There are many frontiers of writing which I have yet to breach. One of them is fanfiction.

I understand that many writers got their starts writing fanfiction. Harry Potter fanfiction, Doctor Who fanfiction, Twilight fanfiction. I know that vast writing communities have formed around these shared universes, budding authors baptised in the wellsprings of their canons, spinning their characters in millions of surprising directions. I respect that they exist.

I’m not sure I have the capacity to write fanfiction yet.

It seems to me that one of the appeals of fanfiction to the beginning writer is that the characters are already fully fleshed out. Why take on the difficult work of fashioning three-dimensional characters out of thin cloth, with all their personalities and histories and baggage. when the author of the canon has done that already? Everybody else in the community understands the context in which her characters exist, so just throw them into a situation you’ve dreamed up by yourself, imagine how they’ll interact, and voilà, you’re a writer!

Except that for me, this is the hard part. Imagine how they’ll interact is the hard part.

How will I know I’ve gotten these characters right? That question will dog me with every sentence that I commit to paper, make me second-guess every line of dialogue that I attribute to them, hang over my shoulders like an oppressive cloud long after I’ve left them to dry.

I imagine that inhabiting a character is a basic skill that writers ought to have. Knowing what she would do and what she would not do in a particular situation. Feeling what she would feel, speaking with her brand of language and trademark wit. That thing that actors do naturally as part of their craft. But I am no actor and cannot inhabit a distinct character too long before feeling terribly self-conscious.

“That was all very well and good, beautifully written,” I imagine my reviewers typing in a chat window or a comments section, “but Snape would never say this, and Harry would never do that.” And then I’d feel horribly ashamed, as if I’d just failed a Turing test for being able to inhabit a character.

I take refuge by writing my own characters instead. Deliberately underspecified, barely fleshed out characters, blank ciphers for a reader to slip herself into. If I must clothe them with characterisation, they end up being different versions of myself, which does mean that their dialogue is not far from how I talk, and that I will fail to write characters who are extremely unlike me. But at least nobody can accuse me of getting someone else’s character wrong.

But perhaps this is the safe way out, and if I ever want to join a fanfiction community, where all the new-writer activity seems to be, I’m going to have to learn at least how to write stories using someone else’s characters.