1 Essay

One of my favorite things to do is sit, curled up on the couch, reading stories with a playlist of my favorite songs playing in the background. Unfortunately, I read through in 3 hours what takes others days. I ran out of books to read, constantly searching the far reaches of libraries for new novels that suited my tastes. Then I discovered fanfiction.

Fanfiction allows readers the familiarity of beloved characters and settings without the boring redundancy of rereading books or reading about new characters before getting over the old ones. There were thousands of them, all on my phone, and they explored new and different sides to all my favorite characters, breathing life back into stories that had long since ended. Reading fanfiction gave me new perspectives on details of my favorite stories that I had overlooked and allowed me to grow a deeper appreciation for the authors that wrote them.

My favorite aspect of fanfiction is the creativity it inspires in me. After reading the same scene ten different ways I felt the urge to write an eleventh; something that seemed impossible to me as an eighth grader who hated writing almost as much as they loved reading. All of the different ways a character was written or a plot point was twisted fascinated me and I started being drawn to fics about time travel and people who had read the stories finding themselves inside the stories, watching the butterfly effect across the pages.

Fanfiction helped me in ways I am still discovering today and so I will reiterate; my favorite activity is reading fanfiction.