The first story idea I ever had came after having seen Superman IV and Batman: The 1966 Series. I thought wouldn't it be great if these two characters got together. So I excitedly wrote my story in a yellow spiral notebook when I was just turning.

Of course, I couldn't know that someone had beaten me to the idea of a Superman-Batman team up by a little bit. In fact, Bill Finger wrote the first team up for the Comics in Superman #76 in 1952-37 years previously and the over-the-radio version was done in 1943-before my mother was even born.

However, unoriginal it was, the point is my first story would be considered fan fiction which was a point brought to mine by my publisher Grace Bridge writing about writing Dr. Who Fanfiction.

Fanfiction has some issues. Technically, publishers and TV creators can create problems if you use their copyrighted characters in fanfiction. However, if no profit's made on it, usually they won't raise a stink. It doesn't make sense to raise a stink because no one is not watching your show to read the fanfiction. The fanfiction is feeding fans obsession with your show and guaranteeing they'll watch it.

Perhaps the bigger issues with fanfiction are that it's got a bad reputation in terms of quality. There are many reasons for it. The chief one is that it can make writing easier. It's writing without having to do serious world building or creating characters. They're all created for you. That leads to people who can't write well writing fanfiction for reasons such as creating implausible crossovers OR having a couple of their favorite characters get together.

However, just because there is a lot of bad fanfiction, it doesn't mean all of ifs bad, and if you get a good writer writing fanfiction, there's some very interesting potential.

The big upside for fan fiction is that it can be relaxing and it can be fun to apply your writing talents to a franchise that it may be hard or impossible for you to actually write in real life.

There's an added benefit as well. If you develop a good enough story, you can develop into one you can use your own universe. You just want to be sure you still don't have a strong resemblance to lead to a copyright suit, but it can be done. Fifty Shades of Grey was originally Twilight Fanfiction. Though perhaps, that's not the best example of quality fiction.

My preferred approach when getting fan fictiony ideas is to write the stories in my own world in the first place. I had an idea recently for a Batman-Superman story. By the time I write it, it will feature neither Batman or Superman and will be in my own story world, but it'll be the same story.

And who knows maybe you'll be able to get good enough writing the characters to write something for them. Stranger things were happened and if these companies were smart they'd be watching Fanfiction websites for authors who write popular and well-written fanfiction to see if they might be able to recruit them for their team.

Stranger things have happened.

The strangest writing story I've ever heard is of a 13 year old boy who said that DC Comics needed better quality stories and he was the one to provide them and DC comics hired him to write the Legion of Superheroes.

So have fun fanfiction writers. Who knows what the future holds.