Fan Fiction: Five Categories

Following Tolkien, we often refer to the imagined worlds in which works of fiction take place as “secondary worlds”. But in the last half-century or so, many amateur authors have created, and shared widely, works set in what we might call “tertiary worlds”—worlds that are to a “secondary world” as it is to our “primary world.” This is a phenomenon commonly known as “fan fiction”, “fanfic”, or in some circles simply “fic”.

We can divide fan-fiction authors into at least five (significantly overlapping!) groups, based on their reason for writing it.