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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40083
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40083
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

It's not uncommon for people to start off writing works that are either straight up fan fiction or so strongly "inspired" by someone else's work that they might as well be. And that's okay. What's not okay is publishing it and calling it your original work. But if you're writing for practice or for friends, then what's important is you're writing.

I'll give you an example. My spouse was super into writing stories for online role playing. All older superhero stories. He'd do loads of research on setting and other things not in the original, then bring out the already created characters. He and the group he worked with had tons of fun doing this.

He also wrote fan fiction. In particular, he had two characters he'd based off a lesser known superhero series. He changed them just enough that maybe he could have gotten away with it had it been published. He worked on this for years.

I'd been telling him for years that he should take all his research and side stories and original secondary characters and put them on to a totally original story with brand new main characters. I wasn't the only one. Over time, those two characters he had worked on became truly original characters.

Finally, he got enough practice and confidence in his writing and something shifted. He took those original characters and stories and created full scripts, took on a cowriter and artistic team and, after another year or more, landed a publishing contract. Issue two will be out in a couple weeks.

You probably don't want to hear that this story you're pouring your heart and soul into is for practice. (And who knows, sometimes straight up fan fic gets published as such.) But yeah, it's too much like the work that inspired it. There's no getting around it. Even if you change the name and couple other details, it's really just a retelling (or new adventures) of a story you read and loved.

And that's okay. You love what you're doing? Keep doing it. Just do it knowing what the reality is. You will grow as a writer and come up with worlds of your own to write about.

Original score: 3