One example from their book is how commenters responded to a writer’s question about portraying Princess Luna, a villain from the show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. An author frequently receives many small pieces of feedback in the form of reviews (sometimes thousands on one story) that are in conversation with one another and that “are cumulatively much greater than the sum of their parts,” Aragon told me. Though writers may develop traditional two-person mentor/mentee relationships on fan-fiction websites, the researchers posit that much more often, people are being diffusely mentored by the entire community.
#Fanfiction websites archive
(Older, more experienced fan-fiction authors tend to prefer the website Archive of Our Own.) They published their observations in a new book called Writers in the Secret Garden, and described their theory that people on these websites are actually teaching one another to write through a kind of sprawling, communal learning that Aragon and Davis call “distributed mentorship.” “It’s really clear that if you have a genuine interest and a personal identification with the topic that you’re learning about, your learning is going to be more engaging and, as a result, more successful,” says Katie Davis, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School and a co-founder of its Digital Youth Lab.ĭavis, along with her University of Washington colleague Cecilia Aragon, recently spent nine months studying a couple of fan-fiction websites, focusing mostly on young authors writing on.
#Fanfiction websites tv
Unlike in the classroom, where a writing prompt is as likely to be met with groans as with enthusiasm, writers on fan-fiction websites are thrilled to be there, excited to write, and passionate about the material-because it’s based on a book, TV show, movie, video game, or something else they already love. Read: The fan-fiction friendship that fueled a romance novel empireĪ fan-fiction site is a uniquely energetic learning environment.
#Fanfiction websites how to
In these online communities, writers of all ages and skill levels-from adolescents still refining their grammar to professional adult authors such as Jemisin-are learning and teaching others how to write, and write well. It’s common for contributors to fan-fiction websites to see their skills develop like this.
“You have to find a way to make it not just the world that people are tuning in to read, so they are interested in your story.” To this day, Jemisin said, she still writes fan fiction, and treats it as a way to try out new genres and skills, such as using the second person, which she does in the Broken Earth trilogy, which earned her the three Hugos. “Fan fiction tends to have a built-in hook because it’s written in a world you’re a fan of you’re predisposed to like it,” she said. “Around then was when I became internetted, and one of the first communities I discovered was a fan-fic community.” Through talking with other authors and writing her own stories about Dragon Ball Z (among other things), she found friends, got feedback, and, as she put it, “blew the cobwebs off writing abilities I hadn’t used since college.”įor instance, this writing helped her hone her ability to hold readers’ interest. I didn’t have a lot of friends, or stress relief,” she told me. Jemisin started writing fan fiction, in which authors imagine new stories based on preexisting fictional works, while in grad school for counseling. Jemisin, the only author to win the prestigious Hugo Award for best science-fiction or fantasy novel three years in a row, partly credits fan fiction for her ability to draw in readers.
0 kommentar(er)
