Hey gang! Red here. Once again I was perusing that ever-giving hobby of hobbies, fanfiction! Whilst there, I happened to notice many things that gave me pause. Especially in the anime section! Hot dog! I thought I might just share with you, the wondrous audience and authors themselves, some tips for writing fanfiction!!!1!1
1. Summaries
Wowee! Before someone even reads your story, they have to be drawn in! Sometimes, just the promise of NaruxSasu Mature Romance just doesn't do it for them! So how, you might ask, will you ever get a finicky reader on the Internet to read your story?
Does your story have a plot? GREAT! This is what you should say in the summary! You should by no means write about yourself, make your summary into a guessing game, or not say anything. Let's say the story I'm writing is about a girl in Gotham City who's saved by Batman and then due to her wildish 14-year old charm, Batman falls in love with her. I should NOT have as my summary:
"I suck at summaries, lolololol! HOPE U LIK!"
"Wow, my first fanfic! Plz R&R!"
"What if Batman falls in love with a 14 year old girl?"
"*Blank*"
The reader is here to read your story, not your despicable rants desperately searching for sympathy and begging for a friendly eye to spend more than 5 seconds on your smoldering wreck of a fanfiction. Also, when you ask "What if", that usually prompts the reader to answer with "Who cares?" and then move on. How many times have you picked up a book, looked at the back, and it started with "What if?" Unless it's a Choose Your Own Adventure, it probably wasn't that good. So how SHOULD I write my summary for the premise I've picked? Here's the answer.
"Batman saves a tween girl from certain death one night in Gotham. But afterward, he can't stop thinking about her. Batman knows only she can save him."
There you have it, no "will she be the key to unlocking his frozen heart?" or something equally cheesy. Moving on.
2. Conflict
EVERY good story has a conflict, whether or not it gets resolved at the end. Conflict creates drama, drama creates entertainment, and entertainment creates reviews. While having a story about Naruto ambling down to the park to feed the ducks, is all well and good, where's your conflict? Perhaps Naruto keeps getting stopped on the way by various nin to complete meaningless tasks. Perhaps once Naruto makes it there, he feels internal conflict about his position in life. That's ok too. Just because Naruto isn't throwing kunai around doesn't mean the conflict is non-existent. More examples you ask? Certainly.
"Naruto went down to the duck pond one sunny afternoon. He brought some bread and threw crumbs at the ducks."
Holy lameness, Batman, that blew. Try something else!
"Naruto wiped a tear from his eye as he ran to the duck pond. When he got there, he collapsed on his knees and threw the half loaf of bread he had been holding at the birds, making them scatter. I can't do anything right, he thought. He sniffed loudly, making a nearby duck quack in response."
Now obviously, if I were really writing this story, I'd have a lot more to do, but already you can start feeling the conflict emerge in the second example that was non-existent in the first one.
3. Characters
Wowee, Writer, you've got yourself a premise! Great job! What characters will you feature? However in love with yourself, or an alternate version of yourself you may be, I do NOT recommend writing a story about yourself. That's what Fictionpress is for. Here's an example of what I mean.
"A girl who loves Bleach gets transported into it. How will she find herself in the Soul Society?"
I've actually read that exact summary for a different fandom. But that's not important here. Despite what you may think, most readers are not here to read about you. If you do get comments left, they may say something like "Wow, Byakuya was really mean in this chapter!" Spoiler alert: They're ctrl+f-ing to find the characters THEY want to read about. They could care less that you passed your exams and made it into the second division and are now Soi Fon's second in command. People hardly like reading about exceptional people, and they especially don't like it when the exceptional person is a character they don't know.
So. Now you've knocked yourself out of your fanfic. Excellent. You may not feel it, but you've already achieved leaps and bounds in the world of fic writing. But now you actually have to write about some real characters. Say you have your characters. But it is not enough for you to have Hitsugaya also take a trip to the duck pond. What is a good conflict for Hitsu-chan to have? Perhaps he is fighting with his lieutenant again because she's lazy and doesn't do her work. One thing most readers love is also to have your characters be the same characters as the actual source material. What do I mean by that? Well, in the manga, Hitsugaya's a brooding, super serious kid. It won't do well to have him out of the blue say
"I think the 10th Division's been working too hard. Let's rent a moon bounce!"
Funny as this may be to you in your mind, it really doesn't work. If you have your heart dead-set on the 10th Division on a moon bounce, you're going to have to change things around a bit.
" 'What is it?' Hitsugaya growled at the knocking on his door. The wooden door slid open, and Rangiku, with the happiest expression she could manage, smiled down at him. 'Captain, the squad think's you've been working too hard. So...' without any further explanation, she ran over and picked him up.
'Hey! I order you to put me down! What are you doing?!' She ran with him outside, to where a giant, inflatable green cage with netting on the sides was set up in the courtyard.
'We rented a moon bounce!' She finished, throwing him inside."
See what I did there? Not only did I keep the characters roughly in character, I even created some conflict between Hitsugaya and Rangiku.
Well now, you're halfway to creating your awesome new, non-you fanfic!
Wow, being cynical for a long period of time is difficult. More to come. Maybe I should be pestering people to get this put on the Bloc. Then again, maybe not.
