Young Writers Society

... written and submitted (either to a magazine or article or fiction writing class or what-have-you) a short work about a character from a roleplay, for those of you that do roleplay? I recently wrote a short story involving a family of RPCs of mine because I wanted to sort of delve into the mind of one character that rarely if ever shows up in a roleplay I'm doing and his feelings toward his family, and now I'm sort of regretting it and wondering if I'm crossing some sort of line?

The story was received well and I didn't straight up tell anyone that "HEY THESE CHARACTERS ARE FROM A ROLEPLAY I'M A TOTAL NERD " but ... yeah. xD

What sort of things do you feel are unacceptable to submit to a writing class? I know fanfiction tends to be a no-no.

I've totally submitted thinly-disguised Sherlock Holmes fanfiction as a creative writing assignment before.

In my defence, it had been written in such a way that it could be read as original fic with no problem (no names used, specific references that could be interpreted in a broader way if one wasn't aware of the fannish undercurrent, etc).

I've done it with RP characters as well, though that was a while ago.

Things I'd consider unacceptable as submissions... fanfic that would be overly dependent on knowledge of the fandom/source material, as then if the reader doesn't know it you kind of lose the point. (plus the 'it's cheating because you didn't come up with them' argument >.>). RP chars-based stories would be fine with me, as long as knowing the current RP timeframe/events is not required. Straight PWP would quite obviously be the Big No, but anything else would be fair game, IMO.

That makes total sense!

I think what was sort of nagging me were the really subtle fantasy elements I slipped in (my professor described the story as being similar to "seeing Harry Potter when he has to clean his room" - like seeing supernatural characters carrying out normal parts of everyday life) and no one in my class really does fantasy-based works much at all.

If your story bears no other resemblance to Harry Potter, then you have nothing to really worry about. There are only so many things you can do, after all.