I confess! I have a Fan Fiction Addiction!

The last year or so I've really become addicted to fan fiction of a particular German television show. It's not the first time I've read fan fiction in fandoms, but this is probably the one that I've stuck around with the longest.

However, as much as I enjoy reading a good fan fiction there are things I absolutely abhor. Since I am a writer I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the pros and cons of fan fiction and the things that bug me the most.


Fan Fiction is a great way to test your writing skills. It's a genre of writing to find out how well can you craft a sentence, how well can you generate plot, how well can you describe, and how well you're able to show and not tell. It's also a great way to practice formatting and other areas of the writing craft.

However it also seems to be place were people ramble on for pages with absolute dribble. It's a place where people often spew out a plot that is absolutely nothing like anything resembling the source material. There's no excuse for this!

Writing fan fiction takes away a lot of the really hard stuff. Your characters are already developed. You already know what they look like and how old they are. You know what motivates them. You know this because someone else figured this out for you.

Now, I've seen some great fan fictions that have taken characters and put them in a whole other world and time period where the characters are different from the source material...because they have to be. However, the world is so convincing and well put together it doesn't matter how off the characters might be...they work in this new construct.

What doesn't work, however, is when you take a hard character and make him soft. When you take a soft character and make him hard. Now you're just messing with the foundations. I get that maybe you want to see (or read) these hard characters have a break... but if you're going to write it needs to be believable. There has to be a strong set up and strong motivation to change a character's core.

I cannot stand reading fan fiction where the characters I have come to know and love say things they would NEVER say and CRY at things they would NEVER cry about. Or just randomly CRY when they never would.

Fan fiction or not, I cannot stand writing where plots are forced. Plots should never be so bad I have to choke them down.

Last night, I was finishing up Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. There is a small hole in my wall where the corner of my book met with the drywall. I threw my book. Not because I didn't like the book, but because I was so invested in the book and in the characters and in the world that when I read chapter 103 I was SO PISSED at Dan Brown I hurled my book at the wall. That's good writing! To get that mad at an author means the author did his/her job. It means I cared. (And eventually, I cared enough to keep going and love Dan Brown again in chapter 112.)

There are VERY FEW fan fiction writers or REAL fiction writers who can accomplish this. It takes practice. PRACTICE. PRACTICE. It takes studying the craft and not just writing down a bunch of words. It takes writing sentences and not just a bunch of fragments that pretend to be sentences.


Fan Fiction (and fiction writers in general) HEED THIS ADVICE!


There's no excuse for bad formatting!

There is a proper way to write dialog. Every other way is wrong. Go to the library and get a writing text book. They're not hard to find.

Every time a new person speaks, they get a new paragraph. You cannot! have two people talking in the same paragraph. You HAVE to break it up. There are comma rules and quotation rules you need to follow.

Dialog needs to sound like the way people actually talk! And your characters need to sound like themselves. It's one of the few times where fragments are permissible.

Use transitions! There is a natural flow to story telling that people just seem to skip in their writing. Things have to flow from one thing to the next. In film they use visual cues or voice overs to tell you when there is a change. They'll do a fast cut or a ten second fade. In writing, you have to get your reader there with words. Again, and I can't say this enough, a good writing text book will help you with this.

SHOW DON'T TELL! There are times when you absolutely have to tell but that's not the majority. Don't tell me how a character is feeling. SHOW ME! Which is more powerful?

A) Christian felt sad.

B) In the darkened living room, Christian let his body drop heavily onto the couch. Letting out a deep sigh, he reached for a pillow in which to bury his face.

Just as it is in real life, actions speak louder than words.

EDIT!*

In a world with spell checkers and online grammar sources... your fan fiction should be near perfect, if not perfect, before you hit "publish." Know the difference between Two, Too and To. Know when to use their, there and they're. Use the correct words. Yes, I'll know what you mean... but I'll probably lose a little respect for you if you mix up loose and lose. Just sayin'



If you're going to write. WRITE.

If you're writing for you then... fine OK, you're allowed to write crap. But if you're publishing your fiction for an audience to read.............then put some effort into it. Ask a writer you respect for feedback. Put together a critique group. A good critique group is going to give you honest feedback without making you feel stupid.

And please, know your audience.

*I don't get worked up about this in an IM conversations or on sites like Twitter. That's a different mode of communication all together and just like the spoken English it's modeled after... it's not always perfect.