Post by Magical Girl Lyrical Sarahnyan on Oct 23, 2010 17:24:23 GMT -5
General Fanfiction Writing Tips Resource
Below are general tips for writing fanfiction. Post your own tips in this thread or expand upon someone else's. It's fine to make this a discussion as well as a resource for aspiring fanfiction writers. Feel free to ask questions about your own fics, too!
1) Do not randomly add a different language into your story if it's not in the language you are writing the whole story in. There are exceptions, but it's frowned upon when it's random. Perhaps it's alright if you really want to add a word or two, but you have to use the words sparingly, with good reason, and tell people what the words mean. People may not uncerstand those words like you do unless it's a fandom-specific word.
For example, anime and manga fanfics are a target of fanfiction to interchange English and Japanese words. Sometimes it's nice to see the words, but often not, especially with repitition and a general sense of that they are annoying.
Character One: "You baka! Baaaakaaa!"
Character Two: "I'm not a baka! You're a baka! Stop being a baka, baka!"
baka = idiot / fool / dummy
See how that doesn't flow correctly? One Japanese word used in an annoying fashion, the rest is all English. Avoid this and you will keep more readers from running away from your story in distaste. You'll look like a newbie and it'll take away from the audience's enjoyment. They come to the story wanting to read the story in a basic lanauge, not to constantly find instances like this. Besides, if a story is written from a different language fans will know it's in that language already; you don't necessarily need to add all of those random words to make it feel more authetic.
2) Know the fandom you are writing by heart. Watch every episode of the show if you do not remember the twists or certain locations. Details are important and they add flavor and familiarity. For example, you do not want to read a story where the character is always happy-go-lucky but they are suddenly dark and depressed in the fanfic. They're completely different and it ruins the atmosphere.
Some other things you'll need are:
Character interactions. Does a character act cold, happy, or neutral to the character you are writings them with? How the characters refer to eachother, too. Do they call them by a nickname or use their last name? Honorfics are important for anime/manga because they allow someone to understand the relationship between characters. Body language, too. Even if you're focusing on a certain romance pairing the secondary characters are just as important to write well with this in mind. You cannot have the sister of the male who is suspicious of his girlfriend in the genre to suddenly be happy and thrilled about the relationship. She may not outwardly influence what happens in the end, but it's strange to see it out-of-character. Something may have to happen first to make her feel better about the relationship.
Personalities. Character feelings and actions are extremely important to correctly write. You cannot completely replicate a story as the creator, but you can try to be as accurate as possible if you can grasp the specific speech and mannerisms of a character. It brings realism.
3) Try to do different things in fandoms that are not the norm. For example, if you want to be popular from writing the main romance relationship from a series, write your heart away. That'll be a great start and you can write a pairing you love. However, it would be interesting to see alternate universes (AUs) or different romantic pairings than the norm. Try to put two characters you like together and see if the chemistry works between them, and create a specific plotline for them. Perhaps you may not get a bunch of readers but you never know when you try. People certainly will respect you for trying something new if they are also interested.
