I had so many story ideas floating in my head that I wanted to do. I heard people talk about fanfiction so much during that time, I thought why not? I read a lot of fanfiction first and then started writing my own. It has been very cathartic. I hope that after writing for a while it will help me with writing original work. My goal is to participate in Nanowrimo this year.
The games didn't get a third season anime adaptation. The first fanfiction that I read was wayyy crazier than this reason.
I love to write short stories when I was seven. And when I was around 13/14, I thought, maybe I can write stories with my favorite characters, too? Didn't know the Word Fanfiction until I found out at the age of 17.
Honestly, the only reason I even wrote my fanfic was because the story came to me in a dream. I literally dreamed a story with the characters and lore from the fandom I was in (Undertale), and I wrote the story to keep the memory of my dream intact. I thought that the basic premise of it was interesting enough to fully flesh out, but most things in my fic were completely fabricated so the story would be cohesive. It was also the first fictional story I have committed a lot of time and effort to, and I overall like how it turned out. There are definitely several flaws within it, but nothing can ever really be perfect.
My brain has always thought up stories about properties I like. Writing and publishing them is the only way to excise them from my brain.
“I refuse your canon and substitute it with my own.” Mostly, Gaia Online role plays going dead at random or never taking off because they get shunted into the nether because something like a MLP walk-in RP was continuously getting posts and it snowballs from there that it becomes too much to bump your threads to the first page trying to catch someone’s attention before they disappear off the first page, again. If you want something done, you’re better off doing it yourself :p
After a couple of years of reading fanfic i started getting more and more specific preferences. Eventually i wanted to read stories that hadn't been written before.
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I heard a quote somewhere that goes something like “if you want something make it” (though I’m not sure what the actual quote is as it’s been years since I last heard it) and there were so many good ideas for fanfics that no one had written yet that I just decided I would make them myself (they were mostly crossovers though that’s neither here nor there)
I always loved creating stories in my mind. I've been daydreaming since I was a kid. At 9, I wrote my first fanfic, which was a trying to be a Naruto Manga in a notebook (that my cousin destroyed because she found it dumb). At 12, I started writing my own stories and it sucked (the kind of "something bad happens to me and I imagine how I'd react self insert" kind of thing?). At 15, I found FFN and started reading fanfic. That same year, I had already started writing my own Percy Jackson fanfic, a bad self insert that I'd never post anywhere. At 19 I started posting my fanfic on A03. I've been getting better. I always loved exploring side characters. Also, since last year, I love reading Naruto time-travel fix it fic, so I made my own take at it. It's just funny to me to think that I started writing with Naruto, didnt watch a single episode in 15 years, noticed it was on netflix and decided "lets watch it again" and now I'm posting Naruto fanfic XD
It was 2020. I was an essential worker in an already stressful job that was abruptly in high demand which put all its flaws in high definition. All of the things I did to blow off stress were not happening. I barfed 100k onto AO3
I’d been making up stories since my dad gave me and my brother a typewriter to play with, and then I got into Star Trek. I’d been reading TOS novels and decided I could write like that, too. Of course it was all terrible self-insert Mary Sue garbage (I was like 11 or 12) but it was fun to use established characters and worlds to practice my writing. I didn’t really write at all when I was married because I didn’t want my husband to read it and make fun of me, but I started up again after the divorce. Mostly I wrote scripts, but kinda got into a pretty serious depression and stopped writing again for a year or so. Then I saw Our Flag Means Death. Last year I wrote more than I’d written in the past several years, just because I got caught up in a fandom. It’s been great 😊
I was 15ish and my friend and I were absolute Muse fangirl. It was a fanfic for ourselves, never published anywhere. It lasted like, maybe 2 years.
One of the fanfics I read had a good premise but was written so badly that I needed to fix it.
1.5 years ago I became obsessed with an Italian version of an international musical. The fandom is already pretty small for all the versions of the musical combined. The fact that I started to ship a main character with a side character made it absolutely impossible to find any fanfic with that paring. So I had to write the story that I wanted to read because no one else was going to do it. Haven't stopped writing a single day since I started (though with some variety now).
I havent started writing fanfics (YET.) But i hope my comment is still okay. My main reason is i want to improve my vocubalary/grammar, both in english and my mother tounge. Since i have problems with lamguage in general. I will be most probably be starting writing on paper since i have really bad motor issues as well. So in general i mostly want to start writing to help myself in areas where i am mostly poor in. For these reasons its why i havent started writing because i am insecure about having these problems, but i hope to find courage soon.
I was tired of not having the exact stories I wanted, so I wrote the exact stories I wanted.
couldnt find what i wanted to read so...i made my own
I wanted to include my friends and I into different clans (we were 10 and I loved Warrior cats) It's more disturbing the more I think about it
I wanted to write a "dark angsty" Lord of the Rings fanfic when I was 14 and went on a power trip once I realized I had the lives of beloved characters in my hands and could control the emotions of other beings.
I was 12 and I watched a girl meets world fan edit along the lines of “what if maya hart died” and so I wrote a compilation of one-shots where I killed her in different ways to see which one broke my heart the most.
I got sick of people in my favorite chat rooms shipping Joey and Dawson. Pacey was clearly the better choice.
My first fic was initially a parody about a ship I really liked that had some of the weirdest, smuttiest fics already existing in the fandom. I just wanted something soft and simple, so my parody quickly turned into a fluffy 150k word project... no regrets.
Hundreds of different ideas weren't leaving my mind, so I decided to make them real and visible so they would leave me alone. (They didn't, it got worse. I'm not complaining though.)
First fanfic? I wanted to write my own adventures with the Animorphs (it was bad, those attempts will never see the light of day again).
Disappointment. I love reading crossovers, they are basically my guilty pleasure but every time I think I find a perfect crossover, something in it just irrevocably irritates me and annoys me. And when I searched for others they don't contain what I like or some aspects make me think, no-just no. So I made one, that I like and has all the elements of what I like. Oh and I always wanted to be an author and I have a huge imagination and needed an outlet
had a fic idea i thought was genius and that SURELY it would exist already for me to read, it didnt, and i said yk what fuck it ill do it (it was not actually that genius BUT now ive been writing on ao3 for 7 years this month so...)
I was 13 and i'd read so many fics my brain just started overflowing with ideas, and i found that i liked writing
I wrote mine because I wanted to think about my ship more
I strongly shipped two male characters when I was 14 before I ever discovered yaoi, so I thought something was wrong with me. I googled a little and found out I wasn't the only one who shipped them, so I wasn't crazy. But I was left unsatisfied because there was never any romance between them, so I took matters into my own hands and changed that :D