She’s not saying “you can be a great original writer without ever putting in the real effort of character/worldbuilding”. She’s saying that if you like writing, but don’t have the confidence or the life experience (because let’s face it, many fanfic writers start when they’re young) to “portray how authentic people make complex choices in believable worlds”, try writing with existing characters in existing worlds– it gives you a feel for how stories are structured, practice on how to construct strong sentences, and even, yes, some practice with characterization, in a “reverse engineering” kind of way (when you think critically about how X[existing character] would react in Y[fanmade] situation)

She’s not saying the “mess” of characterization and worldbuilding can be dispensed with forever, just that if you find those things too intimidating or just can’t think them up when you want to write, you can still practice the incredibly important skills of crafting a sentence and plotting.

Michael Chabon will tell anyone who listens that the first story he wrote, the story that made him want to be a writer, was a Sherlock Holmes/Jules Verne crossover piece that he wrote when he was 10. He spent another 15 years developing his own voice and approach to character and plot before his first novel was published. Another 15 years later, after he won a Pulitzer, he wrote another Sherlock Holmes story.

Oh, gaaah.

And this kind of “advice” is why so many eager, talented fanfiction authors never make it into original writing, and why even so many of those who get published are still so easy to spot.

“Characters” are more than a bundle of quirks and traits. “Rooms” (worldbuilding, I guess she means?) are more than a hodgepodge of “Wouldn’t this be cool?”

And “stories” should grow naturally from particular characters interacting in particular rooms, not imposed upon them like children forcing their Barbies and Kens to re-enact the plot of Harry Potter (but *this* time, with their preferred pairing!)

I don’t deny that fanfiction can be creative and fun, and sharing it is a tremendous tool in building a community. And of course fanfiction is “real writing”, just like those five-paragraph essays they forced us to write in school (remember those?) were “real writing.”

But I could write those essays for a million years, and it still wouldn’t put me one step closer to becoming George Orwell or Katherine Boo. Sooner or later, I’ve got to do the hard, painful work of observing, thinking about, and portraying how authentic people make complex choices in believable worlds.

But that’s “the mess” that she dismisses as no “fun”; and it’s exactly what separates art from disposable fluff.

It’s also a social activity– I started writing fanfiction as a teenager in order to feel like I was contributing something of substance to the fandom. I made friends and got into some really cool discussions based on that. Fanfiction writers are working in much the same structure as women’s “manuscript circles” of the 17th century– groups of women who would write and get together to circulate their work that was not necessarily meant for publication and talk about their craft.

Plus, people need to find out their passion for writing one way or another. I hated writing (stories or papers) for school assignments and couldn’t imagine ever wanting to spend hours a day writing. The minute I posted that first fanfiction (which was all of 200 words), I began to hate the days I didn’t have hours to write. I also began to focus on improving my essay-writing for school, because I hated the idea of any of my writing being received poorly.

TL;DR: Fanfiction is writing no matter how you slice it, and I’m always pleased to see pro-writers come to its defense.