the vast majority of fanworks are bad, and that's fine, actually. they are bad for the same reason that the average number of legs for a human person to have is less than two: statistics. like with all endeavours and especially creative ones, most people who write fanfiction or draw art of their favourite characters are bad at it. if you line up all the crochet projects in the world, most of them will be, well, bad. some are bad because they're the first thing a person ever made, or the second or third or tenth, and this kind of thing takes practice. others are bad because the person who made them is just not very good at it. maybe they just learned how to make granny squares and they're perfectly happy to never expand or improve on that. most people who dance or bake or garden or braid hair are not amazing at it! and you'd never go to your kid's dance recital or eat your friend's homemade carrot cake and expect the same experience as you'd have at a professional ballet performance or award-winning bakery. And that's if we assume there is an objective measure of Good Art, which there isn't! Some art is just "bad" because you don't like it!

I think though that specifically with fanfiction, we sometimes forget that when we read a book or watch a movie, dozens of people have looked at it and given feedback and made changes and done quality control before the final product reaches our shelves or screens, and that's not counting the original writer's learning process and past experience. A published book is not anyone's first crochet project, even if it is their debut novel. But with fanfiction, the barrier to entry is so low (on purpose! this is a good thing!) that we do get to see a lot of wonky granny squares, and on sites like AO3 they're sitting on the same shelf as the hand-made silk lace wedding dress and you can't always tell just by looking at it which is which. The consequence of this is that we encounter fic that we think is unpolished, has bad punctuation, is out of character, and we are tempted to think "well, this is awful! how dare this person put this wonky granny square on the same shelf as the lace wedding dress!" But that's not how fandom is supposed to work! That wonky granny square is somebody who is really excited about this TV show they just watched and they are reaching out into the void to share their excitement with you. To scoff at them for not making a lace wedding dress is really, really rude. Even if they did make a lace wedding dress, maybe it's just really not your style, or you think they should have used a different pattern, and it's still their wedding dress. You don't have to wear the dress and you don't have to read the fic.

We all know that there is some fanfic out there that is incredible. I think it's important to talk about that! But the vast majority of people who post their writing online are just sharing their little hobby projects that they make for fun and I also think it's important to remember that.

actually I want to share a fun story about this

a couple of years ago I spent nine months working on a 22k AU fic. I put so much thought and care and attention to detail into it. I crafted every aspect of the AU around the canonical traits and abilities of the characters. I poured my heart and soul into this fic.

about a month ago, I got a notification that someone had posted a work inspired by that one. it took the basic premise and transplanted it into a fandom with none of the original details — someone had just read my fic, gotten excited about it, and swapped in their preferred blorbos just because. and it was delightful.

if that had happened a few years earlier, I might have been upset by it. how dare someone steal this idea I worked so hard on, and ignore all the care I put into it? but now, I just think it's great. I spent nine months building this gorgeous, elaborate dollhouse, and somebody liked it so much they wanted to play barbies in it. and now they get to have fun with it too! and so do all the people who read their fic! and that's awesome!

anyway tl;dr: as soon as you internalize the "holy shit two cakes" mentality you will have so much more fun in your fandoms

also let us not forget that a lot of books and movies that have gone through many levels of editing. are also bad.

writing is so silly because you have to maintain the understanding that you're not more specialer than anyone else and your work needs improvement and you have more to learn. but also you have to fully believe that your stuff is amazing. mindblowing. masterpiece the likes of which no one has ever seen before. you really have to hold these contradictory beliefs next to each other and force them to play nice. it's like shoving your shoulder angel and devil into a "get-along shirt." It doesn't make any sense. But if you don't, you're not going to get anywhere

You have to pursue what your writing Could Be with dogged determination while unflinchingly perceiving what it Actually Is. You have to accept that you're not more deserving or likely to succeed than any other writer, but you also have to love and honor and cling to your own specific mad genius because no one else is going to do it for you. Writing is really hard and it's also really worth it.

I want to write. I have ideas. I open document. I type four of the worst sentences ever created in the english language. I daydream the rest of the scene. I close document.

The "these two things are not related" at the end absolutely elevates this to god tier

abSOLUTELY NO

i used to call 12 inch dicks in romance novels 'weapons of mass destruction' and i stand by it.

also don't describe the literal metrics of dick sizes in fiction unless you're writing filthy PWP shit with cervix fucking and then it doesn't matter because you're being unrealistic from the get-go and then you can make that dick as long as you like honey.

but don't describe the metrics in romance. just don't. you can talk about size (big small thick girthy thin long) but never never never give a number.

a writer who writes the most fucked up “dead dove: do not eat” problematic pairing and fully tags and warns for the content they create will always be worthy of more respect in my eyes than people who call others weirdos because of who they ship. This is because a writer who writes disturbing things but gives me plenty of warning about them has demonstrated, regardless of what happens in the fic, that they value the consent of real people, and that they value my consent to see such content and will always offer me the option to avoid or withdraw. On the other hand, a purity cultist who demands I explain my trauma and exactly why I might be drawn to dark content, regardless of whether they’re the purest fluff writer to ever write, has demonstrated a lack of respect for my boundaries and the attitude that they are entitled to whatever they want to take from me. 

There are a lot of things that bother me about purity culture, but I think the most disturbing is that it clouds the very definition of consent, and then teaches this confusing version (you must consent to deep dives into your trauma and how it affects you for the benefit of strangers who have already decided you’re a bad person, and not consenting to that automatically makes you an abuser, also no one can consent to reading or thinking about disturbing content ever because thinking about it means you want it irl) to young, vulnerable, and often traumatized individuals, thus making it harder to understand their trauma and easier for them to ignore the real warning signs of abuse (like demanding that you agree with the abuser otherwise you’re literally the worst and most harmful person ever) because it teaches that abusers only come in one type, and that all abusers are “nasty shippers”.

This is especially dangerous because real life abusers teach their victims that the abuse is happening because the victim is a bad, evil person. One of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD is literally “Places undue blame on themself or others for what happened”. Teaching traumatized people that consent is a luxury only “good” people are allowed to have is incompatible with support for abuse survivors. tl;dr a writer who tags “dead dove: do not eat” has demonstrated respect for the necessity of consent. A purity cultist who sends anon hate has demonstrated a lack of respect for consent. 

Yes, this absolutely does include people who write, read, or ship abusive pairings, explore abuse in their work, include rape or incest in their work, with or without “calling out” that content. This also includes writers who include that type of content in erotic work. Content like that that is tagged properly indicates that, regardless of what happens in the fic, the person writing it understands that their work could impact real people and that those real people deserve the chance to choose wether or not they’d like to see the fic. An author who tags their fic has demonstrated that they understand consent and the fact that everyone gets to consent or not consent to the content they’d like to consume, unlike a purity cultist who sends harassing and threatening messages with the intent to cause emotional or physical harm to the person they’ve decided is “bad”.  Furthermore, ANY ideology that allows its followers to harass and attack members of the “out-group” for the crime of “not following the rules”, where the rules are about how you speak or act rather than how you actually do or do not harm others, is dangerous and should be avoided at all costs.

This is such a spectacularly-phrased example. Kudos!

Things becoming a fanfic writer does to you: You find yourself looking up historical weather data so that you don't get your PWP fic wrong.

Some of My Favorite Ways to Describe a Character Who’s Sick

TW for vomiting below cut !!

Fanfic writers!

My theory is that most fanfiction writers are 30+. Let's test this theory.

i love when characters don't get to die

this is about villains/antagonists/general horrible people who finally face up to what they've done. especially if they try to pull the good ole "Dramatically Does One Good Thing To Redeem Themselves And Dies," but despite their best efforts they DON'T die. like yes motherfucker there's no easy way out for you, there's only the slow, awkward and painful process of learning to live with yourself. of learning to live with the weight of your mistakes. you get a second chance regardless of if you think you deserve it. you get to try to make amends and do good. you get to live.

this is also about every self-sacrificial bastard of a protagonist who puts themselves in harm's way again and again and again to a wildly unhealthy and unnecessary degree. see, there's something so compelling to me in the unspoken suicidality of repeated heroic self-sacrifice, and the thing about implicitly suicidal characters is that i want them to live. and that can be used to make a death so much more tragic and impactful - noble sacrifices and last stands certainly can and have been done beautifully - but there's also something special to me in seeing such a character make it. because you'd die for the people you love, yes, but would you live for them?

@ fic authors what do you personally consider a successful fic? What’s the bar?

actually writing the fic down

i keep telling myself i can’t handle longer projects but in the last four days i wrote 23,377 words just totally by the seat of my pants

This is the Good Post of seat-of-your-pants inspiration, reblog so you too may add 23,377 words to your WIP without a single moment of hesitation or self-doubt

Bursts like this are like

Asking bc the vault now has this role

love characters who are like "this is how the world works. this is how it has to be (because if i'm wrong i have to face what i've done // if i'm wrong i have to face whats been done to me) "

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

If your plot feels flat, STUDY it! Your story might be lacking...

Stakes - What would happen if the protagonist failed? Would it really be such a bad thing if it happened?

Thematic relevance - Do the events of the story speak to a greater emotional or moral message? Is the conflict resolved in a way that befits the theme?

Urgency - How much time does the protagonist have to complete their goal? Are there multiple factors complicating the situation?

Drive - What motivates the protagonist? Are they an active player in the story, or are they repeatedly getting pushed around by external forces? Could you swap them out for a different character with no impact on the plot? On the flip side, do the other characters have sensible motivations of their own?

Yield - Is there foreshadowing? Do the protagonist's choices have unforeseen consequences down the road? Do they use knowledge or clues from the beginning, to help them in the end? Do they learn things about the other characters that weren't immediately obvious?

Thank you so much for this!