starberry-cupcake:

I wish people would stop pushing this idea that writing fanfiction is “a stepping stone towards ‘real’ writing” or “a good way to practice writing”. It is writing already. It is. It isn’t a sub-par form of writing as if literature was a high sphere that we can only access if we are Published Authors and a publisher Chose Us and deemed us valid. Hell, a lot of published works out there, many of them best sellers, are in their core transformative fiction of other previous pieces which could be labeled as fanfiction had they been posted in AO3 rather than published by Random House. You are writing fanfiction? Congrats, you’re a writer! You aren’t “in the making”, you’re already doing it. You can improve and learn but you’re already a writer. Whether or not it’s for an income, that’s another subject matter, but a writer, defined as an artist who uses literature as their artform, you already are. 

One of the biggest problems I see in the creative writing workshops I attend is that people think they can’t write literature because “they aren’t worthy” or “they can’t be like ‘real’ writers” and it takes so much to convince them that everyone owns literature in the same way, you don’t have to belong to an elite to attempt writing. And if we can teach kids writing fic right now how valid it is, maybe we can start debunking this idea that literature is something you need to be worthy of accessing from its core.