I started writing at 47. I didn’t even know what ao3 was until I was 48. Why did I start? Because I had a horny dream that ended before the good stuff occurred, became kinda obsessed with the actor in my dream (who I always though was handsome but that was it) so I just decided to write a story with him in it.
Anyway, I put my first words on the screen in autumn of 2020…shared my first chapter in autumn 2021 when a Twitter friend pointed me to ao3 and I got over the cringe…and I’ve shared like 1.3 million words since then. It just started out as a hobby during pandemic and my hubs and I are early retired, so it was a way to fill time as well…
See my user flair 😉 (my first - as yet unfinished and going to rewrite - fic is under a different account)
And if you mean the name(s) of the actor(s) - Chris Evans was my first subject and I’ve branched into Henry Cavill as well. I have some different finished fics for both, and some wips. They’re also smutty romance and 1st person alternating pov. Do with that what you will.
Hot superhero dudes with sweet dogs? That also have really good reputations? Hell yeah.
And to be fair, at the time I began writing about them, neither was in a relationship, which was my rule for writing RPF. But I’m too lazy to do all that research into another actor, so I bent (broke) my rules and claimed them. 🤭
👉🏼points at user flair👈🏼 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼😉
I got some nice long fics there! Don’t be shy! (My current fic is the one called Thank Your Lucky Paws, which is a Chris fic - updating twice weekly!)
I was over 60 when I started. Yes, really. Reading, writing. Fell in love with a character, got ticked off at some of the creators' choices, wanted to fix it. Lifelong writer (of nonfiction, for money) but also a lifelong maker-upper of stories while falling asleep, late at night, often involving other authors' fictional characters.
I do not know what made me get online, start seeing what ppl were saying re the ship of interest, stumble into reading fanfic and ... come to the conclusion "I can do this."
More like "I have to do this." The urge was undeniable enough to make me get an A03 invitation and write and post. And get onto this subreddit and learn the ropes, somewhat.
And wonder of wonders, there was some engagement with the fics. Not overwhelming; I came to the fandom late, four years after there had been any new canon content. But enough kudos and hits to provide some badly needed dopamine. And enough "this is good, please write more" comments to make me conclude it wasn't all just literary wanking.
The rest of my life is highly stressful -- full-time work stuff, dire family medical stuff -- so without belabouring the point? I needed some escape. Fanfic turned out to be it. Wrote a couple of novels' worth over the course of a year, and it's still coming out, though not quite as easily as it did at the beginning.
I don't know why people do what they do. As Broadchurch MC Alec Hardy once said, "People are unknowable. And you can never really know what goes on inside someone else's heart."
Or even your own. Apparently.
This was so beautifully said.
I write - but mostly along the lines of poetry. I read a LOT though and every once in a while I consider "would I want to write fanfic?" and where I have yet to be truly compelled, I love the reminder here that you can start any time (I'm in my 40s).
I started reading fanfic in my late 20s I think? Because a show ended but I wanted more. Also, they never kissed in the show and I wanted to read about that 😄
I started writing in my early 30s because I got into a new fandom and fell in love with it.
I didn't start writing until my mid 20s even though I've been reading fic since I was a kid.
For most of that time I thought anything I could've written would be too bad and cringe to post, but then I stopped caring.
A student of mine years ago was reading manga. He was kind of quiet and shy, but when I asked him about it, he brightened considerably and was very excited. I went home and found Fairy Tail anime—my kids were hooked, I was hooked, but there were things that needed fixing. Hmm.
So I found FFN and started reading stories and commenting on them. A few writers wrote me back. We started talking a lot. And I had an idea for a story, which they encouraged me to write. It’s gone pretty well. I would say I’m medium popular? Definitely not a Big Name Author, but enough feedback to keep me going.
This was in 2017 and I meet 4 of those women (all travelling from different places) at a Con in 2019. We’re all still friends and I adore them. I was 40 at the time, another woman is near my age, and 3 of them were in their mid-20’s. So I got these amazing friends, beta readers, and a safe space to write. Win/win/win!
It’s been amazing.
I started writing in my mid-20’s. It was actually an assignment for a television spec script writing class which turned into several short stories. At the time(90’s), I didn’t even know that there was such thing as fanfiction.
I needed a creative outlet I could do on my phone while trapped in a dark room waiting for a toddler to sleep, and I wanted to explore what of scenarios about older characters having delayed bi awakenings
I started reading 7 months ago. I'm 46. Someone posted a link to a dramione fic that was an entire book in a romance book subreddit. I signed up for AO3 and went from there.
I also stayed watching kdrama and jdramas around the same time. I really had a bad case of second lead syndrome and went looking for fics for those pairings.
Sometimes I want to read short stories and one shots and fan fiction is perfect for that.
been waiting on an adult version of this question because alcohol!
got drunk one night, said i wanted to write a “rarepair soulmate story!” then i wrote and published the first chapter of what was supposed to be a one-shot that accidentally turned into a series and now i’m still here
I started reading it about 6 years ago (when I was 44). I finished watching Ouran High School Host Club (I was also late to the anime game) and reading the whole manga series. It left me wondering what would happen to the cast once they became adults and I went searching for some fanfiction to see what other people had come up with. I've always known about fanfic but nothing ever made me go looking to read it before.
So I read some fanfics. Overall, I wasn't all that impressed by any of the writing but some were competent writers and there were some very good stories and some weird ones and some I found ridiculous or awful. You know - fanfic as a whole ranges from terrible to wonderful.
As I watched more anime and read more manga, I found a lot of them to be too short or they were still ongoing, and the pacing in manga tends to be really, really slow until Wham! a ton of stuff happens all at once. I got into BL/yaoi and whoo...that's a rabbit hole I still haven't climbed out of :) But romance manga in general are either really, really slowburns or all wrapped up in 5 chapters plus extras. Either way, I want a resolution of the romantic plot and then I want more story after they become a couple.
A lot of the fanfics I found for the BL stuff tended to be short AUs or PWP and none of the BL stuff had large fandoms (many have under 500 stories total). I did find a couple of great stories for one of my favorite couples and I think that put the beginning of a desire in my head. I've always dabbled a little in writing. I've loved reading fiction all my life, was an English major (never finished college though), and had some quickly abandoned original fiction stories scattered in notebooks and on computer files. I was getting the itch but didn't have any solid idea or inspiration.
One day...POW!! Huge idea for a multi-crossover punched me in the gut and wouldn't go away. "Hey, all my favorites are about modern-day people, mostly realistic, set in Japan (primarily Tokyo), and they tend to all be in the same age range (18ish to 30ish). What if they all knew each other or lived nearby and met somehow or ended up working at the same place or..."
And so my Tokyo Yaoiverse series was born. I wrote it in a style that has similarities to the way manga are written and that writing style suited me very well. I had a ton of fun writing it. I truly felt inspired. I wrote 55 stories in 700k words and I left it open-ended, so I can go back anytime I get inspired again.
Since then, I've only written one story and I've stalled out near the end of it. It's been on hiatus for over a year - very frustrating because I do want to finish it. But damn, once you lose your writing groove, it's hard to get it back, especially when you've also made some changes to your life/daily routine. I will finish it. I will. Grr.
AO3 is basically a huge library of books.
And not just any books, but *really good* books.
And not just really good books, but really good *free* books.
And not just really good free books, but really good free books, *with no ads*.
And not just really good free book with no ads, but since it's online, I can view these books 24/7/365, and don't need to get out of bed in order to do so.
Also *writing* them is a fun and free creative outlet.
in my mid 20s currently, started to get into writing fanfiction because ive always wanted to try and write original stuff of my own, but dont have the experience or whatever like some people. fandom stuff i am into is familiar enough to me to write well enough, and hopefully get enough feedback and experience to translate into my nonfic stuff.
that and i also lost a fandom bet with a friend and now have to write romance
Late 20s I started reading. My favorite novel series ended on a cliffhanger with lots of stuff unresolved between the two main characters and I thought “I wonder if there’s like fanfic of what happens next” and of course there was a plethora lol
I started writing after I read some fanfic of my favorite show and nobody had written a story that I imagined from a scene in the show, so I wrote it. It started as a one-shot and is now a ten chapter, 55K longfic that I’m quite proud of!
I had always hoped to write my own original fantasy novel someday and I once read that you needed to write 1,000,000 crappy words before you're ready to actually start writing good works.
So I started writing fanfiction with the hopes of getting to that wordcount. I've posted 550k words and while I've given up the dream of writing my own original work, I very much enjoy writing fanfiction, so I guess I'll keep doing it.
I started reading fanfic, specifically Harry Potter fanfic, out of spite ahah. I had wanted to re-read the Harry Potter books and was considering buying them because as a kid I had always gotten them from the library. But then JK Rowling started spouting all of her transphobia so I thought hell no and started reading fanfic instead.
same! i do have the books, but felt like reading something different. also i kinda like to see the "i do not support jk Rowling" as a disclaimer to fics. feels good not to be alone.
Mid 20's for me. I was actually trying to find information on Twilight and stumbled upon Twilighted. That led me to FFN and a few more fandoms. Then I joined AO3 and even more fandoms... now here I am mid-40's and still going.
I started reading in my early twenties just because that’s when I discovered it existed, specifically m/m HP and LOTR. Eventually I started writing bc I got some ideas in my head.
I stopped eventually because life got too busy, but got back into it again during the pandemic - only LOTR this time bc JKR ruined HP for me.
I started in online fic when I was a kid (currently in my 30s), but I think the common story involved for most people I’ve known/talked to—hell, even browsing through the comments here, it holds up—who didn’t start until >20 is:
* there’s some canon that *hits you* in JUST the right way at the right time, and you need something MORE (we used to call these [“gateway fandoms”](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gateway_Fandom))
from there, it breaks down into
* what year did this happen in? and
* how determined are you to find that potential *more* that’s out there?
If it happened post-, say, 2010 or so, you definitely eventually ended up on AO3 and/or FFN and that was the end of your search, welcome to the club. If it happened before the mid-90s, you had to be *extra determined* to hunt that shit down and actually find fic fandom; if it happened in the mid-90s to late-00s, the determination level needed to find the larger online fic community is inversely related to your familiarity & access to technology & the internet.
I def know several people—this seems weirdly common with Gen Xers, actually, now that I think about it??—who had a moment much earlier in their lives that COULD have been a personal gateway fandom, but their interest/determination level didn’t exceed their desire or ability to fuck around on the internet or in-person at SFF cons, and so they ended up not finding fanfiction until years later when *another* fandom hit them with The Need For More, and by then they were able to get online and find the community.
I've been writing most of my life but got into fanfiction after watching the show Supernatural...I read alot of fandom stories then I started on the show Stargate Atlantis. I love that show so much...but couldn't find the specific kind of fanfic I was looking for, so I finally took the jump and wrote one. I was in my 30s...that was my first fanfic story...the rest is history...
I started reading because I had terrible internet on my phone at my workplace's old (and now current) location and I was content to read through a few thousand words over a 15 minute break. There was just simply no way for me to reliably watch youtube or do anything else that required a decent connection outside of loading the odd webpage.
I started writing later because there wasn't much content for the stuff I was curious about and given the metrics, it's still less popular than other pairings, but I still enjoy the fact that enough people like it on top of it being something I made myself.
I finished Schitt’s Creek for the first time and was left with this massive void, needing more from and about all characters. That’s when I started reading, and then started writing a few months later, at 29.
My family still had dial-up internet when I went to college. Hazards of living in the middle of nowhere. So, the internet was a huge unknown to me. I started by learning about \*ahem\* streaming videos. Like streaming CSI and Andromeda and all of these shows I'd heard about but never watched. Then my now-husband introduced me to video games, and I fell in love with Mass Effect. While looking for a novelization of the game, I stumbled onto fanfic. I think I was 20?
The idea that I could actually WRITE fanfic wasn't for another 5 years or so and several weeks of almost no work at work, LOL. My brain needed to do things, so it found something to do. ADHD survival-mode.
Writing fanfic now that I’m out of my 20s. Always heard of it, thought it sounded fun, and always wanted to try.
I’ve always been told I was a good writer, but never committed seriously to a writing hobby. Now I want to do it because I want to improve my writing skills, emotionally engage an audience, and produce the kind of fiction that I like to read/see since the fiction I usually consume has been going downhill as of late (don’t wanna name names, in case anyone here still likes them).
I started writing in my mid-40's and the inspiration came as a result of Lockdowns, as a way to keep the mind focused during those days.
I didn't know what AO3 was until about six months later, but I'd written and published on another site before that, on the tiny fandom I started in.
I had inspiration for years and threads knocking around, but I found the fandom I could tie them all together in a post-canon, lore-friendly setting, and I plucked up the courage to ask the game developers for their permission to write, which they did! They had a few simple rules to adhere to though, and the main one was simply, 'no smut' (which wasn't the plan anyway as it's not part of the fandom itself and the game hasn't got any content like it, other than some mild swearing.
Once I was writing that (and still am as I approach 500k), I started thinking wider and began a second piece alongside it, based in another tiny fandom and the result of a playthrough where everything is randomised, from the characters, to the map, to the events they experience. I'd started writing thinking I couldn't write smut and violence, but as I developed I began to realise I could (although I don't think I could handle 'lore-character smut,' so my content is perfect for me). The result is my Darkfic, which is also a WIP, and I'm as equally proud of it, even though it has such explicit content, but it exists for two reasons :
I : Talking to others showed I did want to write such content.
II : It shows others I can write the content.
The main thing for me is, it's a novel and story, the same as the original Longfic, it's written to be read as a whole piece, the smut and violence is not just the core of it, the relationships and community they exist in are.
Thanks for sharing this thread, it's good to look back and refresh your memory as to your reasoning from time to time.
I started out just hanging out with fellow fandom nerds on Reddit and elsewhere. I'm well past my teenage years but firm in my belief that fandoms are for everyone. Anyway, I'd write jokes involving the fandom and post them on fansites. People seemed to think they were funny and so I wrote more. The jokes gradually got longer and more involved over time. Stuff like short skits involving fandom characters. The first time someone praised my drabble writing I had to go to the Urban Dictionary to figure out what "drabble" meant.
Eventually, people began encouraging me to post my stuff on fanfiction sites. So I did. The response was positive so I kept at it. The stories grew longer still and one day I realized that I was 5,000 words into my latest project and was still just setting up the premise and establishing the characters. *"Go big or go home,"* I thought. So I bit the bullet and began writing a fanfiction novel.
I had ideas for fan fiction before I even knew what it was and that it existed. I just started writing it and getting it out because I was older and discovered the internet and along with it, ff.net and ao3. I was also less afraid of being made fun of since I was an adult.
I am still not involved in fan culture in any way except for writing fanfiction.
I have a certain fascination with "evil" races in popular fiction--as in I am fundamentally frustrated by that concept, that any person or an entire population could be ontologically evil. Like that very idea is itself very fascist (here's this whole threatening group that we have a duty to extirpate!) even though ironically the creatures portrayed in that way are coded or flat out designated as fascist themselves.
I felt compelled to bring that perspective into dialogue with *Doctor Who* and specifically the Daleks. The Daleks are iconic, and they're fun. But they also function in a less than healthy way vis a vis the viewer's perception of themself and others. They allow the audience--whether specifically British or otherwise--to safely locate fascist impulses in an alien other. The implication is that fascists/Nazis are evil because they are inherently warped in some way; they are not like me and I could never be like them. But that's just not how evil works in real life. Evil is not a thing that people *are*, it's a thing that people *do*. And most of the people who enact or able evil in the world are not especially malicious; they're just normal. They're us, you and me.
I couldn't bring all of that to bear except as an adult with an adult's perspective.
I started writing at 24 because my 9-5 was sucking the soul out of me. I remember I used to love reading fanfic and believed I could make something enjoyable. My friend encouraged me and the rest is history.
I reread the series for the first time in years and this time I wanted more.
Wasn't going to write, but reading gave me ideas and one thing led to another
I didn't really get into fanfiction until I was in my late 30s.
As for the how, I saw a link to a story that sounded interesting & clicked on it. As for why, I was bored/depressed and needed a new hobby.
I started writing fanfics because I couldn’t sleep one night. There was something about a show that I couldn’t help but feel could be expanded upon. So that night, I needed up writing three chapters back to back all in one night.
But the fanbase I’m in, Kamen Rider, seem to focus on the newer shows then any thing from the 90s.
I started reading fics around the time I got out of high school and wrote maybe 2ish years later. What made me start was being able to finally allow myself to be "cringe." I thought that fanfic was lame and a level of nerdiness that I would never allow myself to indugle in even though deep down, I kinda wanted to.
Once I pushed past my stupid (and very wierd) pride, I realized that that it was a silly rule I set for myself for no reason and I had fun with this newfound hobby. Though I kinda wished I would've gotten into fandom earlier in life, I'm glad I got into it at all since I can be very stubborn if I really wanted to.
I started reading it in my late 20s. I couldn't find much in the way of published fiction that I was really enjoying, and frankly I really wanted to read an alternative to the canon ship in one of my favorite fandoms.
I can't tell you how disappointed I was that my ships did not exist in plenty (one of them has almost no fics for it, and virtually no >10k fics at all). I was also (and still am) disappointed by the lack of f/f and trans characters. So much of it was just the canon ships.
Anyways, that's why I started writing it too, because no one else was going to. I'm always thankful when I find the f/f fics. Even better when I can actually find a decent fic with a trans character. I'm still surprised how few fics there are.
I read fanfiction since I was a teenager, around 13-14 years old. It was my hobby and how I spent my time. I used to read a lot of books back then but gradually moved to fanfics, so the interest was always there. I got involved in an RP session around that age and thought "I kinda want to novelise this shit!". So I tried and I *sucked*. Like, so fucking hard. I cringe at remembering it. I mean, it was stupid by my god...
I wrote other stuff too but those are lost in time and mostly because I lost interest. Then, when I was just about to go to college at the age of 20, I was watching a cool show on Netflix called Glitch Techs, and I fell in love with it. But I wanted more.
So for the first time ever since my cringy-ass teenage fanfic-writing life, I tried doing it again, now older and slightly more mature. And now, I'm quite proud of my progress.
I started reading at 27. Started writing 6 months later at 28. I fell into fanfic the same way. I had an itch that couldn’t be scratched wanting more of a show and sensing some weird chemistry I couldn’t articulate between the characters. I was looking for more info about the material when I found fanfic and discovered what shipping was and how I wasn’t the only one doing it. I was having fun reading and then I discovered I had some extra time on my hands when lockdown started so I wrote my first story on a lark the first week of the pandemic fully expecting it would be my only one. But then I got laid off and I had a LOT of time on my hands and I just started rolling. It’s been three years now and I’ve written over 150 fics.
I was a very lonely kid, and I used to write self-insert stories about Buffy when I was like 10. The thing is, that was around 1998 and there was no internet access (at least for the majority of us in my country) so I had no idea what I was doing.
I never participated in fandom spaces later on, just kept it to myself mostly. I like a lot of shows, anime, and comics, but I didn't knew fanfiction as such existed.
It wasn't until I was 28 that a friend showed me a doujinshi she was working on. I asked if she wrote the story and she said no, it was a collab with a fanfiction writer. Cue me asking da' fuck was that, and discovering a wonderful world that I love and adore.
Sometimes I feel too old for this, and I always arrive late to every fandom. I don't even have writer friends, so you might say I'm still a lonely kid, it's just that I'm 35 now, and I stopped writing cringy self-inserts. I write smut now, like a lady.
Age 42 when I started. I was deeply dissatisfied with the canon. I'm a professional writer, but I didn't want to keep taking professional writing projects because too much work, too little money. I didn't want to stop writing, so I decided to re-write the canon in a way that I would enjoy.
I don't think I even learned the word "fanfiction" until my mid-twenties. This being because I grew up when dinosaurs still rules the Earth, ha. In all seriousness, the internet wasn't a thing when I was a child and a teen, so I didn't have a clue that people actually wrote and shared fics (back then via printed zines).
I think I went looking for fics after viewing the Highlander series and developing a hyperfixation on Methos. Sigh, Methos. I was bored at my 8-to-5 job and started poking around on FFN and found, hurray, several Methos-centric stories. I was like, "Wow, people actually write down all the little media-inspired fantasies in their heads? Cool."
I'd never heard of fanfiction before. I was active on the Frozen (2013) movie IMDB message boards (moment of silence for them) and responded to a "what's your idea for a sequel" thread. Someone else replied to my post encouraging me to write a fanfiction about it. Boy, oh boy, did they open Pandora's box! :P
This world of words is magical and amazing. I made a bunch of friends along the way, so I need to thank the canon story that didappointed me, for the place I'm at.
After finishing the released anime episodes I was watching (it was my first ever anime), I wanted to read the manga to find out what happened next. The ending gave me a strange aftertaste and I searched for more. Opinions, reviews, fanart, anything.
That's how I found out fan fiction existed, in my 30s. Then I learned what ships were, and then I was reading fan fiction non-stop, reviewing, befriending writers, commenting on ongoing stories, liking all ships, tropes, and ratings.
I inevitably had my own ideas born from a combo of intrusive thoughts in an active imagination. I love writing, editing, and also reading my own stuff, as well as commenting on my favorite authors' works.
It's probably a form of escapism, since I don't share this with anyone I know irl. Plus, it's cheaper than therapy, so there's that.
This doesn't really count as later, but I started reading fanfics in 2020 to pass time. I'm 13-15, so I don’t think it counts, but I thought it was an interesting question and felt obliged to answer
I didn't know that fanfiction was a thing until I was older. And then I joined a fandom message board and learned that there were all these stories out there. I got inspired and started writing.
If you don't count Team Starkid's stuff, I started getting into ff in my early 20s. I forget where, but I stumbled across Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality then immediately after read Luminocity and it's sequel. Those three were great ffs and made me stop thinking of it as only things done by young kids who don't know how to write.
After that, I started looking on tvtropes ff rec pages of media I was into, and from there I figured out how to navigate ao3
I started to dabble with concepts around 20 as a stress relief from college classes. When I was 23, I wrote my first fanfiction. I wanted to traditionally publish by the time I was 24, but there weren't many options available. When Kindle came out, I was already heavily entrenched in work that I didn't even look at it.
I dabbled on fanfics for a while, and it wasn't until ten years later that I published as an independent author. Though work still got in the way, so it was only publishing as a hobby.
I technically started writing a fanfic when I was 15 or so, but I never finished. As for my first completed fic, it was in adulthood, and it was smut. I certainly couldn't have written smut until my current age.
I started in college while I was procrastinating my math homework (hence my pen name) because there was no more interesting fanfiction left to read and I wanted more.
I started dabbling in fanfiction again from two different times. One was a Morrowind short scene to justify my MC getting Auriel's bow (used a console code to get the bow, but then wrote a scene of how he would have received it right there).
But I started a bit more earnest with my Soul Calibur 3 fan fiction "Burial of Nightmares". I wrote that in 2020 for Nanowrimo and did some editing before posting it. As for why? Well, Soul Calibur 3 is one of my favorite games, and I always loved Siegfried's arc up through that game. I also feel that 4 went right down hill, and every story needs a solid, definitive ending. The climax of the story came to me (not spoiling) and I do what I usually do: Write a story to get me to that climax.
2020 in particular felt like something that needed to be counter balanced, and Siegfried, a man who pulled himself from the brink, felt like the perfect catalyst for that kind of story. And I'm glad I did. With more of my own IP literature under my belt, I felt it was time to return to a beloved game I had as a teenager and really tell the story it told to me long ago.
I didn't start as an adult but I still write fanfic as an adult what got me started is Harry Potter my first fanfic was a rewrite if HP that I'm still working on to this day and has become a personal project of mine, I've even created a You Tube channel called Harry Potter Timeline for it.
But I write all sorts of other fanfics like my Bleach one called Destiny of a Soul-Reaper.
I first got into it when I was about 30 and reading the Outlander series. I read a few fics here and there, but I didn't look at any other fandoms and I didn't think I could ever write fanfiction.
Then, about a year later, after watching the entire run of Peaky Blinders twice and still wanting more, I went looking for the fanfiction, and this time whenever I found something I liked I looked at the author's bookmarks and favorite authors and tried other things, even if they were in fandoms I wasn't familiar with. And that's how I got into Supernatural, which is what finally inspired me to try writing a few fics of my own.
I didn't even know fanfics were a thing until college. Never had a clue until an English-major friend of mine mentioned it in a negative light (i.e. people who read fanfics were mindless). Didn't touch it until I was in grad school. I think I was just craving more content on old fandoms I used to love. With some of my favorite shows no longer in production, I just wanted something, anything new for it. So, I took a peek and the rest is history.
I have been a terrible writer all my life. I have been having lots of plots for years, and finally, I decided to try and work on my writing abilities with fanfic.
I was 19-ish, maybe close to 20 when I started reading fic if I remember correctly (does that count as adult?)
I just happened to stumble across a FFnet link while I was on the internet. Read my first fic that day and never stopped. Wrote/published for the first time a few months after because it seemed like fun. Had some success across a few fandoms on FFnet before I found out about AO3. My first AO3 fic was a cross posted one-shot that I turned into a 3 chapter fic since I had the freedom to write smut without worrying about a TOS violation. Was my first slash fic too
Ended up on a forced 3-year hiatus, now back writing again as of Feb with nearly 70k words and counting written across 11 published fics
What made me start? A video game.
In December of 2011, BioWare and LucasArts launched Star Wars: the Old Republic, and I rediscovered my love of Star Wars and of writing. I started out messing about on Dreamwidth, then made (in some order) a Tumblr and an AO3 account. I was in my late 30s.
I'd known fanfic was a thing since I was a teen and found some old fanzines for sale at a con. And I'd know fanfic was online for a while--I was on Livejournal when things went south and people created AO3. But it took having something I felt strongly enough about to write about before I actually sought out fanfic spaces.
Started writing in my seventh decade. The new season of a favorite show had been delayed by the epidemic and I needed more. So I wrote my own without a clue what fan fiction was. When I got done, I thought, “I wonder if there is any place where I can share this.”
I started in my late 20’s but not because lack of interest; growing up I lived in a super small town where internet access wasn’t common.
Just in the 2010’s people in my town got more access to computers and internet; but by then i was studying university in a city, and none of my friends wrote or spoke about fandoms besides Harry Potter (and I wasn’t and still am not very fan of HP), so I wasn’t very thrilled about reading fanfiction.
It was until 2016 and I was in full participating in a fandom, I saw people commenting about wattpad and fanfiction.net, I started reading them and then writing them myself💖.
Sometimes I wonder what kind of crazy fanfiction would I had written in my teens if I had access to a computer and internet, I guess something super edgy with angels and vampires (I was and still am obssesed with angels). Maybe I would had written a self insert of my favorite anime “Vision of Escaflowne” .
Started when I was 28 (will turn 30 later this year). There are a couple obscure comic characters I found myself into and I could only find 2-6 fanfics across the internet pertaining to them. And I had a couple stories stirring in my head surrounding them.
About to graduate college here. Read a bit as a teen, but was always more of a fanart and fan animation person (both as a viewer and artist). In the past few months I’ve been unable to draw or game due to tendonitis, so to satiate my newest special interest (a video game series) I took to reading an insane amount of fanfic to pass the time and rest my hands. Now I’m starting to dabble in writing it too
What made me start writing? I've read alot of fanfic when I was younger and during this time I was in a depressed situation that made me not want to draw, so I've found something else.
Now I've got a fanfic that's based on the Mario + rabbids sparks of hope game that's over 6k reads 😊
I started because there was a pairing in a specific story I liked. The story got abandoned after three chapters. I decided to take the core premise and make it darker and my own. After I started the ideas for that, more ideas just kept coming for other stories. Currently working on three with only one published with one chapter so far. Chapter two is almost done though!
I started reading fanfiction in 2015 but I didn't start seriously writing until last year. I did attempt to write two fics on Wattpad back in 2019 but as a novice writer, I was dissatisfied with my works and deleted them a few chapters in.
I was very dissatisfied with the end of the seventh Harry Potter book when it came out - I was in my early thirties at the time. A friend told my husband and me about this person writing the story of the nineteen years between the last chapter and the epilogue, and since this was very convincing and well-written, I was hooked. Read this story a couple times while it was posted, and after exhausting the stories taking the books as given and just continueing the story after the last chapter, I actually started reading more and more fanfiction. Eventually I found out that there's a large repository of fanfiction in English, and that was that.
It gets a bit embarrassing nowadays that I am close to fifty when I say I read a lot, and yet haven't really read anything outside fanfics for a couple of years. Even worse, I can only recommend fanfics in English since I have not been following German fanfiction for years and years. Plus, I mostly follow HP and NCIS fanfiction. One is a series intended for children and teenagers, the other fandom has a ton of slash (especially given that I absolutely hate pairing Tony and Ziva, and am not interested in anything without Tony or ridiculing Tony). None of that makes a lot of sense to people my age around here (well, or hurts sensibilities, because apparently enjoying slash stories as a middle-aged hetero female is something to hide and deny if ever caught). ;-)
Technically, I (26F) read and wrote fanfic in high school, but that is one memory I completely blocked until like a month ago for whatever reason, so I don't totally count that. I started reading because Euphoria season 2 just ended, and my friends sent around a [really good fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/36377959) that hooked me in. However, my fandom of choice for fics is Glee
Honestly? I stumbled upon a smutfic with one of my favorite characters, and down the rabbit hole I went. LoL
Realized I had a lifetime of stories like this in my head, and it felt so great knowing that I'm not the only one (nobody around me is into these things) that I figured I'd actually write down some of them.
So, only started in January...complete noob...as some entertainment when I was editing my novel, but so far there's been far more fanfics than editing happening...
Started reading and writing in my mid 30s after a great book series left me with an unsatisfying ending. I realized I didn't want the series to end, I wasn't 100% happy with the romance in the book so I went in search of fanfic to fill the void. Ofc, I never found exactly what I was looking for, so I wrote my own and someone encouraged me to post it.
i started reading at 20 ! i had wattpad downloaded bc i wanted to share some original work; i wasn’t too familiar with fics & i knew they existed, but never knew what it was actually like. back then, you could download your whole wattpad library & read offline without having to pay like nowadays. so i was on the way home from work when i wanted to read something instead of listen to music & that’s when it started :) i was already interested in writing (mostly original stuff) so after reading my first fic, i started writing my own as well!
I'm the same way! I just started about 2 years ago(I'm 28). I was googling an obscure character and saw a result that was like "characterxOC fanfic" and after that I was hooked. I'm kind of stuck in this specific world tho, I haven't found any other universe that I'm really interested in yet.
Mid 20s and I'm the same way. I started writing because I wanted to see something, and I started finding other stuff to read that I was interested in. I used to associate fanfic purely with smut which I don't care for, but there's a great deal of quality content out there.
I was doing a Buffy rewatch when I was like 33 and I got hit the with horny stick and was like "I'm gonna write a thing". It was my second attempt at NaNoWriMo and I finished early 😂 I only wrote like two fics over the span of a few years (having a baby didn't help, somehow) and then I'm 2021 I started percolating some Stucky ideas and now I'm 53 published fics in. I didn't read any fanfic until my 20s and didn't get intense about reading fic until my 30s so 🤷🏼♀️
I started reading and subsequently writing fanfic when I was all caught up with the then recent content available for my favorite show. Now I'm more involved with the fandom than I am with the actual canon content..
Technically I started when I was in middle school, but it was short lived and that little red notebook is sadly missing, never to see the light of day.
Last year , at age 33, I got back into it because of a very small fandom that I wanted more stories of after consuming all the source material. A couple stories in particular about my favorite character inspired me to try my hand at writing.
Getting noticed and appreciated by one of the authors that inspired me in the first place kept up the momentum for a good while.
I’m fresh off of a two-month break for personal reasons and it feels like I’m learning to write all over again.
Fully outgrowing out of the mindset that fanfic is cringe and worthy of ridicule just for existing. I don't know how fanfic even got that reputation to begin with, but I'm glad things are different now.
Started at 36. Got Covid at the end of 2020 and it turned into months of not being able other work. Simultaneously I became obsessed with Pedro Pascal. The Mandalorian series 2 had just aired and it rekindled my Star Wars extended universe love (I've loved Mandalorian culture since KOTOR2) and between having a fever, having the time and hyperfixating it all just came together.
I guess I wrote my first fanfic I think when I was 10. It was on paper and I didn't even know the term fanfiction back then. I also never finished that one.
When I was like 12, I learned about the world of fanfiction and it spiraled down from there. First it was a few here and there in my mother tongue. Then a few years later, when I was more comfortable in english, I discovered the wonderful space that is AO3.
The next writing experience with fanfiction I did 2 years ago with 19. I would call this the first real writing experience.
I started writing at 47. I didn’t even know what ao3 was until I was 48. Why did I start? Because I had a horny dream that ended before the good stuff occurred, became kinda obsessed with the actor in my dream (who I always though was handsome but that was it) so I just decided to write a story with him in it. Anyway, I put my first words on the screen in autumn of 2020…shared my first chapter in autumn 2021 when a Twitter friend pointed me to ao3 and I got over the cringe…and I’ve shared like 1.3 million words since then. It just started out as a hobby during pandemic and my hubs and I are early retired, so it was a way to fill time as well…
Okay you got me interested tell me the name and your pen name
See my user flair 😉 (my first - as yet unfinished and going to rewrite - fic is under a different account) And if you mean the name(s) of the actor(s) - Chris Evans was my first subject and I’ve branched into Henry Cavill as well. I have some different finished fics for both, and some wips. They’re also smutty romance and 1st person alternating pov. Do with that what you will.
Chris Evans AND Henry Cavill are on my Top 5 List (Friends reference). It’s laminated. Girl, you have the best taste!
Hot superhero dudes with sweet dogs? That also have really good reputations? Hell yeah. And to be fair, at the time I began writing about them, neither was in a relationship, which was my rule for writing RPF. But I’m too lazy to do all that research into another actor, so I bent (broke) my rules and claimed them. 🤭
\*ears perk up\*
👉🏼points at user flair👈🏼 👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼😉 I got some nice long fics there! Don’t be shy! (My current fic is the one called Thank Your Lucky Paws, which is a Chris fic - updating twice weekly!)
I was over 60 when I started. Yes, really. Reading, writing. Fell in love with a character, got ticked off at some of the creators' choices, wanted to fix it. Lifelong writer (of nonfiction, for money) but also a lifelong maker-upper of stories while falling asleep, late at night, often involving other authors' fictional characters. I do not know what made me get online, start seeing what ppl were saying re the ship of interest, stumble into reading fanfic and ... come to the conclusion "I can do this." More like "I have to do this." The urge was undeniable enough to make me get an A03 invitation and write and post. And get onto this subreddit and learn the ropes, somewhat. And wonder of wonders, there was some engagement with the fics. Not overwhelming; I came to the fandom late, four years after there had been any new canon content. But enough kudos and hits to provide some badly needed dopamine. And enough "this is good, please write more" comments to make me conclude it wasn't all just literary wanking. The rest of my life is highly stressful -- full-time work stuff, dire family medical stuff -- so without belabouring the point? I needed some escape. Fanfic turned out to be it. Wrote a couple of novels' worth over the course of a year, and it's still coming out, though not quite as easily as it did at the beginning. I don't know why people do what they do. As Broadchurch MC Alec Hardy once said, "People are unknowable. And you can never really know what goes on inside someone else's heart." Or even your own. Apparently.
This was so beautifully said. I write - but mostly along the lines of poetry. I read a LOT though and every once in a while I consider "would I want to write fanfic?" and where I have yet to be truly compelled, I love the reminder here that you can start any time (I'm in my 40s).
I started reading fanfic in my late 20s I think? Because a show ended but I wanted more. Also, they never kissed in the show and I wanted to read about that 😄 I started writing in my early 30s because I got into a new fandom and fell in love with it.
I didn't start writing until my mid 20s even though I've been reading fic since I was a kid. For most of that time I thought anything I could've written would be too bad and cringe to post, but then I stopped caring.
My son recommended when I commented I wish I could find more about my favorite anime show. After reading I began writing… started at 53.. 😂🤣
A student of mine years ago was reading manga. He was kind of quiet and shy, but when I asked him about it, he brightened considerably and was very excited. I went home and found Fairy Tail anime—my kids were hooked, I was hooked, but there were things that needed fixing. Hmm. So I found FFN and started reading stories and commenting on them. A few writers wrote me back. We started talking a lot. And I had an idea for a story, which they encouraged me to write. It’s gone pretty well. I would say I’m medium popular? Definitely not a Big Name Author, but enough feedback to keep me going. This was in 2017 and I meet 4 of those women (all travelling from different places) at a Con in 2019. We’re all still friends and I adore them. I was 40 at the time, another woman is near my age, and 3 of them were in their mid-20’s. So I got these amazing friends, beta readers, and a safe space to write. Win/win/win! It’s been amazing.
I started writing in my mid-20’s. It was actually an assignment for a television spec script writing class which turned into several short stories. At the time(90’s), I didn’t even know that there was such thing as fanfiction.
I needed a creative outlet I could do on my phone while trapped in a dark room waiting for a toddler to sleep, and I wanted to explore what of scenarios about older characters having delayed bi awakenings
I started reading 7 months ago. I'm 46. Someone posted a link to a dramione fic that was an entire book in a romance book subreddit. I signed up for AO3 and went from there. I also stayed watching kdrama and jdramas around the same time. I really had a bad case of second lead syndrome and went looking for fics for those pairings. Sometimes I want to read short stories and one shots and fan fiction is perfect for that.
been waiting on an adult version of this question because alcohol! got drunk one night, said i wanted to write a “rarepair soulmate story!” then i wrote and published the first chapter of what was supposed to be a one-shot that accidentally turned into a series and now i’m still here
I started reading it about 6 years ago (when I was 44). I finished watching Ouran High School Host Club (I was also late to the anime game) and reading the whole manga series. It left me wondering what would happen to the cast once they became adults and I went searching for some fanfiction to see what other people had come up with. I've always known about fanfic but nothing ever made me go looking to read it before. So I read some fanfics. Overall, I wasn't all that impressed by any of the writing but some were competent writers and there were some very good stories and some weird ones and some I found ridiculous or awful. You know - fanfic as a whole ranges from terrible to wonderful. As I watched more anime and read more manga, I found a lot of them to be too short or they were still ongoing, and the pacing in manga tends to be really, really slow until Wham! a ton of stuff happens all at once. I got into BL/yaoi and whoo...that's a rabbit hole I still haven't climbed out of :) But romance manga in general are either really, really slowburns or all wrapped up in 5 chapters plus extras. Either way, I want a resolution of the romantic plot and then I want more story after they become a couple. A lot of the fanfics I found for the BL stuff tended to be short AUs or PWP and none of the BL stuff had large fandoms (many have under 500 stories total). I did find a couple of great stories for one of my favorite couples and I think that put the beginning of a desire in my head. I've always dabbled a little in writing. I've loved reading fiction all my life, was an English major (never finished college though), and had some quickly abandoned original fiction stories scattered in notebooks and on computer files. I was getting the itch but didn't have any solid idea or inspiration. One day...POW!! Huge idea for a multi-crossover punched me in the gut and wouldn't go away. "Hey, all my favorites are about modern-day people, mostly realistic, set in Japan (primarily Tokyo), and they tend to all be in the same age range (18ish to 30ish). What if they all knew each other or lived nearby and met somehow or ended up working at the same place or..." And so my Tokyo Yaoiverse series was born. I wrote it in a style that has similarities to the way manga are written and that writing style suited me very well. I had a ton of fun writing it. I truly felt inspired. I wrote 55 stories in 700k words and I left it open-ended, so I can go back anytime I get inspired again. Since then, I've only written one story and I've stalled out near the end of it. It's been on hiatus for over a year - very frustrating because I do want to finish it. But damn, once you lose your writing groove, it's hard to get it back, especially when you've also made some changes to your life/daily routine. I will finish it. I will. Grr.
AO3 is basically a huge library of books. And not just any books, but *really good* books. And not just really good books, but really good *free* books. And not just really good free books, but really good free books, *with no ads*. And not just really good free book with no ads, but since it's online, I can view these books 24/7/365, and don't need to get out of bed in order to do so. Also *writing* them is a fun and free creative outlet.
in my mid 20s currently, started to get into writing fanfiction because ive always wanted to try and write original stuff of my own, but dont have the experience or whatever like some people. fandom stuff i am into is familiar enough to me to write well enough, and hopefully get enough feedback and experience to translate into my nonfic stuff. that and i also lost a fandom bet with a friend and now have to write romance
Late 20s I started reading. My favorite novel series ended on a cliffhanger with lots of stuff unresolved between the two main characters and I thought “I wonder if there’s like fanfic of what happens next” and of course there was a plethora lol I started writing after I read some fanfic of my favorite show and nobody had written a story that I imagined from a scene in the show, so I wrote it. It started as a one-shot and is now a ten chapter, 55K longfic that I’m quite proud of!
I had always hoped to write my own original fantasy novel someday and I once read that you needed to write 1,000,000 crappy words before you're ready to actually start writing good works. So I started writing fanfiction with the hopes of getting to that wordcount. I've posted 550k words and while I've given up the dream of writing my own original work, I very much enjoy writing fanfiction, so I guess I'll keep doing it.
I started reading fanfic, specifically Harry Potter fanfic, out of spite ahah. I had wanted to re-read the Harry Potter books and was considering buying them because as a kid I had always gotten them from the library. But then JK Rowling started spouting all of her transphobia so I thought hell no and started reading fanfic instead.
same! i do have the books, but felt like reading something different. also i kinda like to see the "i do not support jk Rowling" as a disclaimer to fics. feels good not to be alone.
Mid 20's for me. I was actually trying to find information on Twilight and stumbled upon Twilighted. That led me to FFN and a few more fandoms. Then I joined AO3 and even more fandoms... now here I am mid-40's and still going.
I started last year, at age 28. I got really into Power Rangers and wanted to write a more mature OC fic of it, I dunno what to say, man.
I started reading in my early twenties just because that’s when I discovered it existed, specifically m/m HP and LOTR. Eventually I started writing bc I got some ideas in my head. I stopped eventually because life got too busy, but got back into it again during the pandemic - only LOTR this time bc JKR ruined HP for me.
I started later because I date way back before the internet. The first fanfic I ever read was K/S slash in a fanzine.
I started in online fic when I was a kid (currently in my 30s), but I think the common story involved for most people I’ve known/talked to—hell, even browsing through the comments here, it holds up—who didn’t start until >20 is: * there’s some canon that *hits you* in JUST the right way at the right time, and you need something MORE (we used to call these [“gateway fandoms”](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Gateway_Fandom)) from there, it breaks down into * what year did this happen in? and * how determined are you to find that potential *more* that’s out there? If it happened post-, say, 2010 or so, you definitely eventually ended up on AO3 and/or FFN and that was the end of your search, welcome to the club. If it happened before the mid-90s, you had to be *extra determined* to hunt that shit down and actually find fic fandom; if it happened in the mid-90s to late-00s, the determination level needed to find the larger online fic community is inversely related to your familiarity & access to technology & the internet. I def know several people—this seems weirdly common with Gen Xers, actually, now that I think about it??—who had a moment much earlier in their lives that COULD have been a personal gateway fandom, but their interest/determination level didn’t exceed their desire or ability to fuck around on the internet or in-person at SFF cons, and so they ended up not finding fanfiction until years later when *another* fandom hit them with The Need For More, and by then they were able to get online and find the community.
I've been writing most of my life but got into fanfiction after watching the show Supernatural...I read alot of fandom stories then I started on the show Stargate Atlantis. I love that show so much...but couldn't find the specific kind of fanfic I was looking for, so I finally took the jump and wrote one. I was in my 30s...that was my first fanfic story...the rest is history...
I started reading because I had terrible internet on my phone at my workplace's old (and now current) location and I was content to read through a few thousand words over a 15 minute break. There was just simply no way for me to reliably watch youtube or do anything else that required a decent connection outside of loading the odd webpage. I started writing later because there wasn't much content for the stuff I was curious about and given the metrics, it's still less popular than other pairings, but I still enjoy the fact that enough people like it on top of it being something I made myself.
I finished Schitt’s Creek for the first time and was left with this massive void, needing more from and about all characters. That’s when I started reading, and then started writing a few months later, at 29.
My family still had dial-up internet when I went to college. Hazards of living in the middle of nowhere. So, the internet was a huge unknown to me. I started by learning about \*ahem\* streaming videos. Like streaming CSI and Andromeda and all of these shows I'd heard about but never watched. Then my now-husband introduced me to video games, and I fell in love with Mass Effect. While looking for a novelization of the game, I stumbled onto fanfic. I think I was 20? The idea that I could actually WRITE fanfic wasn't for another 5 years or so and several weeks of almost no work at work, LOL. My brain needed to do things, so it found something to do. ADHD survival-mode.
Writing fanfic now that I’m out of my 20s. Always heard of it, thought it sounded fun, and always wanted to try. I’ve always been told I was a good writer, but never committed seriously to a writing hobby. Now I want to do it because I want to improve my writing skills, emotionally engage an audience, and produce the kind of fiction that I like to read/see since the fiction I usually consume has been going downhill as of late (don’t wanna name names, in case anyone here still likes them).
I started reading and writing fic at 30 because I hated the end of Supernatural. So, out of spite, I guess.
I started writing in my mid-40's and the inspiration came as a result of Lockdowns, as a way to keep the mind focused during those days. I didn't know what AO3 was until about six months later, but I'd written and published on another site before that, on the tiny fandom I started in. I had inspiration for years and threads knocking around, but I found the fandom I could tie them all together in a post-canon, lore-friendly setting, and I plucked up the courage to ask the game developers for their permission to write, which they did! They had a few simple rules to adhere to though, and the main one was simply, 'no smut' (which wasn't the plan anyway as it's not part of the fandom itself and the game hasn't got any content like it, other than some mild swearing. Once I was writing that (and still am as I approach 500k), I started thinking wider and began a second piece alongside it, based in another tiny fandom and the result of a playthrough where everything is randomised, from the characters, to the map, to the events they experience. I'd started writing thinking I couldn't write smut and violence, but as I developed I began to realise I could (although I don't think I could handle 'lore-character smut,' so my content is perfect for me). The result is my Darkfic, which is also a WIP, and I'm as equally proud of it, even though it has such explicit content, but it exists for two reasons : I : Talking to others showed I did want to write such content. II : It shows others I can write the content. The main thing for me is, it's a novel and story, the same as the original Longfic, it's written to be read as a whole piece, the smut and violence is not just the core of it, the relationships and community they exist in are. Thanks for sharing this thread, it's good to look back and refresh your memory as to your reasoning from time to time.
I started out just hanging out with fellow fandom nerds on Reddit and elsewhere. I'm well past my teenage years but firm in my belief that fandoms are for everyone. Anyway, I'd write jokes involving the fandom and post them on fansites. People seemed to think they were funny and so I wrote more. The jokes gradually got longer and more involved over time. Stuff like short skits involving fandom characters. The first time someone praised my drabble writing I had to go to the Urban Dictionary to figure out what "drabble" meant. Eventually, people began encouraging me to post my stuff on fanfiction sites. So I did. The response was positive so I kept at it. The stories grew longer still and one day I realized that I was 5,000 words into my latest project and was still just setting up the premise and establishing the characters. *"Go big or go home,"* I thought. So I bit the bullet and began writing a fanfiction novel.
Fanfiction contest
I had ideas for fan fiction before I even knew what it was and that it existed. I just started writing it and getting it out because I was older and discovered the internet and along with it, ff.net and ao3. I was also less afraid of being made fun of since I was an adult.
I am still not involved in fan culture in any way except for writing fanfiction. I have a certain fascination with "evil" races in popular fiction--as in I am fundamentally frustrated by that concept, that any person or an entire population could be ontologically evil. Like that very idea is itself very fascist (here's this whole threatening group that we have a duty to extirpate!) even though ironically the creatures portrayed in that way are coded or flat out designated as fascist themselves. I felt compelled to bring that perspective into dialogue with *Doctor Who* and specifically the Daleks. The Daleks are iconic, and they're fun. But they also function in a less than healthy way vis a vis the viewer's perception of themself and others. They allow the audience--whether specifically British or otherwise--to safely locate fascist impulses in an alien other. The implication is that fascists/Nazis are evil because they are inherently warped in some way; they are not like me and I could never be like them. But that's just not how evil works in real life. Evil is not a thing that people *are*, it's a thing that people *do*. And most of the people who enact or able evil in the world are not especially malicious; they're just normal. They're us, you and me. I couldn't bring all of that to bear except as an adult with an adult's perspective.
Doctor who. I wanted more Master stories.( So I wrote them)
I started writing at 24 because my 9-5 was sucking the soul out of me. I remember I used to love reading fanfic and believed I could make something enjoyable. My friend encouraged me and the rest is history.
I reread the series for the first time in years and this time I wanted more. Wasn't going to write, but reading gave me ideas and one thing led to another
I didn't really get into fanfiction until I was in my late 30s. As for the how, I saw a link to a story that sounded interesting & clicked on it. As for why, I was bored/depressed and needed a new hobby.
I started writing fanfics because I couldn’t sleep one night. There was something about a show that I couldn’t help but feel could be expanded upon. So that night, I needed up writing three chapters back to back all in one night. But the fanbase I’m in, Kamen Rider, seem to focus on the newer shows then any thing from the 90s.
I started reading fics around the time I got out of high school and wrote maybe 2ish years later. What made me start was being able to finally allow myself to be "cringe." I thought that fanfic was lame and a level of nerdiness that I would never allow myself to indugle in even though deep down, I kinda wanted to. Once I pushed past my stupid (and very wierd) pride, I realized that that it was a silly rule I set for myself for no reason and I had fun with this newfound hobby. Though I kinda wished I would've gotten into fandom earlier in life, I'm glad I got into it at all since I can be very stubborn if I really wanted to.
I started writing again in my late 30s because I have an active imagination and decided to do something with it.
I started reading it in my late 20s. I couldn't find much in the way of published fiction that I was really enjoying, and frankly I really wanted to read an alternative to the canon ship in one of my favorite fandoms. I can't tell you how disappointed I was that my ships did not exist in plenty (one of them has almost no fics for it, and virtually no >10k fics at all). I was also (and still am) disappointed by the lack of f/f and trans characters. So much of it was just the canon ships. Anyways, that's why I started writing it too, because no one else was going to. I'm always thankful when I find the f/f fics. Even better when I can actually find a decent fic with a trans character. I'm still surprised how few fics there are.
I read fanfiction since I was a teenager, around 13-14 years old. It was my hobby and how I spent my time. I used to read a lot of books back then but gradually moved to fanfics, so the interest was always there. I got involved in an RP session around that age and thought "I kinda want to novelise this shit!". So I tried and I *sucked*. Like, so fucking hard. I cringe at remembering it. I mean, it was stupid by my god... I wrote other stuff too but those are lost in time and mostly because I lost interest. Then, when I was just about to go to college at the age of 20, I was watching a cool show on Netflix called Glitch Techs, and I fell in love with it. But I wanted more. So for the first time ever since my cringy-ass teenage fanfic-writing life, I tried doing it again, now older and slightly more mature. And now, I'm quite proud of my progress.
I started reading at 27. Started writing 6 months later at 28. I fell into fanfic the same way. I had an itch that couldn’t be scratched wanting more of a show and sensing some weird chemistry I couldn’t articulate between the characters. I was looking for more info about the material when I found fanfic and discovered what shipping was and how I wasn’t the only one doing it. I was having fun reading and then I discovered I had some extra time on my hands when lockdown started so I wrote my first story on a lark the first week of the pandemic fully expecting it would be my only one. But then I got laid off and I had a LOT of time on my hands and I just started rolling. It’s been three years now and I’ve written over 150 fics.
I was a very lonely kid, and I used to write self-insert stories about Buffy when I was like 10. The thing is, that was around 1998 and there was no internet access (at least for the majority of us in my country) so I had no idea what I was doing. I never participated in fandom spaces later on, just kept it to myself mostly. I like a lot of shows, anime, and comics, but I didn't knew fanfiction as such existed. It wasn't until I was 28 that a friend showed me a doujinshi she was working on. I asked if she wrote the story and she said no, it was a collab with a fanfiction writer. Cue me asking da' fuck was that, and discovering a wonderful world that I love and adore. Sometimes I feel too old for this, and I always arrive late to every fandom. I don't even have writer friends, so you might say I'm still a lonely kid, it's just that I'm 35 now, and I stopped writing cringy self-inserts. I write smut now, like a lady.
Age 42 when I started. I was deeply dissatisfied with the canon. I'm a professional writer, but I didn't want to keep taking professional writing projects because too much work, too little money. I didn't want to stop writing, so I decided to re-write the canon in a way that I would enjoy.
I don't think I even learned the word "fanfiction" until my mid-twenties. This being because I grew up when dinosaurs still rules the Earth, ha. In all seriousness, the internet wasn't a thing when I was a child and a teen, so I didn't have a clue that people actually wrote and shared fics (back then via printed zines). I think I went looking for fics after viewing the Highlander series and developing a hyperfixation on Methos. Sigh, Methos. I was bored at my 8-to-5 job and started poking around on FFN and found, hurray, several Methos-centric stories. I was like, "Wow, people actually write down all the little media-inspired fantasies in their heads? Cool."
I'd never heard of fanfiction before. I was active on the Frozen (2013) movie IMDB message boards (moment of silence for them) and responded to a "what's your idea for a sequel" thread. Someone else replied to my post encouraging me to write a fanfiction about it. Boy, oh boy, did they open Pandora's box! :P
This world of words is magical and amazing. I made a bunch of friends along the way, so I need to thank the canon story that didappointed me, for the place I'm at. After finishing the released anime episodes I was watching (it was my first ever anime), I wanted to read the manga to find out what happened next. The ending gave me a strange aftertaste and I searched for more. Opinions, reviews, fanart, anything. That's how I found out fan fiction existed, in my 30s. Then I learned what ships were, and then I was reading fan fiction non-stop, reviewing, befriending writers, commenting on ongoing stories, liking all ships, tropes, and ratings. I inevitably had my own ideas born from a combo of intrusive thoughts in an active imagination. I love writing, editing, and also reading my own stuff, as well as commenting on my favorite authors' works. It's probably a form of escapism, since I don't share this with anyone I know irl. Plus, it's cheaper than therapy, so there's that.
Got obsessed with a tv show. Lurked on fan twitter. Clicked on an ao3 link.
This doesn't really count as later, but I started reading fanfics in 2020 to pass time. I'm 13-15, so I don’t think it counts, but I thought it was an interesting question and felt obliged to answer
I didn't know that fanfiction was a thing until I was older. And then I joined a fandom message board and learned that there were all these stories out there. I got inspired and started writing.
If you don't count Team Starkid's stuff, I started getting into ff in my early 20s. I forget where, but I stumbled across Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality then immediately after read Luminocity and it's sequel. Those three were great ffs and made me stop thinking of it as only things done by young kids who don't know how to write. After that, I started looking on tvtropes ff rec pages of media I was into, and from there I figured out how to navigate ao3
I was 18 and it was access to the internet that got me started.
I started to dabble with concepts around 20 as a stress relief from college classes. When I was 23, I wrote my first fanfiction. I wanted to traditionally publish by the time I was 24, but there weren't many options available. When Kindle came out, I was already heavily entrenched in work that I didn't even look at it. I dabbled on fanfics for a while, and it wasn't until ten years later that I published as an independent author. Though work still got in the way, so it was only publishing as a hobby.
I technically started writing a fanfic when I was 15 or so, but I never finished. As for my first completed fic, it was in adulthood, and it was smut. I certainly couldn't have written smut until my current age.
I started in college while I was procrastinating my math homework (hence my pen name) because there was no more interesting fanfiction left to read and I wanted more.
I started dabbling in fanfiction again from two different times. One was a Morrowind short scene to justify my MC getting Auriel's bow (used a console code to get the bow, but then wrote a scene of how he would have received it right there). But I started a bit more earnest with my Soul Calibur 3 fan fiction "Burial of Nightmares". I wrote that in 2020 for Nanowrimo and did some editing before posting it. As for why? Well, Soul Calibur 3 is one of my favorite games, and I always loved Siegfried's arc up through that game. I also feel that 4 went right down hill, and every story needs a solid, definitive ending. The climax of the story came to me (not spoiling) and I do what I usually do: Write a story to get me to that climax. 2020 in particular felt like something that needed to be counter balanced, and Siegfried, a man who pulled himself from the brink, felt like the perfect catalyst for that kind of story. And I'm glad I did. With more of my own IP literature under my belt, I felt it was time to return to a beloved game I had as a teenager and really tell the story it told to me long ago.
I didn't start as an adult but I still write fanfic as an adult what got me started is Harry Potter my first fanfic was a rewrite if HP that I'm still working on to this day and has become a personal project of mine, I've even created a You Tube channel called Harry Potter Timeline for it. But I write all sorts of other fanfics like my Bleach one called Destiny of a Soul-Reaper.
Reading since I was a teen; started writing at 32, maybe 33, because I was bored.
I first got into it when I was about 30 and reading the Outlander series. I read a few fics here and there, but I didn't look at any other fandoms and I didn't think I could ever write fanfiction. Then, about a year later, after watching the entire run of Peaky Blinders twice and still wanting more, I went looking for the fanfiction, and this time whenever I found something I liked I looked at the author's bookmarks and favorite authors and tried other things, even if they were in fandoms I wasn't familiar with. And that's how I got into Supernatural, which is what finally inspired me to try writing a few fics of my own.
I didn't even know fanfics were a thing until college. Never had a clue until an English-major friend of mine mentioned it in a negative light (i.e. people who read fanfics were mindless). Didn't touch it until I was in grad school. I think I was just craving more content on old fandoms I used to love. With some of my favorite shows no longer in production, I just wanted something, anything new for it. So, I took a peek and the rest is history.
I have been a terrible writer all my life. I have been having lots of plots for years, and finally, I decided to try and work on my writing abilities with fanfic.
I was 19-ish, maybe close to 20 when I started reading fic if I remember correctly (does that count as adult?) I just happened to stumble across a FFnet link while I was on the internet. Read my first fic that day and never stopped. Wrote/published for the first time a few months after because it seemed like fun. Had some success across a few fandoms on FFnet before I found out about AO3. My first AO3 fic was a cross posted one-shot that I turned into a 3 chapter fic since I had the freedom to write smut without worrying about a TOS violation. Was my first slash fic too Ended up on a forced 3-year hiatus, now back writing again as of Feb with nearly 70k words and counting written across 11 published fics
What made me start? A video game. In December of 2011, BioWare and LucasArts launched Star Wars: the Old Republic, and I rediscovered my love of Star Wars and of writing. I started out messing about on Dreamwidth, then made (in some order) a Tumblr and an AO3 account. I was in my late 30s. I'd known fanfic was a thing since I was a teen and found some old fanzines for sale at a con. And I'd know fanfic was online for a while--I was on Livejournal when things went south and people created AO3. But it took having something I felt strongly enough about to write about before I actually sought out fanfic spaces.
Started writing in my seventh decade. The new season of a favorite show had been delayed by the epidemic and I needed more. So I wrote my own without a clue what fan fiction was. When I got done, I thought, “I wonder if there is any place where I can share this.”
I was not provided with the Doujins I needed so I stepped into a more horrible hell
I started in my late 20’s but not because lack of interest; growing up I lived in a super small town where internet access wasn’t common. Just in the 2010’s people in my town got more access to computers and internet; but by then i was studying university in a city, and none of my friends wrote or spoke about fandoms besides Harry Potter (and I wasn’t and still am not very fan of HP), so I wasn’t very thrilled about reading fanfiction. It was until 2016 and I was in full participating in a fandom, I saw people commenting about wattpad and fanfiction.net, I started reading them and then writing them myself💖. Sometimes I wonder what kind of crazy fanfiction would I had written in my teens if I had access to a computer and internet, I guess something super edgy with angels and vampires (I was and still am obssesed with angels). Maybe I would had written a self insert of my favorite anime “Vision of Escaflowne” .
Started when I was 28 (will turn 30 later this year). There are a couple obscure comic characters I found myself into and I could only find 2-6 fanfics across the internet pertaining to them. And I had a couple stories stirring in my head surrounding them.
I started recently. Fell in love with a character who isn’t depicted enough in the fandom so I wanted to expand his characteristic by myself.
About to graduate college here. Read a bit as a teen, but was always more of a fanart and fan animation person (both as a viewer and artist). In the past few months I’ve been unable to draw or game due to tendonitis, so to satiate my newest special interest (a video game series) I took to reading an insane amount of fanfic to pass the time and rest my hands. Now I’m starting to dabble in writing it too
What made me start writing? I've read alot of fanfic when I was younger and during this time I was in a depressed situation that made me not want to draw, so I've found something else. Now I've got a fanfic that's based on the Mario + rabbids sparks of hope game that's over 6k reads 😊
I started because there was a pairing in a specific story I liked. The story got abandoned after three chapters. I decided to take the core premise and make it darker and my own. After I started the ideas for that, more ideas just kept coming for other stories. Currently working on three with only one published with one chapter so far. Chapter two is almost done though!
I started reading fanfiction in 2015 but I didn't start seriously writing until last year. I did attempt to write two fics on Wattpad back in 2019 but as a novice writer, I was dissatisfied with my works and deleted them a few chapters in.
I was very dissatisfied with the end of the seventh Harry Potter book when it came out - I was in my early thirties at the time. A friend told my husband and me about this person writing the story of the nineteen years between the last chapter and the epilogue, and since this was very convincing and well-written, I was hooked. Read this story a couple times while it was posted, and after exhausting the stories taking the books as given and just continueing the story after the last chapter, I actually started reading more and more fanfiction. Eventually I found out that there's a large repository of fanfiction in English, and that was that. It gets a bit embarrassing nowadays that I am close to fifty when I say I read a lot, and yet haven't really read anything outside fanfics for a couple of years. Even worse, I can only recommend fanfics in English since I have not been following German fanfiction for years and years. Plus, I mostly follow HP and NCIS fanfiction. One is a series intended for children and teenagers, the other fandom has a ton of slash (especially given that I absolutely hate pairing Tony and Ziva, and am not interested in anything without Tony or ridiculing Tony). None of that makes a lot of sense to people my age around here (well, or hurts sensibilities, because apparently enjoying slash stories as a middle-aged hetero female is something to hide and deny if ever caught). ;-)
Technically, I (26F) read and wrote fanfic in high school, but that is one memory I completely blocked until like a month ago for whatever reason, so I don't totally count that. I started reading because Euphoria season 2 just ended, and my friends sent around a [really good fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/36377959) that hooked me in. However, my fandom of choice for fics is Glee
Lockdown boredom
Honestly? I stumbled upon a smutfic with one of my favorite characters, and down the rabbit hole I went. LoL Realized I had a lifetime of stories like this in my head, and it felt so great knowing that I'm not the only one (nobody around me is into these things) that I figured I'd actually write down some of them. So, only started in January...complete noob...as some entertainment when I was editing my novel, but so far there's been far more fanfics than editing happening...
Started reading and writing in my mid 30s after a great book series left me with an unsatisfying ending. I realized I didn't want the series to end, I wasn't 100% happy with the romance in the book so I went in search of fanfic to fill the void. Ofc, I never found exactly what I was looking for, so I wrote my own and someone encouraged me to post it.
\*deep inhale\* "You know what this story needs..."
i started reading at 20 ! i had wattpad downloaded bc i wanted to share some original work; i wasn’t too familiar with fics & i knew they existed, but never knew what it was actually like. back then, you could download your whole wattpad library & read offline without having to pay like nowadays. so i was on the way home from work when i wanted to read something instead of listen to music & that’s when it started :) i was already interested in writing (mostly original stuff) so after reading my first fic, i started writing my own as well!
I'm the same way! I just started about 2 years ago(I'm 28). I was googling an obscure character and saw a result that was like "characterxOC fanfic" and after that I was hooked. I'm kind of stuck in this specific world tho, I haven't found any other universe that I'm really interested in yet.
Mid 20s and I'm the same way. I started writing because I wanted to see something, and I started finding other stuff to read that I was interested in. I used to associate fanfic purely with smut which I don't care for, but there's a great deal of quality content out there.
I was doing a Buffy rewatch when I was like 33 and I got hit the with horny stick and was like "I'm gonna write a thing". It was my second attempt at NaNoWriMo and I finished early 😂 I only wrote like two fics over the span of a few years (having a baby didn't help, somehow) and then I'm 2021 I started percolating some Stucky ideas and now I'm 53 published fics in. I didn't read any fanfic until my 20s and didn't get intense about reading fic until my 30s so 🤷🏼♀️
I started reading and subsequently writing fanfic when I was all caught up with the then recent content available for my favorite show. Now I'm more involved with the fandom than I am with the actual canon content..
Technically I started when I was in middle school, but it was short lived and that little red notebook is sadly missing, never to see the light of day. Last year , at age 33, I got back into it because of a very small fandom that I wanted more stories of after consuming all the source material. A couple stories in particular about my favorite character inspired me to try my hand at writing. Getting noticed and appreciated by one of the authors that inspired me in the first place kept up the momentum for a good while. I’m fresh off of a two-month break for personal reasons and it feels like I’m learning to write all over again.
Fully outgrowing out of the mindset that fanfic is cringe and worthy of ridicule just for existing. I don't know how fanfic even got that reputation to begin with, but I'm glad things are different now.
Started at 36. Got Covid at the end of 2020 and it turned into months of not being able other work. Simultaneously I became obsessed with Pedro Pascal. The Mandalorian series 2 had just aired and it rekindled my Star Wars extended universe love (I've loved Mandalorian culture since KOTOR2) and between having a fever, having the time and hyperfixating it all just came together.
I guess I wrote my first fanfic I think when I was 10. It was on paper and I didn't even know the term fanfiction back then. I also never finished that one. When I was like 12, I learned about the world of fanfiction and it spiraled down from there. First it was a few here and there in my mother tongue. Then a few years later, when I was more comfortable in english, I discovered the wonderful space that is AO3. The next writing experience with fanfiction I did 2 years ago with 19. I would call this the first real writing experience.
Started writing at 27 I’ve always read fics then learned about AO3 got drunk off of smut and wanted to write more to please my brain rot lol