Eat your carrots and write your fanfic.

Every once in a while I feel moved to write an angsty "Oh god why do I spend so much of my time and energy writing fanfic?" post. I think about the thousands of hours I've spent on fic, and wonder if they'd have been better spent some other way—learning to knit or playing the piano or saving the world or something. I get frustrated with having a hobby (passion) that I can't tell my mother or my coworkers about. (Though, my aunt reads my fic and I've managed to discovered a couple of coworkers who I can talk about fandom with, so really I guess it's not so grim.) And finally there's the eternal siren song of "original" fiction: if I'm going to spend all this time writing, why not write things that are theoretically publishable?

I've never gone and written that post, mostly because the times when I want to write it are the times when I'm feeling most blocked and icky about writing, at which point I can't manage to get it together to post, either. I'm not writing that post today, either. Instead, I'm going with the upbeat: figuring out ways in which fanfic makes my life better.

The easy answer to "why do I write fanfic?" is "because it's fun!" The problem is, sometimes it really isn't. I'm sitting there rewriting the same damn sentence for an hour and a half, and it won't come out right, and my brain feels like mouldy cheese and my back is aching and I'm wondering why-the-hell-am-I-doing-this-to-myself but something in me just won't let me quit. You know?

The following list is for those times.


( 5 Reasons Why Writing Fanfic Is Good For Me )