So, somewhere around 2009-2013,

I had a text doc that was very short fanfics for different movies. Bollywood and obscure westerns I think, because that’s what I was watching at the time. I’d spend a few hundred words filling in a plot hole, or a missing scene, or providing female POV on the minimalistic romance in a male-centered film, give it a ridiculously pretentious title (think Original Star Trek, or late-era DS9), added the name of the source material in parentheses, and called it good. I remember getting an MCU plot bunny at some point (probably involving Loki’s activities in the late stages of Thor: The Dark World) but I think I let that one get away. I never put any of these online, and at some point I deleted the file beyond any hope of recovery, because in the digital age writers no longer burn their writings in the fireplace when they suddenly decide they hate said writings.

Fastforward to 2022-2023. I’m getting into some old favorites with fresh eyes, as part of writing the Hunter Healer King books, and once again I have fanfic plot bunnies. The vast majority of them are one-and-dones written in 2023, running about 800 to a couple thousand words. One longer one was a loose retelling of a particular film, plugging some plot holes and importing a character from a prequel film to be the POV character and sort of love interest to the main hero. I got four chapters and an epilogue done over the course of 2023, two more chapters and a theme song and a paragraph in 2024, and…another paragraph or so in 2025. Total words as of Summer of 2025: 10K, retelling maybe two-thirds of the source film.

A few weeks back, I was talking with an acquaintance who was at one time a pretty prolific fanfic writer. But between his marriage, his new job, and his gym time, he just wasn’t in the position to mess with his bazillion plot bunnies anymore…until he got ChatGPT to write some of them for him. I decided to give the process a try with this unfinished fanfic and my free Claude AI account.

So, it worked, after a fashion. Three hours of computer time and seven prompts resulted in ~3500 AI words, finishing chapter 7, and covering chapter 8, 9 and maybe half of chapter 10 (the extended version of the epilogue). I had to specific what events I wanted in a given chapter, although the bit it wrote when I failed to specify that was interesting and I might try to incorporate it into another, currently very fragmentary fanfic at some point. I also had to tell Claude to imitate my own, comparatively terse(1) style from the source document instead of its usual florid prose.

I didn’t feel like it nailed the hero’s voice, and he was the most vivid character from the movies involved, played by an actor with a very distinctive cadence and manner of speaking that even well-regarded imitators don’t, IMO, nail particularly well. Fortunately he had little dialogue in the more action-oriented later chapters Claude was working on, so it was easy to fix the bits that didn’t work for me. Ditto the minor French character, who has a big scene in the AI-written section. I had to rework her lines to capture more of the sense of someone who doesn’t think in English. Does it maybe affect the DRAMA of what she’s saying? Probably, but I preferred my tweaked version.

There were other story-telling issues. At one point, it took the building specified in the early chapters as a windmill and set it on a hill (…fair-ish I guess) and gave it a giant external wheel instead of vanes. (LOLwut?) It also had some trouble with the worldbuilding which was admittedly vague at best in the source movies and which I had been only partially successful in making coherent when I wrote the first half of the fanfic. But again, comparatively easy to fix in the edits.

Some of my pleasure with this fanfic is low expectations. I’ve occasionally told Claude to finish a scene from my original fiction(2) that I had in progress, even telling it what events to include, and I’m always dissatisfied with the resulting prose and characterization in a way that I don’t think could be fixed by switching to a paid account with a bigger context window (and therefore longer chats to wrangle the AI with). Why do I do this with my original fiction scenes? Mostly it’s a brainstorming thing: sometimes Claude comes up with a plot nugget I find useful, or the AI’s “lowest common denominator” training makes it tell me something useful about Reader Expectations, something I’m too weird to figure out for myself.

Fanfic…to me, never feels like it’s entirely mine, because it’s trying to match someone else’s creations instead of taking what I like from someone else’s creations, and putting my own spin on it. So, Claude’s banality of characterization and prose doesn’t irritate me here the way it does when I give it my original fiction to work with. If I want a fanfic fix, I can tolerate mediocre prose as long as I’m down with the tropes and the content rating (I prefer stuff to stay PGish), and Claude was more obliging in those regards than alot of fanfic writers.

Downside is, Anthropic throttled the HECK out of my account around the time Claude finished its work last night. I can only guess that this required a lot more tokens than I usually consume. My normal Claude usage is pretty low-key – I do dictation on my WIPs in a phone app once or twice a week, run it through a local instance of Whisper for transcription, and tell Claude to clean it up. Then I do additional cleanup and expansion, and if I’m blocked after a couple of days I go back to the cleanup chat and tell Claude to continue the scene.

Basically, if I do this again I might have to go to one of the less mainstreeam AIs (Venice or Mistral possibly) so as not to nerf my dictation cleanup process. Will I do it again? Well, there’s that fragmentary fic from the same source material that I mentioned earlier, and that retelling of Sense and Sensibility in 1813 New Orleans I’ve never had the guts to write myself….

(1) I try not to beat around the bush too much in my published writing but I’m much more so in fanfic, because I’m just trying to make the plot bunnies go away.

(2) I mean this in the sense that the characters and setting and plot are my own, in addition to me writing the prose myself. It’s all probably influenced by other people’s stuff but with a tendency to drift away and become its own thing. I don’t mean to imply that I am particularly original as a writer relative to anyone else.