The Prompt
Today I want you to write a story in 40 minutes. To help with that, we’re going to take away some of the invention you would otherwise have to do, by writing fan-fiction.
Choose a story, character or world invented by someone else, take a couple of their characters and mix things up. You might want to take an incident or ending that you hated and change it.
Remember that when you’re writing fan fiction it’s not the kind of thing that can be published without the original rightsholder’s permission (at least, not commercially), but there’s a long and proud tradition of artists copying other artists’ work to figure out what makes them…er, work. If visual artists can do it in their sketchbooks, then we can definitely do it in our practice.
Fan fic is common in sci-fi and fantasy worlds, and in the ‘fandoms’ of TV shows and movies, but there’s nothing to stop you writing a fan fic based on something by the obscure literary fiction writer that only you seem to love…Whatever you can summon up some unreasonable enthusiasm for is fair game.
To help you with the timing, I recommend
- brainstorming for five minutes,
- taking 5 more minutes to write your opening,
- then spending the meat of your time complicating things for your characters,
- leaving five minutes at the end to pull it all together in some kind of ending (even if the rest of the story is not exactly ‘finished’ Trust me, it’ll help, when you come back to it, or stumble across this little oddity on your hard-drive in two years and wonder what you were trying to achieve with it…)
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Fan Fic In Forty
Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. Her first recurring characters, at age 11, in no way ripped off the friendship in “My Best Fiend” by Sheila Levelle (thanks, Sheila!)
Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!
Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.
Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday
Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version
It was fun to write fan fic today. It took longer than forty (because if my indecision on which road to take) but it was fun and its done! =) Can’t believe it’s May 25th!
Not sure I wrote a fanfiction piece but I enjoyed what I did. I picked a story by a new author I’ve been reading and wrote it from the POV of the secondary character. I created new vocations for the characters but kept the same unhappy tone and egotistical personalities. Partway through I thought of and jotted down an ending which helped immensely to work the rest of the story toward a conclusion.
That sounds like a fun approach! =)
Hi Melanie, yes, whatever it was I came up with, it turned out to be fun. Looks like you had a good time too.
Hurray! Another first draft done. I spent quite a bit of time finding a story to write with. Once I did, it was smooth sailing. I wrote fan fiction for a very short scary story. There was one really big inconsistency that bothered me and I made a change to address that. Here is one line from my writing today “She sketched pencil drawings of tiny fairies and the gardens around them.” This is a story that I would like to tell around campfires, it is a scary story but it has a comforting aspect to it. Thanks for this fun exercise, Julie!
Fun detail many people forget: sometimes you CAN publish fanfiction – if you base it on an original work that’s in the public domain. Jane Austen fanfic? Can be published. Great Gatsby fanfic? Yup. That one too.
Excellent point!
This prompt did not work well for me. I have trouble remembering what I ate for supper yesterday, let alone the ending of a story. So i went back to yesterday’s prompt that I didn’t write to.
Oh boy, I love the 40-minute FanFic prompt – I’ll do that tomorrow.
Today I have done yesterday’s prompt, ‘Write a story that revolves around an heirloom toy,’ and a unique one. As a kid (and even now), I played Dungeons and Dragons. As a Child DM I created a creature known as a ‘Puppy’. For today’s story, I recreated that creature here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_W-rwu8yIWgv2uvReMwsF5EVAWT_hI68-yLE7fWlm9Y/edit?usp=sharing
That, though, is not my story for the day; that is here: https://afstoryaday.blogspot.com/2026/05/puppy-delivery.html
I really liked this exercise, and it was the prompt about a heirloom toy, just one of my imagination.
Now to go think about some FanFic.