jjpor | To Fic, or Not to Fic?

I write. That's what I might say were you to ask me what I do in my spare time and I happened to be in a particularly pretentious mood. Of course I write; everybody does. Shopping lists, cheques, crosswords, notes on little yellow stickies to remind your other half or other random acquaintances to do things like buying milk. That is to say, I write fiction. Or stories, to be slightly less self-regarding.

I have done so since probably just after I learned to write; for many years it has been a sort of compulsion for me. I make up characters, and make up stories about them, to reduce it to its simplest terms.

Now, to be honest, not much of this writing ever gets to the stage where it is what you might call publishable or even shareable with others. I have reams of single scenes and exchanges of dialogue, none of which really add up to make continuous narratives. There are exceptions; I have completed two full-length novels in my life; unfortunately, they were written while I was aged about 12-15, and let's just say they haven't dated well. The other single longest thing I've ever written is what I think of as my "space story"; two hundred odd pages of big, heavily-armed spaceships and nuclear weapons going off like firecrackers and no appreciable plot development. I wrote that when I was a student.

Now, I don't mean to put myself down; I think my prose style probably needs a bit more polish and I need to start stories and actually finish them, but I think I have my moments. Of course, nobody can really be an objective judge of their own work. My main problem is my complete lack of discipline and work ethic when it comes to writing. It has become particularly bad in the past few years, when I haven't seemed able to stick at anything I write for more than a few pages; plot bunnies piling upon plot bunnies like kamikaze lemmings but no actual progress to show for it. And then, well, then I started fan-ficcing. To be honest, I didn't start it; I'd already done my fair share back in my teenage years, even if I'd never heard the term "fanfic" at the time. Doctor Who, mostly, my first love; I also wrote a lot of X-Files stuff when that was big. I think I had a bit of a crush on Agent Scully; me and every other heterosexual Western male in my age group, I suspect.

People seem divided on the subject of fan-fic, especially if you're a writer who aspires to one day be published. Some see it as good practice, an opportunity to get all of those bad practices and bad ideas out of your system that every writer has. Others see it as a complete waste of time and effort that could be better spent producing original stuff. I don't know where I stand on this; I have spent the last year writing a great deal of Doctor Who fanfic and posting it on the excellent Teaspoon site www.whofic.com. Sometimes I look at my efforts there, and I quite like most of them, but I do think; you could have written a novel of your own in the time it's taken you to produce that. The problem is that if I'd sat down to write my own novel, I'd still be on chapter one, or more likely have written the first chapters of a dozen different novels. At least I'm writing stuff, productively and consistently, for the first time in a long time, and getting feedback that encourages me to write more. Feedback is a big help, especially if you're an attention-hound like me.