As I complete my 100,000 word novel about the adventures of the Brady Bunch kids battling Cylons on the Battlestar Galactica, I am struck by a rather depressing thought: "Was this all a waste of time? Did I pour hours upon hours into a work that no one will ever read? Are the copyright issues so onerous as to keep this work from ever going to print? Has my geek nature squandered my writing talents?"

And the answers are: Probably, most likely, absolutely nearly certainly, and a sad, sad, most likely.

But is there a chance to salvage fan fiction that you have poured hours and hours of your life into?

Let's look at the positive side. Perhaps the effort that went into your fan fiction improved your skills as a writer. Looking at the average fan fiction site, you'll see plenty of writers who have more than a tad of room for improvement.

Another advantage of writing fan fiction is that it may have kept you from boring your dear friends and relatives with conversation about your favorite fictional characters.

You could try to submit something to the studios, but you know very well they're never going to look at your work-- for legal reasons alone.

So what can you do with your work? I suggest just a bit of minor tweaking may make your masterpiece imminently publishable. Just change a name here and there, adjust a few minor plot points, and you'll make a work that had been fit only for the lonely fan boards into a very likely best-seller.

Take, for an example, this synopsis of a recent work of mine that with a judicious use of Word's "Find and Replace" has become something I'm sure will set off a publishers bidding war:

The Office Star

Nurse Cathedral worked on a space ship that existed hundreds of years from our Earth present. She was content with her work, but sadly her love for the chief science officer of the ship, Mr. Brock, was unrequited. This was because Mr. Brock was only half human. His mother was human, but his father was Falcun, an alien race that was incapable of expressing emotion or parallel parking.

Then one day the Starship Firstprize was smacked upside the poop deck by a time anomaly. The captain of the ship, Tim Burke, was sent back in time to Earth in the early 21st century! Mr. Brock decided he needed to go back in the past to save the captain, using the Time Perambulator. There was room for only three in the Perambulator, so Mr. Brock took Nurse Cathedral along in the event Captain Burke needed medical attention. (Dr. "Scones" Malloy could not venture in the Perambulator because of a rare skin condition.)

Traveling back in time, Brock and Cathedral found that Captain Burke had contracted amnesia, taken a job as a salesman at a small East Coast paper company in the United States, and fallen in love with a company receptionist by the name of Jam (a nickname derived from her real name, Jemima.)

Now, I don't want to give away the whole story, but it's filled with thrills, chills, and wacky escapades, as the mission of our three visitors from the future to return to their own time is hampered by the zany practical jokes of Tim's new boss, Michelle Schott, the paranoid plottings of rival paper salesman, Spite Root, and Mr. Brock's inability to parallel park. Don't worry, true love finds a way to make all things right.

You may not believe this, but this work was originally a fan fiction based on two television programs: one a science fiction program from the 1960s and the other a sitcom that is still in production. By cleverly concealing the origins of the original material, I was able to take a project that would only be read by the most bored of all Internet geeks into what I believe is a highly viable piece of marketable fiction.

My plan now is to send this work off to agents, publishers, and studios that will surely be anxious to adapt this into the next big movie blockbuster, establishing huge tent poles with the inevitable sequels, TV series, novelizations, fan boards, screen savers, pool toys, etc.

Or perhaps I'll decide to self publish. That way I won't have to share my profits with those greedy agents, and editors, and marketers. The profits will be mine and mine alone.

Either way, I can rest assured that this work will be read by at least one segment of the market. Not only will this demographic read my work, they will read it closely, with an eye to every detail of characterization and plotting. Yes, I'm talking about the litigators that will be enthralled by my work. There are packs of studio lawyers that will be studying closely for any trace of copyright infringement.

And that would make it all worthwhile. After all, as writers, aren't we happy just knowing that someone out there is reading our stuff?

(If you Google "Dean A. Anderson" [the quote marks are important to avoid the star of "MacGyver"] you'll find a microbiologist and the author of the Bill the Warthog series of mystery books for kids. I'm telling you, the Bill the Warthog characters are much better for fan fiction writing than the little germs you'll find in that biology book.)

Sponsored links

Ring binders

 

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!

How to find a book publisher

Home

Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007 Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
Please contact the authors if you'd like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must listen to Barney sing the "I Love You, You Love Me" song over and over again.

writers writing software