Student of Trinity

I find it funny that there are tobacco pipes in Avadon 2, but no tobacco. What are they smoking?

Shh. That's the big reveal about what started the Corruption.

...I just read "trowels" as "towels." Three times.

I've been noticing an awful lot of towels in Avadon 2. It seems that every cupboard I break into has nothing but towels. I'm blaming it on Jeff's children.

Most writers I know, including myself, have very little problem with large-scale originality. Ideas are everywhere, and they're cheap, even major characters and detailed settings. It's getting it down on paper that's the hard part.

 

If you are trying to write a masterpiece and you don't think the craft part of writing is a huge deal, give up now! (If you're writing for fun, or practice, or some other reason, then this warning is not for you. Keep writing and have fun.) Craft is the bulk of creative writing, not ideas. If you don't wrestle over questions like "Does this sentence sound right?" or "Is this scene at the correct narrative depth for this story?" then no matter how great your characters and setting, odds are you'll end up with a cacophony, not music.

I agree in part, and partly disagree.

I agree that the largest scale originality is worth much less than one might think. "Elves and dwarves, but the dwarves are really robots!" is not something to worry about anyone stealing. The elevator pitch idea is much easier to have than one would like to think, when one has one's first one; and it's an infinitesimal contribution to the final product. When I was a kid I worried a lot about having ideas like that. I worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with them. I thought that if I could only get one, I'd have it made. I was wrong on both counts.

I also agree that the craft of hammering sentences and scenes together is really important. I still don't think it's as big a deal as playing performance-grade music, but it's what will inevitably take up almost all the time of actually writing a book. The thing is, though, that I actually know this part of writing pretty well by now. I've been writing something or other almost every day for over thirty years, so I reckon my total word count must be up in the millions. The point I want to make with that is that in-the-trenches writing is something that just comes with practice. In that sense, despite all the time it takes, it's not a bottleneck. Not having it will certainly kill your book; there, I agree. But for poorly written sentences and scenes, there's a straightforward remedy. Write moar. This stuff can always be made to work, if you work at it long enough.

The thing that I never learned by writing mostly expository or argumentative prose for all those years, but have discovered in pounding out a 135K word novel draft over the past eighteen months, is that there's a lot of levels of fiction design between scene and synopsis, and these levels are deadly. Maybe a few more decades of practice would make me as confident at these levels as I am at writing paragraphs, but in the long run we're all dead. When you haven't yet written a dozen good novels, there are lot of really hard challenges in getting a longer story to work properly together. Things have to click, and although a few things seem to click by themselves, most of them have to be made to click. You can labor mightily over paragraph after paragraph to the end, and yet end up doing no more than dragging a clunky story to its tired conclusion. Producing something that zings from start to finish is a lot more than just having a large-scale idea, but it's also a lot more than just writing decent prose.

Maybe this is just because I'm only starting out in this game, but at this point I have the alarmed impression that the problems at this does-it-click level don't always have remedies. I think you can easily find yourself half-way into a novel that just won't work. You can fix any bad sentence or paragraph, but I'm not sure there is any fix for characters that are just fundamentally lifeless or unappealing, or that just don't have anything to say to each other. Or at least, the only fix possible will be tantamount to scrapping the whole book and starting over, with a few recycled parts. In this sense I feel that writing original fiction is a blood sport. You really don't know whether you're going to make it. It's scary but it's a rush.

Taking predefined characters seems to me to mean ducking a lot of the really hard challenge of writing good fiction — but it's also the part that I think may be most interesting and rewarding. I certainly don't mean that everybody has to try to climb that particular mountain, but I don't like to think of people missing it just out of fear that they can't manage it, or not realizing that it is there.

SoT, it really sounds like to me this whole original fiction vs fanfiction matter you're wondering is because you place them on different intrinsic value levels, where original starts at the top, and fanfiction a step or few lower. And that the trouble of seeing any worth in writing fanfiction is because you see it automatically as 'lesser' than that of original - regardless if it's actually better written or not. Or that because it's on a lesser step, it automatically cannot be as good. But it's perfectly likely that there are terrible books (well, in anyone's personal viewpoint, obviously), and great fanfic stories. And vice versa. I really don't get this line of thought my self, because it's very far removed form what I feel about stories, in that I place them on different value levels depending on how much I'm entertained by them, regardless of whether they're original, or fanfiction. But it does make me kind of understand what you mean by writing under a ceiling. I just don't agree with it, because the reasons for it aren't meaningful enough to me.

I could perhaps make an exception for a bad story with one or two elements that had potential for a much better story. One of my very favorite books, Treasure Island, is described by the author in the preface as a sort of fanfiction for the whole genre of pirate stories that he read as a boy; and of course Treasure Island is a three-star chef's burger and fries. The thing there is that although Stevenson apparently took a lot of tropes from the genre, he didn't need to take any recognizable characters or places or items. I can see how a bad book might still have something in it worth stealing, but I don't see why the theft would have to be admitted. At least I don't think this would happen very often.

That remains just my personal taste. I didn't think it would be condescending, because I took it for granted that nothing in this whole discussion could possibly be objective. I was puzzled as to why fanfiction has become a thing now, when it never used to be, years ago. If I don't like it, I obviously don't have to read it, so there's no reason anyone should take my opinion seriously enough to change their behavior in any way just to suit me.

If anyone is writing fanfiction just because they're shy about inventing their own characters, then I'd like to encourage such people to give it a shot.

First of all, it's not fair to simply say "most of fanfiction is bad" (i.e. unpublishable). I think the simple truth is that "most fiction is bad" ...

My guess that most fanfiction is unpublishable was a theory as to 'why now' — why is fanfiction (however far back its precursors may go) only now a thing? The theory was that the internet has made publication, in the form of online posting, cost nothing. Fanfiction sprang up as soon as the publication cost barrier fell, hence it's a plausible guess that publishability was the one thing holding it back, before. I happen to suspect that most fanfiction is what I would call bad, because I also feel that most fiction is bad. I never got far in Middlemarch, and though I'm not sure how to define what it's ilk may be, I am certain that it has a vast ilk, and that I hate all of them. I approach books in general with narrowed eyes, and a genre whose defining feature seems to be that nobody is willing to pay for it doesn't soften me up any.

I certainly don't see fanfiction as a scourge on society, or anything. It keeps people off the streets. Actually it's got to be one of the more constructive activities that the internet supports. As a therapy or a way of dealing with obnoxious peers, I'm sure it's a great constructive response. If it's even just a way of putting pressure on a wound to stop the bleeding, I'm not trying to tell anyone to shut up and bleed like a man. I am a bit worried that it's a box some people are still staying in when in fact they're in good enough shape to stand up and step out of it.

SoT, you seem to regard fiction as a way of imagining events and situations that are impossible in real life (ignoring the most dominant genre of fiction in the 19th and early 20th centuries by doing so!), and, at the same time, see it as a way of showing "what really happened" - fixing things down (in realistic or non-realistic settings), right? Well, that's fine on occasion, but isn't ambiguity more fun sometimes? If we were told at the end of Inception that it was, in fact, reality that Cobb had reached, would that make it a better film? Personally, knowing that he's happy regardless makes it a far more compelling ending. Why does everything need to be resolved? I can understand that the ambiguities of the real world make a fixed and final answer desirable, but isn't this simply a false promise? Hearing that "this is what happened" and believing it is, I think, slightly lazy, and, more dangerously, denies somebody the ability to imagine, to create, something else. The responsibility I felt for the progression of the plot is taken from me, and I may as well have read a Wikipedia article.

Yeah, I'm normally just not very interested in realistic fiction. My feeling about reality is that I've already got one of those. I don't necessarily feel that everything has to be resolved, but I do feel that resolution is a rule that can be broken when you can get away with it, rather than a rule that should be repealed. A little ambiguity goes a long way. It doesn't take much before I lose interest in the story entirely, because nothing in it seems to matter any more, anyway. There is no actual Sherlock Holmes there, to go away and live his own life regardless of what I think of him. If I have no idea who he really is, then he's nobody at all, and who cares? I want a story that isn't afraid of commitment. Ambiguity is only interesting against a strong background of resolution.

I've never read Wuthering Heights. When I was in high school it was a set book in an early grade, so most people had to read it, but I took some kind of enriched English stream that avoided it. I didn't have to read it, and it had bad buzz, so I never did.

I'm guessing Israel for 7. And Hungary for 5, because Finland should look colder. If it's Bilbao, grrr.

I'll agree immediately that the musical instrument is a much better analogy for what I meant than any competitive sport; the point I was trying to make was that writing is fun in a way that makes one want to get better at it, and the element of competition was a distraction from this that I didn't intend.

The musical instrument analogy also captures the idea of fanfiction as being something that steps a bit away from pure composition, in the direction of performance. Not every musician composes their own scores; there's an art of interpretation, as well. I raised the issue of actors versus playwrights above, but maybe jazz musicians are the more apt comparison. Jazz has recognizable pieces, originally written by someone, but every performance is supposed to have a lot of improvisation. It's also true that a decently skilled musician can play solely for their own enjoyment, producing sounds that maybe no-one else would want to hear.

In effect, just as a lot of music blurs the boundaries between composition, performance, practice, and listening, fanfiction blurs the line between writing and reading. It sounds to me as though some kinds of fanfiction actually constitute a form of a literary criticism, expressing insights about the original work, and just doing it in a medium other than the traditional critical essay.

My fundamental discomfort with fanfiction still remains. Writing is a much cooler medium (in McLuhan's sense) than music. It's lower bandwidth; more conceptual. Compared to a tune, even the most lyrical piece of prose is more of an idea and less of a thing. While I like the jazz analogy as a way of explaining the direction fanfiction is facing, I don't really buy the analogy as a claim to artistic status. A good jazz player uses a huge amount of very unusual skill to produce, within a few minutes, a complex body of sound whose detail, even in MP3, would stretch to thousands of pages of text. That's a technical detail but I think it expresses a significant fact. Playing good jazz is orders of magnitude harder than writing even pretty good fanfiction, I think. There is a distinction in writing between large-scale originality — inventing major characters or whole settings — and detailed craft, but although the craft part of writing is also a creative exercise, I don't see that it's as huge a deal in itself as the challenge of turning notes on a page into notes in the air.

I still think fanfiction must at least normally be writing under a ceiling. The room may be wide, but it has limited height. The best stories have a lot of synergy between plot and setting and character and theme. These elements all blend into each other, and make each other what they are. The best characters have grown together with their original plots, and they won't have the same synergy with anything else. The best characters grow continuously within their original plots, and this is an important part of the story; preserving a character exactly as they were at the end of an original story doesn't mean keeping the character at all, because originally they were growing and changing up to that point. All fanfiction is zombie fiction, if it tries to maintain the known characters exactly as they are.

Yet allowing an established character to change, in a new story, is inherently dubious. The odds are, I think, that the result will be daubs on the Mona Lisa. And even if one supposes that the new character developments are written by an artist with skill equal to the original creator's, a good story is good because the character developments involved were somehow the ones that fit, especially well, with that story's particular plot — and plot and character together added up to something really interesting. Looking to repeat that kind of synergy is like asking lightning to strike the same spot twice. Plus, trying to make major character development really work in a story is hard. Restricting yourself to doing it with pre-established characters has got to be like rock-climbing with weights in your pack.

The best I can see being done is basically accepting zombie status, keeping developed characters essentially as they are, but trying to add just a few rather small and cosmetic innovations — behavioral changes in the character that can fall within the range of day-to-day variation that everyone expects. This is a ceiling, to me.

Maybe I'd be happy with this sort of compromise: fanfiction is folk art. In some ways that's an elitist judgement, but in some ways it's the opposite. I feel that more people who spend hours writing fanfiction could spend at least a few more of those hours also writing from scratch. Start with your own blank canvas, step out on stage, swim out from shore: you can do it.

Naw; I think it's pretty rare for there to be a bucket holding that many drops. Sure, lots of characters have more than two hours of film or a hundred thousand words in them. But not a lot more than that, not of really good book or film. A genius could maybe turn out a new classic by unexpectedly breathing life into a veteran schlock character like Mack Bolan, but to expect a character who has really clicked in a really good story, once, to do as well again, is almost like asking lightning to strike twice. if you say that TESB was better than SW, then I say that the series went steeply downhill after TESB.

I'm not saying you can't somehow keep shoving the characters out onto stage for another run, almost indefinitely. I'm saying it doesn't take too long for me to prefer re-reading the really good version, or moving on to something else entirely.

If it exists, there's pony of it?

Writing is fun, or at least much of it is. Some of it is quite a pain — like deciding that two pages of carefully crafted, lyrical prose are bogging down the story, and cutting them; or realizing that your plot's timeline requires your villain to be using precognition but then forgetting it, and racking your brain for a way to fix the problem. I guess what strikes me is that writing isn't just fun the way eating Smarties is fun. It's fun the way playing basketball is fun, which is that it's not really so much fun until you reach a threshold of skill, and then it gets more fun the better you get at it. So to me there's a built-in motivation to improve.

I figure you can play basketball for a while just accepting that you're not good at three-pointers, but if you're into the game then at some point you're going to feel that's a weakness, and want to practice it more. You may accept that it'll never be your forte, but you'll want to make it less of a gaping hole in your game. In the same way, although I can totally see that there are lots of aspects of writing that you can practice using somebody else's characters or world, I can't imagine doing too much writing without feeling the urge to bring up those parts of your own game, and try to make your own characters and setting from scratch.

The other thing I feel is that fanfiction must usually be writing under a fixed ceiling, because the really great story involving established characters, the story in which they were born to appear, has already been written. The best juice has already been squeezed out. What's left to write, at least usually, will be second-best at best, no matter how well you write it. Of course, if I start from scratch, I may not actually manage any better than third-best. But at least I'll have a clear shot at aiming higher.

But I'm an obsessive perfectionist type. I have a hard time doing anything at all without convincing myself that it's a quest for ultimate achievement — which means that it's either feast or famine with me; I pour a lot of effort into a very few things, and let everything else go with minimal effort. I do understand that not everyone has to be like that. I just have a hard time understanding, really, how they can not be like that.

Some game, Jeff has to put in a superweapon trowel.

What's going to happen to his custom title?

Whatever he wants.

Mens sana in corpore fluffy,

The truth is that most of the admin job consists of filing. Yes, filing. You don't think all these posts just get automatically sorted into threads, and preserved forever, by some kind of magically super-intelligent machine thing? I mean, seriously. Science fiction is fine, kids, but it's time you returned to the real world. Machines, forsooth? Processing our precious information? Hardly appropriate, even if it were remotely possible.

No, *i (bless his heart) has been working for hours every night, year after year, patiently stuffing your telegrams into slots and folders and message tubes, so that they can be efficiently shipped out, after appropriate on-demand recopying by underpaid gnomes, through the web's gleaming conduits. But he has served his time. The calluses on his filing fingers have reached the bone.

Alorael is the obvious candidate to take over because he causes most of the work.

If you try to delete the dancing doomguard, make sure you get it in one click.

Everyone always tells themselves that things will be great in the future, because the present is not so great.

And yet, people react quite differently.

Yes, this is what got me interested in this whole thing. I'm really not sure, myself, whether I would have judged Silke as severely as I instinctively seemed to judge Rainer. Maybe, but I wonder.

I can't really find out, now, because I've thought about it too much. But it's a really interesting experience. There could be some cool studies done this way, I think.

In fact the whole medium of graphically modest CRPGs like Jeff's might an interesting one for psychological studies. It's low-budget, compared to film. There are fewer variables to control, precisely because the test vehicle is so much simpler. You don't have to worry so much about discovering, after three months of taking data, that some prop in the background is cuing some of your subjects and skewing their responses. Yet it's richer than just having your subjects read text and then answer multiple choice questions. Getting your subjects involved in a game, even a bit, would make them less self-conscious about taking your test. You could run a short test in a web browser as a free online game, and let in-game choices be your questionnaire. If you wanted you could run a few supervised in-person pilot trials, to get an estimate of things like correlations between player choices and player gender, then go online for scale, collecting voluntary information from subjects. Online people might lie about their personal details but you could compare statistics with your supervised smaller samples to try to get a handle on this.

You have to at least look closely enough at the package label to tell whether it's a cutie mark.

That definitely has something. The reader certainly isn't expecting that Sarah can transform into a small creature like a bird, or do it at just the right instant, or leave the old body behind as a dusty simulacrum that persists for long enough to deceive the killer. Yet it's plausible enough, I think. Even though her ability has been described by another character as merely changing her appearance, if this is the beginning of a book then neither the scope of paranormal powers in this world nor the reliability of the watcher's judgements has been established. And this all means that it's also plausible that Seth and the watcher are deceived, that they are as surprised as the reader is by Sarah's last transmigration.

I do have a worry, though, that the twist of the robin getting away is somehow happening too quietly. It works, but it might not work reliably for every reader. Some readers might just not understand what has happened, because the bit about the body dissipating into dust is kind of a distraction, that raises odd questions. A fair amount of re-evaluation has to be done quickly, to figure things out. In a screen version you could do a dramatic focus on the crumbling body, a little slo-mo, and then cut to a bird's-eye view; but it's hard to do that in prose.

I'm not sure what to do about this, exactly, but my feeling is that the final transformation needs to be louder. It's too quiet. It just flits away, like the robin. But it's Seth that needs to be given the slip, not the reader.

Maybe just add some more sentences to draw out the emphasis on the last transformation. Describe the body crumbling, drawing it out a bit. Describe the bird flying, again just to add focus and emphasis, signaling that this is really important, and worth thinking about.

Or alternatively perhaps, add a short teaser line at the beginning, that won't make much sense where it is, but that gets picked up later. The girl thinks about how nice it would be to be a bird, or something like that. That's a stock thought, so it wouldn't be a spoiler.

I had no idea that fanfiction writers were predominantly women. Insofar as writing fanfiction is self-therapy or solace, it's a good thing, regardless of whether anyone will ever want to pay to read it. But I retain a bit of suspicion about any case where a lot more women than men are working for low pay. My suspicion is that the women may be doing that because of some kind of inefficient constraint, such as a lack of accurate information. In this case I can't help wondering whether there's a big ghetto of female fanfictionists who could and would be writing entirely original fiction, and earning royalties, if it weren't for their own false belief that they can't. Or maybe that's a true belief, in the sense that the publishing industry does not well serve the market that their fiction would find. Obviously it's quite possible that this isn't the case, and that fanfiction is just a hobby that happens to be popular among young women (or at least more than among men). But I wonder.

Imagining events and situations that seem impossible in real life is the whole point of fiction, so there's no reason why anyone who finds real life bleak shouldn't write about more interesting scenarios. But why do so with pre-established characters? One factor that occurs to me is that pre-established characters lend legitimacy. Even if Sherlock Holmes only says whatever because I wrote that he did, some of Sherlock Holmes sort of rubs off on my little story. Between the lines you can read, "I'm Sherlock Holmes and I endorse this message." You may be appalled at my story and not believe for a moment that Sherlock Holmes would ever do those things I wrote, but you still have to take my story seriously, in a way that you wouldn't if my great detective were named Abel Fudd. So if a particular part of one's bleakness is the feeling that no-one takes you seriously, then the theatrical mask of an established character is a good way to make your voice big.

Would it perhaps be right to think of fanfiction as something almost as different from first-instance fiction as, say, theatrical performance? Actors don't normally write their own lines, after all. So maybe fanfiction is somewhere in between those two art forms, and it's a mistake to think of it as a (possibly defective) subset of original writing.

You can entertain or provoke thought in all kinds of ways, but I'm inclined to say that the existence of a definite "what really happened" is one of the main things fiction is for. Real life is so ambiguous. You never really know what other people are thinking, in real life, but in fiction you do, because the narrator tells you. It's clear what happens, it's clear why it happens, and in the end all the loose ends are tied up. That's what everyone wants, and achieving it is a big part of why we pay attention to low-bandwidth worlds with bad graphics. A few successful books play against this, but they can only do this because the baseline of fictional canon is there. Ambiguous fiction is parasitic on the canonical norm.

I don't think it's fair to claim every possible kind of literary borrowing as fanfiction. Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy are remarkable in turning pre-existing cultural figures into characters, but those figures weren't previously fleshed out as characters with extensive dialog. No doubt there's a continuum but I think of fanfiction as a phenomenon clustered near one end of it. The puzzle I have is not why anyone borrows at all, but why people would borrow so much.

I can understand wanting to talk about a book with other fans, but why do so particularly by writing another book with the same characters? That seems like running full tilt in an arbitrary direction. And if you're expressing yourself creatively, why accept the constraint of using a pre-established character? Isn't that like paint-by-numbers? I think the real spark must be the appreciative audience. People will do pretty much anything if other people will clap for it. And so the question seems to me to shift from writing to reading. The main answer to why people write fanfiction is probably that (enough) people like to read fanfiction. So why do people like to read fanfiction?

I think it's a good insight that popular fictional characters are like celebrities, though it probably says something disturbing about Our Society Today that this insight wasn't expressed the other way around (celebrities are fictional characters).

People do like to bond by knowing the same other people, even when the other people we both know aren't present and are unlikely to arrive. Perhaps it's some kind of evolutionary hangover that started with identifying common distant relatives, in a behavior driven by genes trying to determine whether we share enough genes for it to be worthwhile co-operating instead of competing. Or it's simply a good way to exchange relevant information quickly. If I can find a shared topic of interest I can quickly learn whether another person is an idiot, but if I can find a shared acquaintance I can learn that and a lot more. So perhaps chatting about shared acquaintances brings an instinctive feeling of security, that people like even when the knowledge they gain isn't practically useful.

Maybe I'm just a psychopath of some sort, but I feel almost no interest in reading fanfiction. The idea just doesn't interest me, I think because I'm hung up on canon. If I get attached to a favorite character, then part of that, for me, is that it's important 'what really happens' to them. A story about them that isn't part of their 'what really happened' canon is intrinsically annoying, like a deliberate mistake. I would be much more inclined to read a new book with a familiar character by a different author, if the original author had endorsed the new book as official. I don't think this is exactly because I attribute such authority to the original author, as that I really want some kind of authority to establish 'what really happened', and the original author is the best authority I can find, so they get the job.

Having said that, I could probably cope okay with a character who had a varied and picaresque career, into which some disconnected episode could easily be retconned, without any tension with a canonical story arc. It doesn't bother me at all to have many different actors playing James Bond or Doctor Who. I would also be quite happy with having a beloved character appear in a brief cameo in some other story, if the continuity were at all plausible.

I didn't mean to claim anything about fanfiction: I know almost nothing about it. Shared world series, which seem to me to be older, at least as mass market paperbacks, are all I can really talk about.

I guess I just don't understand the appeal of writing about someone else's character, except maybe just as a lark. I could see writing a fun pastiche in which half a dozen famous fictional detectives all work in a laundromat or something. But a serious, longer work? I don't get it. If you've got an interesting and original story to tell, and some good dialog, then whatever characters do and say that stuff are going to take on a life of their own, automatically. Some of the most famous characters of all time are figures in plays, defined by nothing at all but dialog and skeleton plot. So why voluntarily put a ball and chain on yourself, by constraining yourself to a character that belongs in a different story?

I guess I can imagine two theories for why people write fanfiction. One is that it's primarily an act of fandom. You're not really trying to write a story as such, but just to explore that character more, so you put them in a different situation and imagine what they'd do. It's not really so different from a kid making a drawing of Spongebob. You like the character so you represent them yourself. I find it a bit odd to be so fascinated by a character as to put that much effort into showcasing them — writing well is hard work; but maybe a lot of fanfiction is bad precisely because people don't really put much effort into it.

The other reason I can imagine that some people might write fanfiction, in principle, is that they are trying to write fiction, but want some help with it. Featuring a great established character is a way to try to spice up a banal story. When all you have to cook are leftovers from the fridge, you open a bottle of Tabasco®. I'm afraid I suspect that some of this kind of writing might be people kidding themselves about their basic ability to write. They manage to turn out something passable, but the truth is that the only actually good element in their story is the part they stole.

I don't really think that you have to be born a writer; I think you can learn it. My theory is, though, that the people who are meant to do something are the people that can't help themselves from putting effort into that thing. If you can let yourself do something without working hard at it, then doing that thing is probably not your calling. So if you can write with little effort — if you can resist the urge to look over that last sentence and try to improve it — then maybe you shouldn't try to be a writer. If anyone churns out lots of fanfiction, without really taking any pains with it, and thinks that this is helping them learn to write, then I suspect they're kidding themselves.

On the other hand I can see that careful fanfiction might be a useful training exercise, up to a point. Writing good characters is hard — I've been trying to do it, I'm not sure I'm succeeding at all, and if I do succeed it will largely be by cheating, with characters who are highly abnormal people. What I have learned, though, is that at some point characters can start helping to tell the story. You find that stories spring up just from asking, What would she do, in this circumstance? Or you discover that the story you planned just won't work, because your characters just refuse to do it. The exercise of writing a story with a good established character might help you learn what that feels like and how that works, and give you a standard to aim for, in making up your own characters.

I can see somebody doing that once or twice, as part of teaching themselves to write. I don't see it as an exercise that you can usefully keep on doing indefinitely.

I'd say it's because the idea of a piece of fiction with a single author in the first place is relatively new, on the scale of human history. For a long time it was simply the default state for multiple people to contribute to a myth or story as it was passed down, with the best additions retained by others and the rest discarded. As far as fanfiction as it's currently understood goes, people have been writing unofficial sequels to novels for as long as there have been novels.

There's clearly some truth to that, but on the other hand stories have also been settling for thousands of years into canonical forms that can't be changed or extended: Achilles dies, the fox gets the cheese, and so on. That's how the story really goes, that's all that character did, there is no more to tell. So perhaps there isn't so much a basic tendency to keep on expanding stories, as a basic tendency to keep on improving stories, until they're finally right. Once the right version is attained, people tend to recognize it, and preserve it.

From this point of view, fanfiction that tries to salvage the good parts of a bad story would be in the long tradition, but fanfiction that tries to extend a story, which everyone agrees is close to perfect as it is, would be a recent heresy.

How much fanfiction only uses an established setting, and how much tries to use established characters as well? (Does anyone ever just take the characters and put them in another world?)

Repeating a plot doesn't seem to count as fanfiction. That's just repetition. It wouldn't be very interesting to repeat the same plot with different characters, even.

Shared world stories can be good. I quite liked the Merovingen Nights series when I was stressed out with my dissertation. It was also notable in establishing that, if you let her take twenty volumes to work up to it, C.J. Cherryh could manage to make one of her sudden violent endings actually make sense. But the shared world really is only sharing the world; people don't normally put each other's main characters in important roles. Sometimes the appearance of another author's character is more than a cameo, but usually not too much. And even then people are expected to expand the setting a bit with each of their contributions, not just maintain it. Agreeing to let each other all make canon is the main agreement.

Shared plot is hard. D.L. Sayers organized a shared-plot murder mystery once, The Floating Admiral. She got a galaxy of famous mystery writers to each write a chapter. Each author had to have a definite idea of what was really going on in the story, that was consistent with all previous chapters to theirs, and they had to reveal a bit more of that story in their own chapter. But the result was a hopeless mess. None of the expert hoodunnit writers could guess where the story was going from the previously provided clues, so the result was a sort of random walk through murder mystery tropes. The various authors all supplied explanations for their chapters afterwards, revealing that none of them were ever on the same page at all.