Fan Fiction: An Argument for It

Both of us have mentioned it at one time or another, but that’s because it’s meant a lot to both of us.

Fan Fiction.

Most of you have probably heard of it, if you don’t write it yourself. Let’s be honest here, online blog for teenage writers? Most of us probably know about it. This fall I have been writing fan fiction for five years. Margaret started writing it a few months before I did. It’s how we met. We were both writing fan fiction for a website called Artemis Fowl Confidential.

You can see why I consider fan fiction one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That being said, I am not ignorant to the ugly side of it. There is a lot of ugliness.

A lot.

Just in case you don’t know, fan fiction is a story that is written by a fan of a book/movie/show ect. These fans come up with stories or ideas about the characters or the world and write them. If you want a new ending, you can write it. If you think of something that was mentioned in the book that was never realized, you can write it or find it.

That of course opens the door to quite a bit of ugly. When it comes to couples in the fandom (a mix of the word fan and kingdom, it’s the collection of fans of a certain book/movie/show ect. and everything that they do to show their love for it) things get really ugly. There are crazy shippers (people who support certain people in a relation’ship’) who will attempt to murder you if you try to tell them that their ship is wrong or not going to happen.

Not only that, but you’re sticking a bunch of (usually) inexperienced writers in a situation where they can go crazy and write anything they want. That leads to a LOT of bad writing. Probably only about half of the fics (the term applied to a fan fiction story) you find on FanFiction.net (the main website for fan fiction) are legible, despite the fact that they’re all typed. Bad grammar, poor sentence structure, horrible characterization, cliché ideas, cliché characters that are basically their attempts to stick themselves in the story… We’ve mentioned it before in the Non Cliché Protagonists Post. Mary Sues are the hated Queens of Fan Fiction-dom.

And that’s not even going into the PWP (porn without plot)/M (Mature rated) fics, or how it’s a gateway into the worst parts of fandom.

All this being said, it’s probably done more for my writing than anything else I’ve done.

First, most obviously, it’s practice. I mentioned in the last post about consistency ( Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goal) that I’ve written 2000+ words of a story pretty consistently every week for the past three years. That’s a fan fic. If you start at the first chapter and make your way all the way through to where I’m writing now, you can tell that there’s been growth in my writing.

Just the simple act of writing constantly improves your writing. And if you’re a dedicated fan of whatever it is you’re writing, you will probably be writing pretty consistently (sometimes too consistently when it interferes with writing your actual material).

Not only is it practice, but if you’re in the right fandom/website, a lot of time there are other writers who are willing to give you advice or tell you what you did right or did wrong. Especially when you’re trying out a new style it’s a great place to try to out because you can tell from the reviews whether the readers think that you pulled it off or not.

Which brings me to another valuable skill I’ve learned from my years of writing fan fiction. Learning how to take constructive criticism. Not everyone is going to be nice. In fact, depending on your skill level they often will not be. But there is a difference between someone just being plain rude/mean (flamers) and people who are offering constructive criticism which is a fine line that you learn after enough reviews. Being able to tell the difference and bending your pride enough to at least take someone’s advice is an incredible useful skill.

In fact, it’s a skill that’s not only useful in writing, when you’re getting rejections from agents or editors or either one is giving you suggestions for what to do with your manuscript, but it’s just useful in life.

You learn how to develop characters. The mistake almost every new fan fiction writer makes is trying to write an OC (original character) that turns into a Mary Sue or warps one of the characters so that they’re completely OOC (off original character). I did it. My first major fan fiction involved my OC, Amanda, making the main character, a character who is not interested in romantic involvement at all, fall in love with her. She also spoke eight languages, had over 200 IQ points, came from a poor family, was beautiful… It didn’t help that the title of the story was “Amanda’s First Adventure”.

You learn to not make those mistakes. Making a mistake like that will (hopefully) keep you from getting a book picked up by any agent or editor.

It’s also an introduction to all different sorts of formats and styles. You can do drabbles, one shots, three shots, full length stories. You can write stream of consciousness, traditional, interrupted, scene skipping, flashbacks. Decide whether you like first person or third person. Try present tense. Figure out how to pace a scene so that it’s not going too fast or dragging on. Learn that you really do need to plan out what’s going to happen in a story or face epic writers block (See Margaret’s post on the Brick Wall from Hell).

Maybe even make a best friend.

Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goals

I think that just about anyone can agree that the key to success in most things is consistency.

I talked about this a bit in my post about New Year’s Resolutions, because it really is a universal principle. Practice makes permanent as my English teacher says, and it really does. One of the number one thing that people look for when hiring employees is consistency. They want people who will be excellent and continue to be excellent.

Now I have never been the best at starting habits. It’s hard. I forget, I get lazy, other things get in the way. And not all things require it. Some things are just things you bang out in one sitting, you don’t need to do the same thing every single day. You know how I said in New Year’s Resolution to edit for 20 minutes every day? Hasn’t happened. But I have started posting pretty consistently every Friday. Sure I skip a week here or there, but for the most part I usually manage to get something up.

Trust me, if I could tell you what made the difference or what it was that made it so I did one and not the other, I would use that secret all the time and would soon become the perfect person. Two weeks ago I started writing in my journal, and have since done so every night since. Do I know why it worked this time and not the 5 billion other times I’ve tried to start a habit of writing in a journal? No clue!

But I do know that most of the really cool things I’ve managed to accomplish writing wise have happened because I’ve been stubborn about consistency.

I think we can all say getting a novel itself requires some measure of sheer headed stubbornness. You have to refuse to let the writer's block get the best of you or keep working even when you want to do anything else. 

There is a set of stories that I write online, and I’ve updated them almost every single Sunday for the past two and a half years. Most chapters are 2000 words or more. I’ve all together written nearly 300,000 words for that story. And I’ve gotten quite a few fans off it, several of whom have told me that if I ever chose to write a full length novel they would be interested in checking it out.

Writing this blog once every Friday. Usually most writing bloggers say to update once a day or two days, and while we're not quite there (baby steps, baby steps), writing once a week has actually done a lot to the number of people visiting the blog. It’s not exactly about to become one of the most popular writing blogs ever, in fact when you Google search “Blog for young writers by young writers” which is the tag line for this blog, it doesn’t show up in the first five pages. But if you search “Two books before twenty” it is the first option!

It hasn’t always been.

Now there is a measure of quality. Quality is also very important. Even if I updated every single day and Margaret updated every other day so that some days we had two posts, it wouldn’t mean much unless we had a post that actually attracted people’s attention. And you have to have quality to keep people there/here.

But then again… there are a lot of people who manage to make a lot of money without writing anything spectacular, but they write a lot of it. John Grisham has written more or less the same lawyer story 20 times. Most of the “Kindle Millionaires” (people who have made a million or more dollars selling e-books) aren’t writing anything that would change the world of writing forever (if they weren’t making a lot of money off it online)… but they are writing a lot of it.

Consistency matters. You can hide writing skills that aren’t the best with consistency. But you certainly can’t hide inconsistency with good writing. All the best writing in the world will mean nothing if you can’t finish the book.

Of course the best solution is to have both. That’s the best way to go. But you have to have consistency and persistency.

Reblog: How to Do Your Chores in 12 Easy Steps

So today was my first day at a job that I'm going to be doing on Saturdays. We know a newlywed couple who both work full time and she has physical disabilities so too much physical exertion is painful, so she's hired me to help her clean up on Saturday for a few hours. I'm pretty good at cleaning other people's stuff, and I need money (lots of stuff to save up for), so it's a pretty good fit.

However, while I am good at cleaning other people's stuff, I am horrible at cleaning my own. I'm lazy, I get used to the mess and dealing with it, if I ever do decide to actually go and clean I'll get distracted or I'll realize just how much I have to clean and start trying to clean too many things at once, or I won't clean up cleaning up (as in putting away the cleaning materials). 

Which leads me to my reblog.

This is a brilliant little article that I found once, and it's just an awesome blog in general.

How to Do Your Chores in 12 Easy Steps by Nathan Bransford

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/05/how-to-do-your-chores-in-12-easy-steps.html

"Step 1: Start a novel

Step 2: Write 50 pages in a month

Step 3: Write 5 pages in the next two months

Step 4: Stare at the screen

Step 5: Despair

Step 6: Open a closet

Step 7: Eye cleaning supplies longingly

Step 8: Clean every square inch of your apartment/house, marveling at how much more fun you're having than writing your novel

Step 9: Find a filing cabinet, organize it

Step 10: Find tiles, scrub them with a toothbrush

Step 11: Run out of things to clean, return to computer

Step 12: Stare at the screen in a freakishly clean living space"

And the funniest thing about it?

I can't count how many times it's worked for me.

How Writing Novels Helps You Pass Your AP English Test

So today I took the dreaded AP English language and Composition test. I'm technically not allowed to talk about anything on the test because I signed the little "I will not talk about any of the stuff on this test until it's released" section on the booklet that you had to sign to take the test, so I will not do that, but I will tell you that the multiple choice was harder than I thought it would be, but the essays weren't that bad.

Probably because going into the test I was not worried about the essays much at all. Not only were the essays just about the only think we worked on all year in my class, but even before the class my essays were already pretty good.

Guess why?

As this is a writing blog, I think you can all manage to guess the answer to that.

Even though essays and novel are rather different writing forms, you'll either be surprised or already know how much extensive narrative writing skills can help you write good essays. 

At the bare minimum, you've got the writing mechanics down. You know how to form a sentence and that sentences form a paragraph. Even with spell check, you should have a good enough grasp on spelling an punctuation that the grader won't cringe.

If you're really dedicated to/good at writing, you also probably know how to develop an idea. Good essays aren't just thesis, evidence, idea, conclusion. (Unless you're in my 7th grade English teacher's class. In that woman's class you conformed to the strict format or she would fail you on the spot. So if you are in the younger grades (7/8) stick to the format and have hope for a future in which you can break free from suck limited writing. There is hope, I promise.) 

They have flow. The idea is developed and supported and expanded, just like a plot or a character. A Character is typically introduced and developed in the readers mind, then some of their background is explained so that we can understand them, then the character ( if dynamic) grows as a person/character.

Usually when writing a novel, you start to use a lot of different methods and structures and sentence lengths ect. It would be really boring to read a book with the same sized sentences and the same sized paragraphs and the same words. Unless it's a purposeful styles, "he said","she said" books are boring.

In short, you develop a certain repertoire of skills that don't just apply to narratives. They work and even should be used in essays. it makes them much better.

And of course, writers are more familiar with taking constructive criticism. Or at least you should be. So we're a lot better at taking a grade lower than we wanted because we can take that to improve our writing better than most kids who are used to getting As on everything.

We also tend to be a lot better at sitting in one place for 2+ hours, doing nothing but writing.

That helps a lot.

Knowledge is Power!

(Schoolhouse Rock reference intended)

AP tests.

Death.

I’m taking less than half as one of my other friends though. She’s taking five, two of which are on the same day. Now that is death. But I’m pretty close. Not to mention the fact that my other teachers/classes don’t seem to acknowledge their existence and are giving us the same amount of homework and tests as we’ve always had.

Joy.

But of course this not a blog where I complain about my school life, though it does cut into my writing time which I guess makes it relevant.

I cannot stress how much I recommend have writing buddies. They say make friends with people who share your same interests, but especially when those interests include serious writing. Those are the friends who will know your pain, give you sympathy, help and sometimes ideas. They understand what you want to do, why you want to do it, and a lot of time two people can figure out a lot more info about publishing and such than one can. And now even agents are looking for referrals rather than unsolicited material, so if your friend manages to get their foot in the door they can refer YOU. That’s how Cassandra Clare got her first publication. Her friend Holly Black had gotten a publishing deal and referred Clare to her agent. Now she has over 8 books with millions of copies sold each, a movie, and at least 4 more on the way. If you still need to be convinced, check out the full article on it, Writing Buddies.)

If you read a bit around on this blog, you’ll know that my Writing Buddy also happens to be my best friend. In fact that’s another reason why I haven’t been as faithful updating this blog the past week or so, I’ve been working on her birthday present with every spare minute I haven’t been studying. It’s finally in the mail (a week late- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARGARET! You’ve got 3 years left to get your two books. You can do it!). But she’s not my only writing friend, and one of the things that I’ve noticed, being able to compare the two, is that writers know a lot of weird stuff.

I know that might sound weird, but it’s true. We know a lot of weird stuff.

I have no interest whatsoever in going into the medical field, much less becoming an OBGYN doctor, yet I know an astonishing amount about preterm births. I am also very much not Jewish, nor do I have any family or close friends who are Jewish. Yet I know quite a bit about Jewish funerals. And I know far more about malaria and how it affects a person than anyone other than someone working on a malarial vaccine should know. Why? Because I researched all of these for a story.

There is no reason that my other friend would know so much about modern day pirates or Somalia. Most people I know wouldn’t know where to point on a map to find Somalia. Except that she has a character who is a Somalian pirate.

It doesn’t always have to be stuff found researched for a story though, it can also be stuff that’s just been picked up reading or in school. I will never forget where the latissimus dorsi muscle is in your back because my teacher described it as “the wing shaped muscle” but I misheard her as “the muscle where the wing attaches.” Now I knew that I had misheard, but I’ve certainly never forgotten. I believe that historical fiction is probably the best way to learn history.

Sometimes we run into stuff we don’t know though, or something that we’re not sure about because we’ve seen it on TV, but can you really trust Hollywood at all? (usually the answer to that is no. If you think you know something because you saw it in a movie, please research it before you try to put it to paper. When it comes to information always assume that Hollywood is a liar.)

The internet is probably everyone’s best friend in this case. There is no end to the information you can find out with a Google search (I would have said a quick Google search, but some information is very far from a quick Google search. I’ve spent hours trying to get a simple question answered while people just keep on telling me stuff I already know. New mommy websites, I love you.) But just like Hollywood, you have to be very careful about the answers you find. Make sure that they’re correct.

What is your source? Are you looking on yahoo!answers, or are you looking on The World Health Organization’s official website/reports?

• Dot orgs are usually much safer than dot coms, I think we all know that having grown up in the Information Age.

• If you’re looking for historical information like stuff people would be wearing or dressed in, I would suggest finding a website for roleplayers- sorry. Reenactors. Especially on the American Civil War, you will be able to find out just about anything you want to know about that war from hard core reenactors.

• Medical information should usually come from a website sponsored by a hospital.

• Don’t trust Wikipedia, unless it’s a highly specialized topic. Yes people can edit what it says on Wiki, but who’s going to both modifying highly specialize/scientific information?

• I’ve found that you can usually find a lot of statistical information from either the UN an/or its various break off branches, or if you’re looking for information about the US, PewResearch.org is a great place to go.

• Then there’s also the New Mommy type websites. Websites that are designed to help people figure out what to do when they have no idea. This category would also include First Aid websites too.

• New articles, if you can find one related to your topic are… usually pretty good. It depends on what your topic is and who wrote the article. Usually they’re pretty good. Usually.

And you can always try to find someone who knows what they’re talking about. When I was doing my writing project on incompetent cervixes, there was no one better to ask for help than my OBGYN Aunt. Asking actual people is really nice because you get to ask them questions and they will answer that specifically. And let us not forget the still very valuable source of information called BOOKS. We’re all trying to write one, right?

If you’re looking at the right sources, you can find out all sort of relevant information to your topic… and lots of other cool/weird information that you can impress/freak out your friend with later.

Did you know that parasitic flatworms have the most complex reproductive systems of an animal?