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pingo1387 Interview
ABefore we get started with the questions, would you mind introducing yourself and telling us just a little about yourself?
Sure! I write under pingo1387 online on FanFiction.net, Archive of Our Own, and Tumblr. Fanfiction was the first kind of writing I posted in a public internet space, and I’ve been posting it since for about six or seven years fairly regularly.
Q1: What kind of fan fiction do you write/ have you written?
A1: All sorts of genres. I’ve written long high school AUs, tragic romances, fairy tale-based stories, and plenty of adventure. Right now I’m in the middle of writing mostly romances with a few friendship-themed adventures and an AU set in 20th-century America.
Q2: What made you start writing fan fiction?
A2: I started writing in 9th grade, and the main reason I wrote was because I had an idea for a crossover fanfic that I wanted to make a comic out of, but I couldn’t draw to save my life (I still can’t). I’d always had a pretty good grasp on grammar and read a lot, so I decided I’d write a fanfic about it instead and make a comic later (I never did).
Q3: Were you scared to begin posting it online?
A3: I sure was. Part of the fear came from Fanfiction.net’s comment system being called “reviews,” which made me think people would be posting paragraphs of criticisms and critiques, since the only kind of review I was familiar with was newspaper columns rating new films and novels. I was pleasantly surprised when this not only was not the case, but that people actually liked the story!
Q4: Has writing fan fiction taught you anything? About writing? Reading? Something else?
A4: Writing fanfic has definitely helped me improve my writing skills, simply because I wrote so frequently and reread my own stories, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. It also taught me to be more patient when waiting for updates from other authors, now that I knew how difficult it was to upload more than once every few weeks!
Q5: Do you ever want to be published in a professional capacity one day?
A5: Absolutely. I have some original stories in mind, and I’d love to make a living off of them while seeing other people enjoy them.
Q6: How you feel about the stigma surrounding fan fiction and fan fiction writers? Or, do you not feel any stigma at all?
A6: I feel like there is some stigma regarding what fanfiction is and what its writers are like—that it’s not real writing, that it’s all porn, and that it’s generally terrible. Fanfic and its writers get a bad rap.
Q7: Do you think that stigma is warranted? (Whether or not you have personally experience it?)
A7: It’s absolutely unwarranted. I believe if you look up statistics, you’ll find that most fanfic isn’t explicitly sexual, and of course there is plenty of bad fanfic out there, but there’s plenty of bad published writing, too, and a lot of fanfic writers are not professional and/or just starting out as writers. Of course there’s going to be bad writing; you can say that about almost any site with writing, fanfic or not, on the internet.
As for it being “real writing,” first off, what defines real writing? Does it have to be professionally published, hit a bestseller list, win a Hugo award? Does it need to have a blockbuster film based on it? Does it need to be in classical Greek, written by a scholar only two people in the world have heard of?
Guess what? Even if you say yes to any of those, there’s a lot more fanfic in the world than you might realize. Paradise Lost is essentially fanfiction of the Book of Genesis from the Bible. Medieval painters in Italy often painted scenes from the Bible, making many famous paintings fanart. Dante’s Inferno is a self-insert, one of the most ridiculed kinds of fanfic, into the Catholic afterlife, where he meets many famous and infamous figures (not unlike a so-called “Mary-Sue” self-insert who gets to meet her favorite characters all in the span of two chapters). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a horror fanfic of Pride and Prejudice. I could go on, but you get the idea. There are so few truly original ideas simply because everything has been done, and fanfic just takes recycling ideas to the next step.
Q8: What’s your favorite piece of fan fiction you’ve ever written? Why?
A8: Currently my favorite piece is a one-shot called “Swallow Your Soul,” a One Piece AU fanfic with the premise that a mysterious affliction is negatively affecting people with powers. My guilty pleasure favorite is a Hetalia high school fanfic, spanning three long stories and written over the course of three or four years.
Q9: What’s something you’ve never been asked but want to be?
A9: For various stories, I’d love to be asked how I came up with certain aspects, where an idea came from, or for details on a worldbuilding thing I never had the chance to fully elaborate on in the story. I love rambling about those sorts of things, and if any one of the answers is that it’s a reference/homage to something, then I’d jump at the chance to talk about where it came from, because it’s probably something favorite of mine.
Q10: Do you write outside of fan fiction?
A10: A little bit, yes. At the moment, schoolwork and fanfic keep me occupied, but I’m trying to put together characters and plots for original stories that I hope to sell one day. One is a collection of connected short stories, and the other is a YA fantasy-style adventure.
Q11: What site you (mainly) use to write fan fiction?
A11: I’ve been on Fanfiction.net for my entire fanfic writing career. I occasionally post one-shots or drabbles on Tumblr in response to events or requests, and I’m working on rewriting my favorite Fanfiction.net stories to post on AO3, as well as planning to post any new stories on both FFN and AO3.
Q12: Why do you write fan fiction?
A12: It’s still the best medium for me to get my ideas out into the world. It’s easier for me to use characters I’m familiar with for stories, even if the settings are unfamiliar, and though I’m developing my own characters, I don’t know them well enough to write them in anything outside the main story I’m planning for them. It’s very fun to play with the characters I know and put them in new situations, and writing stories several thousand words long over and over is great practice for when I finally submit something to be professionally published.
Find pingo1387 on Tumblr, FanFiction.net, and Archive of Our Own.