Some people, including authors, look down upon fan fiction. Some, like for example Robin Hobb, do not even allow fans to use her story as a basis for fan fiction. The most common argument against fan fiction is that a writer has to learn to create their own worlds, characters and stories. I agree with that, but I am also in favour for fan fiction.
I have read a lot of fan fiction and written a couple of stories myself. Most of them were set in Harry Potter universe. While there is crap among them, some of the stories are brilliantly written. Sometimes I did wonder why such skilled writers would waste their time on fan fiction, but I dreamt of becoming a published writer as well when I wrote fan fiction. I wrote fan fiction because I enjoyed it so much. I loved working with the character I knew so well (or thought I knew so well) and expand the stories we already had. I knew that nothing would be as good as the original, but that didn’t matter to me. Fan fiction gives characters and settings an entire new life. And I do think fan fiction is a great flattery. If people like your work so much that they want to create their own stories with them, you should be happy. I would be thrilled if someone would do this with my work someday. As long as they do not own money from it, or do not claim the original idea to be theirs, I see no problems.
Fan fiction makes writing swift. You do not have to do any world building and often you do not have to flesh out characters. It is a great way to teach yourself to write without having to put months’ worth of work into it. But you will never become a good writer when you stick to fan fiction. You are missing the whole process of world building and character creation, which is as important as the plot and the writing itself. I do think it is important to understand when you write a fan fiction that you limit yourself to certain aspects of writing. Now that I finally found an original story that I cannot stop working in, I have given up fan fiction for now. I’m not saying that I am never going to write any again, but original stories have my priority.
Cassandra Clare and E.L. James are two well-known authors who stared their careers with writing fan fiction. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey started off as a Twilight fan fiction while Clare wrote Harry Potter fan fiction. There are probably other authors around who did the same, but these two are the ones that came to mind. It is not because you write fan fiction that you will never become a good writer. It is writing only fan fiction that will hold you back from becoming a great writer.
Fanfiction.net is, I think, the largest fan fiction site on the internet.
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