Writing Fanfic

 What's your favorite book? Your favorite movie? Your favorite video game?

My answers to those questions change as I read, watch, and play new things. But one thing always remains the same: each time, I think what would happen differently if I got to control the characters.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would pretend to be Star Wars characters when we played. Or we would play with action figures who were characters from the movie. But instead of playing out scenes from the movie, we invented new ones.

Sometimes we even wrote these scenes down. I have an old movie, shot on actual film, that I made as a boy using Star Wars action figures as the players on screen. The story has some elements of the films--Luke's injuries are healed in a Mason jar full of water, for example, just like Luke being treated after his exposure on the ice planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back--but many other things are new, like, for some weird reason, Luke, a Bespin guard, and Chewbacca riding a popsicle raft down a stream of water in my bath tub.

Try writing a scene--or even a whole story--based on characters from a book, film, or video game you love. It's okay if they do things kind of like what happens in the real story, just like it's okay if they do crazy weird stuff they would never have done in the official version. This is your story. This time, you get to decide what your favorite characters do...