To Write Dominion "Derived Fiction" and not Fanfiction

[Caradryan]

Sombre's got a point.

Warning: rant.

There's a difference between derived fiction and fanfiction. From my understanding (and I have little expertise in English itself), the original definition of fanfiction is defined as using canonical characters within a particular work and re-interpreting elements of the story with an overall adherence to the work as a whole.

In other words, you are limited by the definition itself when writing fanfiction.

Fanfiction on FF.net is more or less "writing whatever the hell I want." Most fanfiction I've found lack a great deal of things - in the end, they don't even make good stories to read. The few pieces of writing using established game-universes I've seen that are (in my humble opinion) good are really derived works.

Derived fiction is taking elements of a particular work and then putting the author's own creativity into it. A short story written in J.R.R. Tolkien's universe about an elf would be a derived work and not quite fanfiction, even though it uses elements found in Tolkien's work (elves, middle-earth, etc).

This is why good video game writing tend to be more of the derived fiction format, because a video game isn't meant to tell a story. Its design is to entertain. Oftentimes people praise final fantasy or whathaveyou as amazing works full of character depth, but from a writer's perspective, there's really very little for you to work with.

So, in my opinion, good writing is good writing. It doesn't matter if you use canonical characters or not, so long as there's a purpose to everything in your story. Be warned, however, that oftentimes what I consider to be good writing is considered to be unreadably boring by the contemporary 14-year-old fanfiction writers. :P