Humans are born storytellers. Think of how effortlessly kids come up with impromptu plots for the adventures they’ve having with their friends and/or toys. As we grow up, we start thinking too hard and begin to second-guess ourselves.

Is my story any good? Will it make people yawn, cringe or laugh at me? They say “write what you know,” but what if I want to write about an intergalactic empire at war with giant space monsters shooting lasers from their eyes?

I think nearly every creative writer has had thoughts like these (well, maybe not that last one specifically, but feelings like it.) Creating art, whether it is with words, paint, clay, ink, dance, or anything else, is an intensely personal thing. To take something that only exists inside our heads and bring it forth into the world is the closest to real-life magic most of us will ever get. Of course it can be scary!

There’s good news, though: there is no such thing as bad writing. Sure, there can be bad stories, but the act of writing is always worthwhile. If you re-read what you wrote and decide it’s irredeemable garbage, well… now you know what not to do, and you got in some good practice. Sometimes a story will evolve as you write it until you barely recognize your original outline, and most of the time that’s a good thing.

When I was in fourth grade, the death of a favorite book character inspired me to pick up a pen, determined to write a story explaining how he didn’t actually die; it was all a misunderstanding! I wrote two and a half pages wherein nothing really happened, and never went back to it. I look back at my earliest stories now, and, despite the errors in spelling, grammar, consistency, and logic, I cannot help but feel nostalgia and even pride, because I can see glimmers of the passion for writing I developed in the decades since.

Because that first tale was a continuation or reimagining of an existing story, it was an example of “fanfiction” (or “fanfic” for short). I didn’t learn the term until years later, when young me got on the even younger internet and discovered thousands of other people who wrote fanfiction, too. It isn’t a new phenomenon:  Arthurian legend, the Divine Comedy, and much of Greek and Roman mythology fit the definition. “I’m going to weave a tale of a knight who was mentioned twice in my favorite King Arthur saga” and “I’m going to write the life story of this video game character who has five lines of dialogue in a single quest series” are basically the same impulse.

Most of what I wrote until my mid-teens fell into the fanfiction category, and I’ve continued to write those kinds of stories through the years, but around age fifteen a curious thing started to happen. I realized the stories I was writing, initially inspired by an existing franchise, had evolved and spiraled out to the point where they would be perfectly understandable to someone who knew nothing about the original—and unrecognizable to anyone who did (except for a few place names). I stumbled into original writing without even realizing it, and I loved it.

I could write about anything I wanted, and change anything at any time: characters’ names and relationships, the geography of the world, what kind of animals and technology they had… it was all up to me. That doesn’t mean my first original stories were great. They weren’t. But they were better than the first story I had written so many years earlier, and only improved from there. In fact, I still write in the same universe I created decades ago, even though it’s changed a lot through the years. (How much? Let’s just say it started out with a planet-hopping sci-fi setting and now it’s all set on one planet where flying hasn’t even been invented yet.)

When a movie or other media disappoints me, which often happens in this age of milking franchises well past their freshness date, my own writing is waiting to soothe the sting. When a big budget movie botches a character arc, I can try my hand at writing a similar one that’s more to my liking. (Whether my versions are any better than the famous ones is very much up for debate, but it’s fun to try!) The fan’s urge to “fix” disliked aspects of a story is the driving force behind a lot of fanfiction, too. Improv actors use the “yes, and?” method to advance their skits, but fanfic authors also rely on “no, but…”

Whether you’re writing a story that uses other media as a jumping off point, or crafting a universe to your own specifications (or a little of both), writing can be a fun, freeing experience. Even if you don’t finish the story or show it to anyone, you’ll know that you created something that didn’t exist before, and there’s no feeling like it.

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