Turning fan fic into original work

Has anyone here done this before?

I meant taking one's own fan fic and abandoning the shackles, and at the same time, life support, of the source material and lead one's work into ... unfamiliar territory.

Just asking before I go any further.

There are people who have; not sure if any are actually on this forum.

I'd assume it involves a lot of reworking of the world-building beyond just changing names - if you just do a find-and-replace it'd be obvious what your source was. An opportunity to fix any aspects of the canon you had problems with or think could have been better used, maybe?

I have. It is not easy, and to do it you have to ask yourself a few questions:

1: How far have I gone from the source material in the first place? if you have invented a whole new area/set of characters/tech level/whatever, than it may be as simple as changing a few names. If you have not, it might not be possible to extract your work from the original.

2: How much of this is me, and how much of this is the source? This requires an objective appraisal of the work in question, and that is best done by someone other than you. Our creations are our children, and no one wants to see flaws in their children.

3: Am I willing to make fundamental changes in what I already have so that it can fit in a world I've created? This can be necessary because some of the elements of the borrowed world may have served as springboards for your own creation. Whole sections (even ones you dearly love) may have to go, just because you cannot use them without infringing on another creator's copyright.

More than that, I'd have to actually see what you've done to give you any more advice. My own personal experience; I ran a series of Shadowrun games that were tied together. Because I did not own many of the books (and the 3rd Edition Shadowrun sourcebooks were so badly put together) I was forced to make up much of the setting, to the point where one day I realized it wasn't Shadowrun any more. I had to change a bunch of names and chuck some portions of my created world that were too similar to the source material, but in the end I had a functional gameworld and system. People I know still use the system.

Pity it will never be published because I did it with my now ex-wife, the intellectual property rights were never handled during the divorce proceedings, and getting sued sucks. Which brings me to the last question that you need to ask yourself...

4: Am I willing to risk a lawsuit despite all my hard work?

Again, would have to know more about your situation to provide any more help, but there's what I know.

I've changed an adaptation to a fully original story, a similar procedure.

To be honest I haven't written anything yet.

Because in the end I am shackled to the source material and I feel that no matter how well I write my story, the source material shall overshadow it.

In time my work will be proven false and that the creators will never adopt my ideas. I prefer not to suffer such events.

edited 7th Oct '10 9:43:53 PM by Worlder

I did something... not quite similiar - I divorced my story from Star Wars, stripped it of all Star Wars-y elements, and...

Shoved it into Firefly/Serenity. Drawback is that I have less canon material to work with, but that's not a problem, that's more freedom.

I had a story set in “Arcanum” by Troika Games, but eventually made the world more my own. It still a fantasy world, with Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs, going through an industrial revolution, so now I feel like a plagiarist.

I can shake off the guilt of being a plagiarist by admitting the influences and origins.

If I admitted the influences I reduce the potential for a scandal.

Every fanfiction I've contemplated writing morphs into this eventually. Personally, I don't find it hard at all. Particularly when I end up merging two separate ideas together, which is often how my fanfics turn into original fiction. What's hard, for me, is not doing this.

I have done fanfics before (very few of which I am actually proud of due to just how bad they are) and I have decided that enough was enough. I had had it with these motherfucking fanfics on this motherfucking idiocy scale. Okay, that one wasn't that clever...in fact, that joke failed...

Point is, I had gotten tired of writing stupid fanfics and decided instead to work on original stuff. I had just dropped fanfics entirely since then. I admit though that some of my work I had borrowed some details off of other series (Price For Freedom shares more than a few things with Mech Quest), but I had cut most of it from original cloth.

More to the point, if you want to turn a fanfic into an original work, I suggest cutting out the middle man and go wholly original. That way, you don't have to worry about possible legal issues if it actually gets published, and as an added bonus, you actually get a good feeling because you made something from original cloth. That shouldn't stop you from inserting a Shout-Out or two if you still want to remind yourself of it being a fanfic originally, but for the most part, just cut out the middle man.