Fan fiction is defined as fiction written by fans of TV series, movies or books that includes the characters of the original stories. Widely popular online, fan fiction is an area in which it seems like just about every fan has dabbled at least once or twice. Fan fiction also is a integral part of fandom communities (world wide groups of fans), and has been around since the popularization of it in 1960’s in Star Trek fanzines such as Spockanalia (1967.) Fan fiction certainly has its fans and practitioners in the Creative Writing and Literature Department, as was demonstrated recently when Amaya Garza, sophomore Creative Writing major, lead a Student Writer’s Association workshop on fan fiction. “It’s been my sort of weird dream to teach a fan fiction class,” she says with a laugh. Garza strongly believes that every writer should write or at least take a serious look at fan fiction. “Fan fiction is a useful tool to train a writer in characterization and consistency. I have always been very passionate about characters and…you have to really care about the characters you write about…So when you write fan fiction and you have to take someone else’s character and treat it as your own little thought baby and cradle it and take care of it, it kind of helps you form that bond and you can later transfer that bond to your own characters,” Garza explains. One aspect of writing fan fiction writers struggle with is keeping their versions of the characters in line with the canonical personalities. Garza believes that writing fan fiction and forcing oneself to keep truthful to a character’s essence is good practice for one’s own writing. Creative Writing freshman Chantelle Mitchell agrees with Garza. She believes fan fiction is especially helpful for screenwriting and collaborative work. “…Taking a character that’s not your own and being able to do it justice and stay true to the character while writing is an important skill to have just because in the professional world you won’t always be writing your own characters. If you’re working on a collaborative project or a screenplay or a TV show, somebody else created those characters and you have to be able to write them true to who they are as people. I think fan fiction is a good way to practice that.” Novelist and Creative Writing faculty member James Reich, however, cautions students about writing fan fiction. “If the world you write into isn’t public domain—broadly, pre-1923—you may be wasting your time,” he says. “You could call it a learning environment, but I don’t think it’s a sufficiently challenging one for a serious writer.” Fan fiction fans are aware of its critics. At her seminar, in fact, Garza asked attendees to list the things they didn’t like about fan fiction. What she found was that very few of the characteristics mentioned were exclusive to fan fiction but were rather simply elements of bad writing. “Whenever fan fiction gets a bad reputation it’s because use of cliché, bad diction and bad syntax, poor characterizing…these are all the things that people complain about but when you take a look at it in a list you realize that it’s just the elements of bad writing,” she says. It’s not that fan fiction writers aren’t good at what they do, but rather that a lot of people write fan fiction and a lot of people don’t know how to write well in general. Not everyone has a gift for literature or have the opportunity to study writing at a university. “It’s easier to blame an online community that you don’t know than to say that publishers will publish bad writing.” Reich, however, points out his concerns about the medium itself. “My anxiety about fan fiction… is that, apart from the impossibility of publishing it offline without risking a legal suit, it exists in a vacuum of wish-fulfillment and weak writing that the Internet...