A writing community for people wanting to talk about the nuts and bolts of fanwork.
Fanfic to pro fic
Does anyone have any experience with reworking a fanfic as an original fic and publishing it?

A writing community for people wanting to talk about the nuts and bolts of fanwork.
Does anyone have any experience with reworking a fanfic as an original fic and publishing it?
A writing community for people wanting to talk about the nuts and bolts of fanwork.
I haven't reworked fanfic myself, but I still might have some useful input anyway. I attend a fiction workshop group fairly regularly, and one of the things I've noticed when people try and move from fic to original is that they're not always conscious of all the shortcuts they're using to tell the story. One advantage fanfic has when writing it is the emotional bonds readers have already developed for characters and ships, not to mention the worldbuilding. That means because we know readers already buy in, it can sometimes be easier to jump straight into the action or romance without having to first sell it to the reader. Those shortcuts tend not to work in original novels, though!
So what I'd do in your position is try to keep in mind that you have to convince your readers to care, and also find some non-fandom beta readers (or just people who aren't familiar with your fic or that particular fandom, and don't tell them where it came from) who are decent at concrit, and pay close attention to how they react to characters/relationships and where they stumble or get confused. Anyway, thank you for tolerating unsolicited advice from a stranger, but I had to comment somewhere to make this username ;__;
I tend to do the opposite: take my old original story ideas and then write them about my OTP instead.
I don't, but I have noticed that there's a community dedicated to it that's just popped up - it's /filing. Maybe you'll have better luck there?
Ooh, thanks!
Oooh, you got a big storm coming. Good luck.
(I don't hate the practice, but a lot of people do.)
We're trying to talk about this over at /filing ! Just starting out, but you're welcome to join us in Uberfiction :)
I've seen it done with self publishing. I've seen quite a few good ones actually. Good luck!
None so far but I've considered doing this with one of my fics. It's a complete AU of the original and keeps mostly character names and relationships, along with personality traits and a few key things that happen in the story. The fandom I'm in (OUAT - Rumbelle) is HUGE into AU stories and this one was pretty majorly AU and included a lot of research into the world it took place in. It would probably translate to an original fic pretty well with only a few minor changes.
But I've been scared to do it. I also hate the thought of taking it down as it's a fic that's meant so much to me...so...I haven't quite decided what to do.
I don't have direct experience with reworking fic, but I worked with a publisher who accepts fanfic with the serial numbers filed off and absorbed a lot of the general guidelines they use.
The big roadblock, for a lot of fans, is that the original fic has to be taken down. There are also a lot of editing concerns - fanfic doesn't have to describe the setting and can use shortcuts in character motivations, and in many fics, some parts of the plot are skipped over to get to "the good bits," whether that's character insights or relationships.
I don't but I've seen it happen. Once in the 80s (Star Wars fanfic), once in the 00s (Justice League fanfic), and most recently in the 10s (Stargate SG1 fanfic).
In each case, the professional version submitted was changed significantly (okay, so not so much in the Star Wars fanfic, but it was a printed fanfic, before the internet took off, so it was harder to trace, although once you know the published book and you look back a the 'original canon' then you can see it very clearly). We're not talking 'Shades of Grey' here, we're talking major worldbuilding and character development.
One could really argue that the authors in question took the characters they loved from the fandom, shifted them sideways and turned them into original characters. They kept some of the archetypal characteristics of the characters, giving them new backgrounds appropriate to the worlds in which they now inhabited, but maintaining many of the key personality traits and relationship dynamics which attracted them to begin with.
And, yes, as rawr_balrog has pointed out, you have to convince your reader (single reader = the agent/editor who will take your story on to publishing) to care about your 'original fiction characters' without the shortcuts that you can count on in fanfic.
This will be easier for some characters than others. For instance, society loves the character of the annoying-yet-brilliant-scientist/geek who means well but really can't adult, which is why there's one in every movie series and TV show.