Dear Fanfiction, Thank You for Teaching Me to Write

Mikayla Guerry

Before I ever stepped foot in a creative writing classroom, I learned how to tell stories in the messy, glowing corners of the internet. I wasn’t polishing essays or outlining character arcs—I was hunching over my phone at two in the morning, trying to figure out if my favorite fictional couple would ever kiss. Like many writers, I didn’t start with blank pages or fresh ideas. I started with fanfiction: stories about characters who already belonged to someone else, shared in comment threads and posted on websites like Wattpad and Archive of Our Own that didn’t require permission to dream.  

Fanfiction is often dismissed as unserious or embarrassing. It’s the kind of writing people love to roll their eyes at. But for many of us, it was our first teacher; the one that didn’t demand perfect grammar, flawless plot structure, or even perfect English. All that mattered was that we cared enough to tell the story. 

That’s what gets overlooked. Fanfiction provides a ready-made cast of characters, a familiar world, and—most importantly—a safe space to experiment. Free from the pressure to publish or impress, you can play with voice, pacing, dialogue, and emotion, take risks, make mistakes, and get immediate feedback from a community that’s just as invested in the story as you are. It strips away the anxiety of “originality” that can paralyze new writers and instead asks for something simpler: What happens next?  

Before I ever posted anything, I read fanfiction obsessively. I devoured works with word counts that rivaled an entire novel series. Without realizing it, I was studying craft—absorbing rhythm, pacing, and structure by watching other writers do it in real time. I learned what flowed, what fell flat, and how tension built slowly across chapters that ended in perfect cliffhangers. 

Reading fanfiction was like watching storytelling unfold in public. I witnessed writers improve, rewrite, and experiment with style, all out of love for the story. I didn’t need a class to study the art of narrative—I had hundreds of examples, all for free, all driven by passion. 

Fanfiction comment sections were my first writing workshop. Readers didn’t talk about “themes” or "symbolism." They said things like, “I screamed at that ending,” or “this dialogue broke my heart.” Those were lessons in reader response, in understanding what moved people. I learned how to keep readers engaged, how to pace emotional moments, and how to earn an ending instead of forcing one. Storytelling wasn’t solitary—It was a conversation between writer and reader, one update at a time. 

But fanfiction isn’t perfect. For all its freedom, it can become a comfortable cage. The longer you write inside someone else’s world, the harder it can be to build your own. When the characters already have backstories, personalities, and looks, you skip the hard but rewarding work of invention. Moving on to original work means learning to build that scaffolding from scratch, which can feel terrifying after years of borrowing someone else’s. 

I had to relearn how to make my own characters speak and look, how to imagine new worlds without the safety net of an existing fandom. But the skills fanfiction gave me translated easily once I stopped clinging to what was familiar. Fanfiction wasn’t a limitation; it was a foundation. 

Ironically, even as academia dismisses fanfiction as “unserious,” the publishing world keeps proving otherwise. Fifty Shades of Grey as Twilight fanfiction. After was inspired by One Direction. Books like The Love Hypothesis started as Star Wars fanfic before becoming a bestselling novel. This shows that the line between fandom and literature is far thinner than many would like to admit. These authors took the lessons they learned from fandoms—character intimacy, tension, reader awareness—and built careers from them. Fanfiction didn’t stop them from becoming “real” writers. It gave them the tools and courage to become them. 

  Of course, fanfiction's biggest crime in people’s eyes is that it dares to be joyful. It’s not written for money, grades, or prestige. It’s written because someone loved a story so much, they couldn’t let it end. When people sneer at fanfiction, what they’re really sneering at is enthusiasm. But that unfiltered love of storytelling is what every writer needs to survive. 

So, this is a thank you letter: 

To the forums and AO3 pages that let me make mistakes.  

To the readers on Wattpad who left comments that kept me going. 

To the late nights spent reading and falling in love with characters and worlds I already loved all over again.  

Thank you, fanfiction, for showing me that writing doesn’t need to be approved or published to matter. You were my first classroom, my first audience, my first taste of creative freedom; you made me brave enough to write.