Feel free to share your journey below :)
my love of Harry Potter + Kingdom Hearts!! Back in the golden days of the early 2000s
I’ve discovered fanfic itself around the mid-2000s. I was neither a particularly active reader, nor was I bound to any canonical material.
What really got me going was when I discovered the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers fandom in late 2005. I had been a fan of the show since its German premiere in early 1991, and I was glad there was a fandom full of like-minded people. And especially, there was fanfic.
I had read some before I joined the fandom and the main forum. Mere hours later, I think, someone suggested I could start writing fanfic. Many of the few fans wrote fanfic in those days. First the suggestion seemed weird, also since I’m not a native English speaker. But then I decided to give it a try.
Let’s just say that I was bursting with ideas just days later. That’s how my fanfic-writing craze of 2006/2007 began. A pity it slowed down a lot afterwards.
By the way, I refused to read the often-recommended classics at first. I didn’t want them to influence my writing too obviously. I guess they did later on, or my ideas for certain details were too similar.
I guess we all started the same way. I was the same. I started on a fansite on wetpaint (now defunct, under a different name) then moved on to ff.net until AO3 came around. I still write for my fanfom from time to time but life often gets in the way unfortunately. :(
When I was waiting for books in a series to release (typically there’s a 1-2 year wait) I began reading fanfiction, especially if the book ended on a cliffhanger.
A desire to do better by a couple of side characters who I felt got mistreated by their series. Admittedly, I don’t read fanfics at all but I write two.
Yeah, I think we’re similar. I tend to write my Naruto fanfics where Neji is actually alive. And I’m making it my goal to get TenTen and the rest to shine.