Well, maybe
MediocreFanFiction.com
I mean, __good__ fan fiction would involve doing some research to be slightly converstant in the subject matter of the main character, and maybe a little support imagery , you know, just some stock photos of the place the main character lives, etc.
Too many people must have read blogs or bought books about how to write flash fiction and how to write fanfiction and so forth during the coronavirus lockdowns.
I remember now a time after Macintosh computers had been around for about a year, (and I had acquired one) and one of my brothers was taking graduate work in creative writing.
He popped into my place for a coffee one night when I was having fun shoving files around in file folders with "real names" as opposed to DOS-garble acronyms... and there was one on my desktop called "Short Fiction." As it happens, that just had documents in it with the issue dates and titles of pieces in various popular and literary magazines. I'd decided to computerize my notes about them so I could actually find the pieces again on a weekend when I had time to re-read stories I had liked.
Well the writing-savvy bro was intrigued, less by the tech advancements in GUI or directory identifications than by the idea of stashing retrievable notes about writing in general (maybe his own), even if it would also be nice that they could be, as of the time of Macintosh, end up stashed with better directory and file descriptors than say NOVL1985.
So we started talking about breaking writing
tasks down into categories and then about synthesizing fiction from some kernel, and then looping back to analyzing types of fiction, and then I said "oh like this..." and from a totebag at hand I hauled out a copy of Harper's or some such, meaning to point out a couple ways the short fiction in there could be categorized.
But meanwhile the bro spotted one of my airport terminal purchases in that same totebag, some Danielle Steele thing, and he took it out and said "No, like this."
And suddenly --well not suddenly, since by then it was like 3am-- my Mac desktop, having gained a folder called "Steele Analysis" was sprouting nested file folders with names like "Characters" and "Sub plots". By then the bro was ripping pages out of the hapless Steele paperback and saying "So maybe put this in "Flashbacks"... and eventually asking "You have any more of these upstairs? We could see if there's a static pattern or she mixes it up sometimes".
So my homebrew cataloguing system of short fiction I just wanted to be able to remember that I wanted to re-read was in the wind somewhere on my Mac's desktop. And there we were practically writing a fanfic novel. Yeah! Three o'clock in the morning!
And yes, by then we had a prototype "Best Seller" in its own file folder on my Macintosh, with sub folders for characters and plots and everything... even chapter epigraphs in case we went all highbrow on the thing.
Somewhere around there I called a halt before my bro decided to lay hands on some trade paperbacks upstairs for whose fate I had more concern. He was starting to talk about how we should maybe analyze a better grade of fiction and pitch to the upscale markets, which is where the epigraphs idea had come from.
At that point I was like "how much more upscale can a writer get than dressing her kids in Victorian outfits?" the way Steele did back then... but he was talking about the readership, and I was starting to fade because even then I drank less coffee late at night than he did.
In that single night's events, both the bro and I came to realize there's more to writing fiction (or, fanfiction) than just figuring it should be pretty simple to crank out a more or less orginal best seller if you put your mind to it and have a clue how other people have done it.
Long story short, Ms Steele may have mastered the art of her particular subgenre long before one of her works got dissected that night at my kitchen table, but some of the stuff on, as you tagged it, "MediocreFanFiction.com" usually has quite a long way to go.
Certainly the case for our demo that night. All that remains of it for me is fond remembrance of my early experiences in using GUI for directory management of files on a personal computer. Practice can help make perfect, but the kitchen table should be the end of the road for some of the homework in the meantime.
The problem now is that computers sitting on a kitchen table are usually hooked up to the internet. And yeah, before
@Gutwrench chimes in about Ambience, I'm pulling the plug on mine here, but not without noting that this thread revives a wonderment on my part about how many people all over the world have a 2nd (or, 3rd) job called "writing a novel" or "writing poetry".
Writers like Wallace Stevens come to mind... working all those years as an executive at The Hartford insurance companies as his day job, and meanwhile investing energies in what might have been sleep or partygoing in what eventually became his collected poems.
He'd probably be first among writers to caution against thinking that such a "second job" can be easy or simple. Even if the knack of writing comes easily, getting it right takes more time and maybe more mentoring and editing than the eye-blink's time it takes to send it out to the world. Proof of that does seem to lie in some of the work on FanFiction.com if anyone spends some time looking around on that site. Even the imitative fanfiction genre is hard to bring off well and that's intentionally secondhand to begin with.
