How Not to write Bad Fanfic

How Not to Write Bad Fanfiction

A collection of pet peeves and lessons learned the hard way.


There's a lot of bad fanfiction out there. Everybody knows it. But that doesn't mean that fanfiction is inherently bad. I've written my share of fanfics. I've written horrid Mary Sues, left good ideas unplotted until they snowballed and avalanched away into terribleness, and forgotten plots entirely and so had to abandon fics. In writing them, I've learned a lot. I've grown as . storyteller. I've learned how to plot, how to portray characters consistenly, and I've improved in my basic language skills. So now, I'm going to record those lessons here so you won't have to make them yourself before you start cranking out the good stuff.  Needless to say, these are simply a list of guidelines that I've found work for me.

Lesson 1) Your readers read fanfiction for the official characters.

People read fanfic for much the same reason they write it: they like a show. They want more material about it. They want to learn other people's takes on their favorite characters. They're not interested in someone they've never heard of before coming in and stealing the regular characters' thunder. New characters haven’t built up the same rapport with the reader as the official characters have. So please, keep your plot focused on the official characters and keep OCs in minor roles.
How I learned this lesson: Through a collection of bad Gundam Wing suefics that have since been stricken from the internet.

Lesson 2) Stick to the Canon, where possible.

What's already been established in your source material is fact. When you change something in the canon for no apparent reason, your readers will notice. And it will distract them from your story. You want your readers to be immersed in your story, and any moment where they can go “Hey, wait, that's not how it is.” is like a huge flashing stop sign.

When is it acceptable to diverge from canon?

    * When the canon hasn't been established.
    * If you need to know something about a character, but the issue hasn't been addressed in the source material one way or the other, by all means, take your best guess.
    * When it's central to the plot
    * Some stories focus the plot on a change from canon. I like to call these 'what if' stories. For example, a plot that could be summarized as “What if Light had never picked up the Death Note?” “What if Ishida was the shinigami instead of Ichigo?” To me, this counts as having a good reason to change the canon.

When is it not acceptable to diverge from canon?

    * When you don't like something that's been established
    * You can't change something from the canon just because you like your way better. Just because you think “Sakura” is a stupid name doesn't mean you can change it to “Rose”. Stories that change canon “because I like this way better” usually don't explain or justify the change. They expect the reader to accept it while they continue on telling their story that works just as well calling Naruto's pink-haired friend “Sakura”.
    * When the change does not influence the plot
      - If the canon on a specific topic has been established, you must have a good reason for changing it. Even if your new ideas make a lot more sense than the canon, if it doesn’t make a difference to the story one way or the other, you might as well leave things the way they are.
How I learned this lesson: Being annoyed by one too many fics thinking “No! That’s not how it goes!”

Lesson 3) Write out a summary of your plot before you start.

Getting into this habit can save you from two major faults.

    * Snowballing.
    * Knowing where you're going helps keep things from getting out of hand. This doesn't mean you can't introduce a new idea that you thought of after you started writing. In that case, modify your summary to take the new idea into account and keep going.
    * Abandonment
      When you write as slowly as me, there comes a time when you sit down, after a month or so, to write the next chapter of your fic. Except you can't. You re-read what you've already written, but you just can't remember where you were going. If you have your handy summary, you can just pull it out, skim it over and you're reminded and good to go. This has saved a few of my fics. Take “Back to Start”, for example. I started it in 2005. I'm a busy student so I only get the chance to work on it every few months or so. When I sat down to finish it last month, I still remembered exactly how it ends, because I had my summary. It's taken me an insanely long time, but the thing is getting finished.
How I learned this lesson: Watching my list of unfinishable fics growing and thinking “I really need to find a way to stop that”

Lesson 4) Remember the Genre you're writing in.

Remember, Death Note, Weiss Kreuz and Yu-Gi-Oh aren't slice-of-life anime. Not every fanfic needs to be a fluffy romance.

A reader expects to see the notebook being used in a Death Note fic. A reader expects to see some bodies piling up in a Weiss fic. A Yu-Gi-Oh fic should include at least a few references to card games. And you should at least give House clinic duty if you're going to write about him. There are a lot more plots out there waiting to be explored than just who is in love with whom.
How I learned this lesson: Reading dozens upon dozens of Weiss Kreuz fanfics in which nobody was killed.

Lesson 5) Spelling and grammar are important

No, this isn't English class. So what? You don't forget how to play basketball once gym class is over, do you? Why assume you can forget your own language? On the internet, the only thing we have to judge you by is what you write. It's important to make a good first impression by writing correctly. You're not likely to get hired if you show up to the job interview looking like you're homeless. A reader won't read very far if they're too busy trying to ignore the spelling to pay attention to your plot. So please, use proper english.

Honest mistakes, of course, are another matter entirely. These aren't due to a lack of trying. Honest mistakes can be minimized by proof-reading before you post, and by finding a good beta-reader.
How I learned this lesson: Rereading old fanfics I wrote and being horribly embarrassed at all the typos and lazy grammar.

Lesson 6) Don’t crossover without a reason

Crossovers can be fun. You can mash up characters from related series, or even completely unrelated series and see the chaos unfold. Unfortunately, a lot of fanfiction takes this promising foundation and turns it into a sandbox for crack pairings. Why stick with just this when there’s so much more to explore?  For a crossover fic to work for me, it has to answer a few questions:

      - What are they doing there?
            - Regardless of how you mash all the characters together, you have to explain how they got there. If you’ve decided both series take place in the same world, say so. If they’ve been pulled in from elsewhere, you need to say how and why it happened.

      - The plot must centre on the crossover.
            - If your plot can work equally well using characters from just one series, there’s no reason for the character from the other series to get involved, now is there? Give the two casts a reason to be working together and then you can watch characters growing closer together as a natural consequence. Plus, it gives you a subplot and a fic that can be enjoyed on multiple levels.
How I learned this lesson: Abandoning crossover fics started after I realized they had no plot.

Lesson 7) Be Brief

Don’t use six words when one will do. Use one or two words that have exactly the right meaning rather than five that hint at it. Using long,flowery language for the sake of long,flowery language is at best annoying and difficult to read and at worse pretentious.
How I learned this lesson: Trying to role-play with people that wrote this way, and failing to be able to follow anything past the purple prose.

Lesson 8) Stick to one viewpoint character at a time

This one is tricky. I know that I have to do this and I still find myself bouncing between heads like a pinball sometimes. Bouncing between heads makes your story hard to follow and will thus lose you readers. The natural places for point-of-view changes are at the end of a chapter or at the end of a scene.

I find it helpful to pick a viewpoint character for each scene before I write. Then, when I’m in the proofreading stage, I go back over the scene carefully: Would the viewpoint character know this? Are these really his or her thoughts on what’s going on, or someone else’s?
How I learned this lesson: After receiving critique on a bit of original fiction at a writer’s forum.

Lesson 9) You write the story, not your reviewers.

Every now and then (or more often, depending on where you post your story) you’ll get a review/comment/etc telling you that you ‘should’ do something in the next chapter of your story. Or insisting that you keep writing, even though you’ve planned to end the story in one more chapter. That doesn’t mean you have to. Sure, maybe the suggestion is a good one. In that case, go ahead and work it in. But don’t feel you have to just because someone mentioned it. Your readers don’t know what you have planned out in your head for the rest of the story, so their suggestions wouldn’t always work. If they’re asking you to keep writing after the last chapter, good. They can start reading your next story.
How I learned this lesson: Watching a fanfic spiral into dozens of chapters of neverending soap-opera simply because reviewers said “please write more”

Lesson 10) Keep the characters in-character

Xelloss won’t fall in love with Filia, because happiness can kill him. Jade Curtiss doesn’t have the emotional intelligence for long and heartfelt speeches; he’d be more likely to let something slip during a normal conversation and let the person he’s talking to double-take. Lina Inverse isn’t one to wallow in self-pity.

You can’t change major aspects of a character’s personality for no reason or because you think it’d be cool to see. You need to show how the personality change came about, or your readers will be too busy thinking “So-and-so would never do THAT!” to pay attention to your story.