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Ravenwood's Tips for Writers of Fanfic

Warning:  Autocratic opinions ahead.  If you don't like the advice, don't take it.

1.  Label your work.  Names are good.  When you posted the fic and when you expect to get back to it if it's unfinished are also good.  Most importantly, though, label your content.  I don't particularly care about age-of-majority laws, but it is only courteous to note when a fic is sexually explicit (lemon, PWP), involves the evocation of feelings some people might not want to feel just then (angst, violence, gore, NCS) or has...how shall I put this?...potentially community-specific appeal (het, shounen-ai, BDSM, particular pairings, etc.).  It's not nice to spring surprises on your audience--though I do admit that the surprise ending/pairing/setting is a perfectly valid technique. Make sure it's on purpose and not just sloppiness. Therefore, also make sure you label it AU or OOC if you're going anywhere outside the bounds of what's actually shown in the original story. Then you can virtuously blow off any twit who takes you to task for writing thus.

Lest I be accused of blatant hypocrisy by those who know I detest extensive labeling, let me point out that all this information can be given with a genre, a rating and a blurb/teaser/summary.

2.  Most people are willing to forgive a few spelling mistakes (the little demons of chaos know I am, since I'm horrible at spelling and always have been).  Comprehensible sentence structure, though, is a major help to your readers.  Try to make sure you haven't left words (lines, whole paragraphs) out, and that you have all the quotation marks in the right places. Do not, for the love of whatever you may hold sacred, use "u" for "you" or any other such locutions. It's one thing to write a personal web-page or letter to a friend that way, but to use it in a story is as out of place as using it in business correspondence. It makes you look like an utter twerp.

3.  Consistency is a major issue for any writer; Emerson can go screw himself.  This covers a lot of territory.  Try to use the same formatting throughout to indicate thoughts versus dialogue versus lyrics and so forth.  If you're writing a sex-changing fic, some waffling between pronouns is understandable, but be consistent about name forms, place references, stuff like that.  I am a great proponent of the principle that The Author Reserves The Right To Have A Better Idea, but if that happens inside a single story, go back and make things match up.  When you're writing multiple book-length stories, then you can fudge it.  And remember to keep the characters at least marginally related to wherever you got them from.  I'm not rabid about out-of-character fics; some of them are great.  But if you want to take a given character somewhere other than where the original story took her/him, then show how she/he got there.  As they always tell us in math classes, show your work.  The key term here is character development.  Having a familiar character suddenly doing something wildly out of character with no explanation is unpleasantly jarring.

4.  This is especially aimed toward those of us who watch subtitled anime.  Don't use gratuitous Japanese.  There is an English word for "but"; there is absolutely no reason to use "demo" instead.  Likewise for "I love you," unless you're seriously making something out of the distinction between telling someone "suki desu" and  telling someone "ai shiteru."  Now, if you want to convey a nuance that doesn't have a good English equivalent, that's something else.  Titles, for instance, just don't translate well.  Trying to translate something like "onii-san" in the non-familial usage is practically impossible.  If that's the case, dandy, use the Japanese.  But as a general rule, if there's a serviceable English equivalent, use that.  It really does read more smoothly. This will also keep you out of the cross-cultural grammatical boglands. Every now and then I see someone using "kisama" as if it were a swearword; it isn't. It means "you." It's just a strongly superior-to-inferior version of the pronoun. I admit, "teme," which is even more expressive of contempt, is sometimes placed at the beginning of a sentence that doesn't need a pronoun in the first place purely to emphasize said contempt, but still. You can insult someone handily in Japanese by using different grades of politeness and familiarity that don't translate directly. For example, if one adult man calls another adult man Soandso-chan when they don't know each other really well, that's a moderately dire insult, but one that would take a long paragraph of explaining in English. Like the different levels of politeness in pronouns, the connotation of wussy-boy (loosely) relies on cultural conventions that have very different forms in the US. Use our own forms when you're writing in English. I mean, what's wrong with using "scum-sucking bastard" anyway?

5.  This is a personal preference.  Don't use the conventions of the super-deformed drawing style in writing.  "Soandso sweatdropped," for example.  It's just laziness.  If you want to say that Soandso was nonplused or taken aback or exasperated or embarrassed, then say so.  Same goes for facefaulting and production of mallets from hammerspace. I have only ever read one author who could make the mallets work; do not blithely assume you can do the same.

6. When you're writing based on anime characters, get the colors straight. Anime uses some very fine gradations of color in eyes and hair; don't sell the artists short. For instance (the one that first jumped out at me) there's a bad habit of describing Heero's eyes as cobalt. Cobalt is a very deep, intense blue, sort of like this (or at least that's as close as I can get with computer colors; if I ever get a real cobalt in hexadecimal, I'll let you know) and I have yet to encounter that color used for that character even in the artbooks. Even the official "prussian blue" is glossing it. Try variations on blue-grey; you can even get fancy and talk about blue agates and storm clouds and such, if you're writing that kind of fic. Take advantage of the subtleties. If you would like some reference pictures, I provide some on the page What Color Is The Sunset; take a look. The other approach to this issue is not to mention the characters' coloration at all, which can be a refreshing change.

7. Learn the subtleties of our own language. English has a lot of irregular verb forms, and I personally think they make things interesting. I see them disappearing, though, especially the past tense, and sometimes it makes for peculiar sounding sentences. For example, the noun form of to plead is not a plead, it's a plea; the past tense of shine is not shined it's shone (unless it's indirect action: he had his shoes shined, but the sun shone); the past tense of seek is most definitely not seeked it's sought (pronounced sawt); and while it has become permissible to use kneeled for the past tense of kneel, it's more correct to use knelt. And, really, it just sounds better. That is, after all, where irregular forms come from--they happen when people preserve the sound conventions rather than spelling conventions. That said, the issue of homonyms and homophones is a problem of its own. After all, we do have standardized spellings these days and they make a difference on the page. Bare, for instance is the word you use to convey uncovered; bare naked or bare ground. Bear on the other hand is the word used to indicate carrying or enduring: to bear arms or to bear with. Also the word to indicate ursines. It's usually possible to make out what an author means, even if s/he uses the wrong word, but it's a far better reading experience if your audience doesn't have to struggle.

For further vocabulary notes, see the Vocab page.

I've long said my books 'happen' to me. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl, Write me! Write me now! But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again, and so I spend a lot of my time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying, Wait for me! Wait for me!, and waving my notebook in the air.

--Robin McKinley, "Author's Note," Rose Daughter

8. Apropos of the quote above, here's a more general recommendation. Plot it out while you've got a grip on the idea. Write the storyline down in as much detail as you can manage. Then, when the story whizzes off again, or you have to study for exams for three months straight, or you find out that you're getting promoted provided you work twelve hours a day for the next five weeks, you can still come back to the story later. Plotting it out will also let you keep track of long works without getting sidetracked or losing your way round about Chapter Five. That happened to me a lot, starting out.

9. Write What You Know is a rather trite bit of advice, and I don't advocate it under all circumstances, but when it comes to writing lemons I'm afraid I do. Please, please, please, don't write sex scenes if you haven't experienced sex yet. At best, these come off as mechanical; trust me, a blunt description of who put what where is supremely unerotic. At worst, they're humorous. Somehow, I don't think that's usually the intention. If you have had sex and want to write a lemon, put some serious thought into your experience. Remember that, if all goes well, the audience will be identifying with your view-point character. Describe that character's sensations and responses, not just what she/he is doing/having done to. That's boring. Linger on the details; if you're embarrassed to do so, you shouldn't be writing a sex scene in the first place. For a good example of someone who knows how to write a lemon, take a look at Kelly's fanfics. She knows how to linger. On the flip side, over-detail will kill the mood just as dead. Concentrate on sensation but don't bother with every single breath. Sugah does good examples of this balance.

I also want to take this opportunity to air two pet peeves. Will people please stop writing as if their characters can't breathe while kissing?! It's only their mouths that are occupied, not their noses; it's quite feasible to breathe while kissing. Now, if your characters are so involved that they forget to breathe, that's something else. Also, please, please, please lay off the corny euphemisms for penis. Please. Spear, staff, rod, what is this, a sex scene or a fishing trip? There's nothing wrong with cock or erection, used in moderation.

10. There are some words that just shouldn't be used anywhere, by anyone, for any reason. Orbs is one of them. If you mean eyes, say eyes. I will even accept gaze. Orbs has been so atrociously overused I hereby declare it contraindicated with all forms of fic. And for crying out loud, go easy on the pretty purple words; shimmer, for instance. Use them with a sparing hand unless you really want to sound like Mattel hired you to write about Barbie's newest outfit.

11. Save the author's notes for the end of a chapter. Do not interject notes into the narrative unless you're writing the kind of story in which the author is a character in her own right (hint: those are usually humorous stories). Interjections like that break the flow of the story and disrupt your readers' belief in the scene you've created.

12. Deus ex machina (originally a Greek theater term meaning "god from a box") is also something you want to use sparingly in serious writing. Minor plot points can happen "well, because it was just fate", but major plot points don't answer as well to this technique. The most prevalent current example is probably the whole soulmates/lifebonded thing. Lazy authors use this as a fast lever to get their characters into bed without having to actually get to know or learn to even like each other. If you examine Misty Lackey, who I suspect is the source of this particular deus' current popularity, you will note that she uses lifebonding more as an obstacle than as some kind of love potion. Her characters still have to go through all the usual process of falling in love, only further hampered by a rather odd imperative they may not even understand. More than one of her characters likens lifebonds to some kind of disease. It does not make characters fall in love, all it does is make sure they stay in proximity. This is a reasonable use of deus ex machina. Use it to nudge your characters, not as some sort of magic shortcut around all your necessary plot development. At the very least, remember that you need to have a machina for your deus to emerge ex. I will accept deus ex machina, but I draw the line at deus ex pouthenos.

13. No cheap angst. My ex-officemate Tamara told me that all beginning fiction writers seem to suffer from this, so here's a nice clear-cut list. NO drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy, rape, terminal illness, domestic abuse, suicide. Just don't. It's generally completely unjustified in fic and possibly even more gratuitous in originals. Using these for angst or character conflict cheapens the true horror of these situations. If you genuinely want to write good fiction, don't touch these for at least five years. Ten would be better.

14. The advice "no adverbs" and "no epithets" have entered the same realm. These dictums are as overused as the abuses of language they were originally aimed at. Adverbs (-ly endings) have their place, and avoiding them completely can make for extremely unwieldy sentences. Overusing them, however, is lazy writing and will eventually distract your reader. Your goal should be a good balance between over description and awkwardness. Likewise, epithets (the Japanese pilot, the young wizard, the redhead) do have a place, but need to be handled carefully, lest they make your story both hard to follow and utterly laughable. The best guideline is whether your viewpoint character would actually think of the person in question that way. If, for instance, her blond friend has just dyed his hair scarlet, then, yes, she might well think of him as "the redhead sitting next to her" because that particular identifier might be on her mind. If two characters relate to each other exclusively in terms of their social roles, then it is reasonable for one to think of the other frequently as "his captain" or "his partner". In general, though, names and pronouns work better. Use them. Don't worry about repeating them a lot, it will read just as smoothly, and often more so, as five different inventive descriptors in one paragraph.

15. Blasphemies should be in character, just like any other element of dialogue. If the character comes from a monotheistic background, her exclamation should be "God!", not "gods!". I don't care what your beliefs are, the only thing that matters here is what her beliefs are. Most importantly, if the character is Japanese she is extremely unlikely to use any blasphemies at all. Expressions of shock, entreaty or disbelief are variations on "wow", "impossible", "it can't be true" or "no". Neither singular nor plural deities come into it at all. In general, even Kami-sama (Jehova) is only mentioned by not-name when directly petitioned. Characters from other countries, alternate universes and fantasy pantheons may, of course, be a different matter; judge case by case.

16. Go easy on the eye colors. Yes, many of them are lovely and are identifying characteristics. But if you pepper every third line with "his red eyes glowed" and "his gold eyes flashed" your reader is going to start wondering if this fic is really about a kaleidoscope. Try to restrain yourself to only using the color when there's an actual point to it. (Contriubuted by finnedartist.)

I'll add more of these as I think of them.  If you have one you'd like to contribute, let me know.

Last modified: 11/8/06
First Posted:  1/01

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