Why so much fanfiction is bad and how it can be improved

Ever wonder why so many people write poor fanfiction? Here is how I see it, both as a reader, and as someone who is trying to write my own fiction (both fanfiction and original fanfiction):

1. It’s very easy to apply your own bias to other peoples’ characters and situations; It’s very difficult to do it well.
   • 90% of all the OOCness I encounter is the result of people applying their own experiences in ways which don’t fit very well or of the fanfic author failing to notice some subtle point in the original work which contradicts some core point of their carefully planned story.
   • What’s worse is when people explicitly try to shoehorn the characters into their plans. I don’t care how much you want it to happen. Unless you have the skill to make it believable, it’s not gonna happen, and I’m not just talking about making the emotions believable. You have to justify the change to the readers. I suggest pretending that they’re critics. This is especially a problem in the world of slash fanfiction. (yaoi, for anime and manga fans who have little fanfiction experience)
2. Just because English is a confusing language doesn’t mean that poor grammar can be excused. I can’t think of one fanfic that is completely free of mistakes, though I can think of a dozen or more good fics which have only one or two minor mistakes. (usually something like using “too” when “to” would be appropriate, or something similar)
3. Reading comics does not make a good author, just as reading novels won’t teach you to draw. This is probably the single most common general problem I’ve encountered in anime fanfiction. (though a variant of it does plague inexperienced Harry Potter fanfiction)
   • If you want to write fanfiction, read a large amount of varied professionally publish fiction. It’s the only way to properly build a sense of what works and what doesn’t. I’ve been reading too much fanfiction and not enough professional fiction in the last few years, but when I’m at my best, I can smell a cheesy plot at a hundred yards.
   • I’m not qualified to talk about how to learn to make good webcomics, but I do know that a similar principle applies. The human brain is very good at recognizing what works and what doesn’t, but more importantly, what works for novels doesn’t work for comics. Both media have their own sets of useful styles, and it takes a great deal of skill to successfully discover a new one that works.
   • As I mentioned, a variant of this does plague fanfiction derived from novels such as Harry Potter. (though there are a handful of people who are naive enough to think they can write fanfiction after having watched the movies) Specifically, the “varied” part of my earlier instruction. You can’t write good fiction if your only reference is one or two authors, unless hell has frozen over and you are not only a very fast learner, but have the exact same writing style and creative process. Read a lot of varied novels
4. Poor authors “have no shame” and there’s no framework for sorting the jewels from the junk. Unlike with fanart, where you can tell the quality at a glance, fanfiction has a great many elements, and some may be better than others. I can remember several cases where I have read fiction that is almost unreadably lacking in proofreading because the plot is captivating enough to hold me. Unfortunately, there is currently no decent method for sifting through all of the works out there. Fanfiction awards are useful, but due to the immense amount of fanfiction, and the fact that people read for the plot, not for pure quality, they don’t help very much. I’m working on a design for a communal review site which, if successful, should help, but it’s still in the planning stage.

Now, I am quite aware of how addictive manga and anime are. Before I discovered them, I was reading at least one novel per day. (two on weekends and holidays) After I discovered anime and then manga, maybe one per week, if that. It went down to one per month (or worse) once I discovered fanfiction. That’s not to say that the addiction is inherent to manga and anime themselves, but rather, to the storytelling style and choice of stories preferred by Japanese authors targetting teenagers.

Don’t believe me? Read the Slayers novels. They feel just like the anime or the manga, they are hilarious, and the novels are the originals. Sadly, the only thing I can think of which hooks the reader at even a fraction of that speed is the Harry Potter series, or maybe the Artemis Fowl series of books by Eoin Colfer. As both are targetted at older children and young adults, It seems that North American authors assume that the reader will have a much higher attention span than Japanese teen authors and mangaka do.

It doesn’t help that I have yet to see a single North American novel which duplicates the style of comedy that I myself am addicted to. (the kind found in the Slayers novels, and most anime and manga comedy) It’s a very lucky thing that going too long without intellectually stimulating reading material starts to drive me insane. The most stimulating anime and manga I’ve found so far have been whodunnits like Detective Conan (“Case Closed” in North America) and Tantei Gakuen Q, and they don’t satisfy my thirsts for sci-fi. On the flip side, North American content fails to satisfy my thirsts for gender bending stories and comedy.

In closing, I’m not sure whether the happy-go-lucky abundance of low-quality fanfiction is a good thing, since it does allow for communal improvement and the sharing of ideas which may not otherwise be considered, but I do think that fanfic authors should learn more about writing, or find someone more experienced to act as an editor before posting. Not to mention that there is little (if any) excuse for publishing work that has not been proofread. Hopefully, more diversity will flow into North American novels to aid their efforts. As for proofreading, there is no excuse not to do so. For the most part, I’m skilled enough to be my own proofreader, but I recognize that nobody is perfect and I always ask for at least one other person to check my work over. I also prefer to wait a week and proofread a second time, in order to give my perspective time to shift.

Blog posts such as this one are an exception because I know that if I did wait, I’d end up forgetting, or just being too lazy to post them.

Why so much fanfiction is bad and how it can be improved by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.