This is a kind of theoretical thing I've been kicking around, and I'm also going to post it on the comics community I'm involved with to get as many responses as possible. I was wondering if anyone here has used fan-fiction as a method of coming up with their first scripts, or the concepts of their own projects. It's something I do, and, while not being very successful, it is pretty fun. The idea came when I found out that the 1980s movie "Cyborg" was originally scripted to be the sequel to the live-action "Masters of the Universe" movie. Anyway, have any of you done anything similar, or do you have an opinions?

I used to write fanfic. While I think it's good for practicing characters or working on one aspect of your writing while letting the canon take care of the rest, I don't think plots are very portable from someone else's universe to your own original universe, unless the worldbuilding is totally generic, which is not a good thing either. I've had more luck with converting scripts of diceless original roleplays into stories, but for that you have to do your own worldbuilding and at least a vague plot outline first.

I want to start this off by saying that writing a good story does not necessarily mean you have to start off with the worldbuilding. Cultures can be based off characters, empires can be based off cultures, worlds can be based off empires.

Secondly, a large part of the appeal to fan-fiction is that you don't necessarily have to go by every rule the original material set forth. If you want to, you can put Lord Zedd and Skeletor together in a fight with Garou and the Guyver if you want to. Just because you're using a character doesn't mean you have to use every bit of his original history.

If you take a character like Sesshoumaru from the Inu-Yasha series, you don't have to use him in a setting with demons in the Warring States period of Japan. The idea, though, is to put him in a place where he wouldn't be out of place. You could put him in a science fiction or scifi/fantasy mixture if you wanted to, and as long as he wasn't out of place, it could work.

The fact is, most writings take characters from something they like or something they experience and change them enough to fit into their world. That isn't to say that those characters aren't original; that comes in later. That's just something we do by nature.

The biggest case of a successful that was not much more than a converted fan-ficion is Star Wars. Those six movies managed to maintain their originality* while taking characters from other works and fitting them into their world. Frodo and Gandalf had blue swords, while Obi-Wan and Luke had blue lightsabres. The Balrog had a flaming-red sword, while Darth Vader had a red lightsabre. This is more than coincidence. Think I'm bullshitting? Check here.

[Edited by - orionx103 on March 16, 2006 7:34:29 PM]