i'm writing fanfiction again
Back in 2020, I started (technically resumed) writing fanfiction on AO3. It was a good outlet for my writing ideas, and I met some of my best friends through it. I wrote nearly non-stop for two years, putting out something new at least twice a month for most of 2021, and then slowing down but still writing often for late 2021 and all of 2022.
But then in August 2022, I just... slowed to a crawl. I was writing something every so often, maybe once a month or every couple months, but then I just stopped completely in early 2023. I tried to write something in 2024, but that now sits in limbo, only two chapters completed and waiting for something new.
The loss of inspiration is something I can trace easily. I'd joke and say it was the AO3 author's curse, and maybe you'd laugh, but that's not an inaccurate assessment. I ended up leaving home, bouncing around from place to place as I tried to find my footing after a fight with my parents, until I got myself set up in a homeless shelter in a city a good few hours away. I'd visit home every month or so, and things were slowly being repaired with my parents, up until I ended up moving back in with them after things went very south at the homeless shelter I was staying in and I needed out.
So, "being homeless for a year" is a pretty reasonable experience to attribute to the AO3 author's curse, methinks.
And then for most of last year, I was swallowed by FFXIV, cleaving through the main story with twelve hour days over the course of a few months. I filled my life with it, started to feel like I didn't exist outside of it, met friends within it. I wrote thousands of words of character lore and backstory for my WoL, and then started developing new lore for new WoLs as well.
Nothing that was ever published, of course. All that lore sits in my Google Docs, or in discord messages between friends. Maybe a bit of it as peeked out into the light on a tumblr blog I made for FFXIV posting, but otherwise, none of it was ever put anywhere.
So what changed? Why am I now devoting a few hours a day to writing again?
Funnily enough, Tiktok actually was the catalyst.
I met a few friends on Tiktok that posted FFXIV content, and we started chatting. I made a stupid shitpost that was originally only going to be for one or two of these friends, but I ended up posting it and it got... a lot of traction. So I made a follow-up. Then another post. Then another.
And then I finally sat down and put together a full ten minute video for a concept I'd been sitting on for over a year. A full monologue set at the end of Endwalker, playing tribute to the many characters of the story, and overall an essay on what gives our lives meaning within that story — and branching into my real life, of course.
The entire video was, effectively, fanfiction. It was my character speaking, my scriptwriting, my voice dubbing. I utilized clips from cutscenes with this character, grabbed from the Unending Journey. I told a story through this OC I had created for a shitpost.
And now I'm writing actual fanfiction again. I recently played Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, and an idea came to mind over the course of my playthrough that I thought would make for an interesting character. This idea never actually came up in game, and I thought it was a wasted opportunity to not execute on it, so I started writing. I created an OC to fill this role, mocked up some reference photos, and gave them a backstory within the world of Xenoblade Chronicles X. And then I opened Google Docs again, and started writing.
I published two chapters about a week ago, and a third a few days later. The fourth is completed and ready to publish, and I'm working on the fifth to set up a backlog. Inspiration has hit me again, and I'm not letting the momentum go.
Things in my life are still not great. I'm unemployed and disabled, stuck with chronic fatigue, and all in all a shut-in. But I'm tired of not being able to create. I'm tired of letting these ideas fester in my mind, never executing on them. So I've given up on daydreaming and actually started creating. No more unfinished projects, no more half-written ideas in my notes app.
Maybe one day I'll write something fully original, like a novel. Who knows. But for now, I'm telling a story of a silly half-self-insert OC I made up interacting with characters from a fictional universe I happen to like. I hope Dante and his Inferno are proud of me.
And frankly, I think fanfiction is one of the most freeing forms of writing. Seeing people love a piece of work so much that they take the pieces of that story and build their new narrative, it's a beautiful thing to witness. Some of my favourite pieces of literature are fanfiction. Some of the best things I've written are fanfiction.
It's also just a good method of getting into writing. Analyzing characters and the ways they interact with each other, determining their different traits, piecing together how they'd behave in different situations, it's a brilliant way of practicing writing your own characters in your own story. How might this character approach this situation? How might it look if these two characters were given the chance to interact more than they do in canon? Seeing how people answer these questions, and frame them in brilliant prose and dialogue feels like reading a love letter to the source material.
And I want to start doing that again.
If you want in on my writing, you can find me on AO3 here: stxrdrifter