Great question! For starters, I am not, in fact, all that creative
and have often considered reworking my first actual published fic (a story called One Week; Google KTBSPA Fiction at your own risk). For another thing, I spent most of my life wanting to be a journalist. The protagonist in my very first fic worked for MTV News and essentially spent a whole tour embedded with BSB around 1999ish. (She also happened to be Brian's, we'll say, 80% platonic best friend from high school, because plausibility was not important to me, LOL.) I never published that story, but I never really forgot it, either. That concept of journalist as protagonist, thrust into the BSB's universe by her work, just felt like a natural place to start when I came back to fanfic as a journalism graduate student seven years ago. Also, coincidentally, I'd just read a spectacular book called The Boys on the Bus about covering presidential campaigns on the road. (I'm sure the dude who wrote that would have a stroke if he knew the title had been borrowed for a piece of fanfiction...)
Does that make sense?