Article content Students are told in creative writing classes to write what they know. At the same time, fanfiction is often strongly discouraged because it isn’t considered “real writing.” That’s a great way to confuse kids.

Fanfiction — writing stories using established characters from books, comics, TV or movies — isn’t new. The retelling of tales is older than the bardic storytelling tradition of passing news from town to town. Even now, you can throw a shoe and hit dozens of books and movies based on Cinderella.

The subtle difference is that most fanfiction picks up a story after it ends, or takes the characters into fanciful worlds of “what if.” Once confined to photocopied zines or passed around friend groups, fanfiction had a renaissance in the early ’90s with greater access to the internet. Suddenly stories could be easily shared via listservs and BBSes.

Communities dedicated to such fandoms as Star Trek and The X-Files popped up. Browsing the fanfic platform Archive of Our Own , it appears the most written-about world now is that of Harry Potter, with the Marvel and Star Wars universes, Supernatural TV series and the anime My Hero Academia also boasting tens of thousands of stories to peruse. Fanfic had a bad rap for many years and was considered low-brow literary piracy.

It was the awkward cousin in geek culture, riddled with plot holes, childish fantasies and shallow archetypes. Yet the writers — and the subfandoms they generated — got some.