I am editing my WIP. It is my first one and it is taking me a lot of time to edit because I have little spare time to do it in, and it needs a lot of cleaning up. I am sure I read a thread on here this morning (but can't find it) about fanfic. I haven't actually read any so I googled what makes writing like fanfic, and noted a few things I need to clean up. However, the below point came up a lot and I wondered how people knew it was an author's wish fulfillment in original work? I've read a series recently that started out good but three books later was tiresome and repetitive, and I would question whether that was 'wish fulfillment' but I couldn't say why. Does anyone have some insight? 'Wish fulfillment does contribute to things feeling like fan fiction.' Hope this makes sense. writing this between meetings!
Ever read a book and it left you thinking "i wish this would have happened...." Ive written exactly 1 fan fiction in my life and it came about because if that thought. So i fulfilled my wish and wrote the story how i WISHED it would have ended. Which was more action, a final boss battle and a cliff hanger that actually made sense.
Arh got it! I was reading it as if people were reading books and thinking the author wishes that was happening to them and couldn't work out how people could identify a story or author's fantasy.
Often it means the MC is a Mary Sue, a blatantly obvious self-insertion who never suffers any hardship or has to work to achieve what they want, and the opponent is one-dimensionally evil and foolish and easily defeated. If you're not familiar with it look into the characteristics of a Mary Sue. Basically it's when the author turns the whole story into a self-serving fantasy and ignores the rules of good writing. Here's the Wikipedia entry about it.
There's also the idea of self-indulgent writing, which overlaps the ideas already mentioned. There was a thread last year about it which covered some of the same points in this one: https://www.writingforums.org/threads/self-indulgent-writing.169211/
