User:Quirel

And I'm Quirel, the guy who writes Not All Who Wander.

But not just Not All Who Wander. I've got a pretty active slate, with a dozen oneshots and multi-chapter stories in some level of production. Most are just notes scribbled down in a notebook, some are proper outlines, some are mostly written, and one or two desperately need me to get off my lazy butt and write a final chapter.

I have a problem where I can't stop writing stories. I'm often daydreaming. I come up with these characters, situations, and snippets of dialog, then I turn them over in my head for hours, like rocks rolling around in a tumbler until they emerge with a smooth polish or crumbled into dust. Writing these ideas down is the best way to short-circuit that process and get them out of my head, and if I'm going to write them down, I might as well do something with them.

Part of what draws me to writing fiction is that I'm interested in philosophy, ethics, history, and theories of mind. Fiction allows me to explore these ideas vicariously by putting characters through times of hardship and seeing how they react, or by pitting characters with opposite ideas against each other.

Halo, Fanon, Fanfiction
To start off... it's kind of funny that I ended up here. You see, there's two kinds of fanfiction. The first kind, the far more popular kind, is remixes. Peggy Sues, self-inserts, crossovers. That kind of fanfiction is all about taking elements from a story and giving them a good shakeup, adding new elements and seeing how that would change the course of events. This is a lot like how songs get remixed, or how videos get cut up for Youtube memes. The whole point is to shake things up and have fun along the way.

This kind of fanfiction is so common, in fact, that the best way to predict what stories will produce a lot of fanfiction is to look for a story that is amenable to this remixing. Look for an accessible story with likeable characters, especially a story with an audience surrogate. Look for a story with powers or magical systems that can be swapped out or rules-lawyered. Most of all, look for a story that leaves the audience less than satisfied. That's very specific. Look for a story that's flawed. A story that is good enough to gather an audience and keep them hooked, but has any number of mistakes that the audience wants to see fixed. The ideal generator of fanfiction would probably be serial fiction that gives the audience plenty of time to get invested, but has flaws because the writer is writing one chapter at a time and makes mistakes early on.

So the fact that three of the biggest generators of fanfiction, AFAIK, are Worm, Harry Potter, and Naruto shouldn't be too surprising.

I got into fanfiction for an entirely different reason. Back in 2006, there were a grand total of two Halo games and three novels, plus a graphic novel if you could find it in your local bookstore. That's it. There was a hunger for more fiction, and more fiction seemed to be coming down the pipeline. Halo 3 was getting close to release, Halo Wars was known to be in development, Eric Nylund was working on Ghosts of Onyx, and Microsoft was actively seeking to make a Halo movie. That was a fantastic time to be a Halo fan, but if you wanted more content, you had to wait or make it yourself. At the time, I wasn't exactly a patient person.

I tried to write more Halo fiction, staying true to the character of what had come before. I wasn't successful, but I did a much better job than one might expect from a first try. And it's strange, but Halo seems to have inspired more of this kind of fanfiction than the fix-it fics. Halo seems to generate more fiction about original characters, or the continued adventures of Master Chief, and there is a whole Halo fanon wiki with a strict canon-adherence policy. That wiki was founded, by the way, to give Halopedians an outlet so they wouldn't mess up Halopedia articles with their fanon.

So, now we've come to the Daybreak Continuum, a Halo fanon project that takes an alternate universe stance.