I am coming to the end of a fan fiction story that I have been writing for a couple of years (yes, I know fanfic isn’t exactly the height of literature, but it refused to leave my head until I wrote it). It’s turned out to be far longer than I thought it would (over 130,000 words with a couple of chapters to go) and I have had very positive feedback from readers. It’s pretty good, if I say it myself. There’s even been the odd moment of ‘Wow, I actually wrote that!’ Yesterday I started on an original work, which I have had stuck in my head for ages. Barely a hundred words in and I am completely demotivated. Everything I write seems so clumsy and artless, it’s as if I’ve forgotten how words even work. I have read about a writer’s ‘voice’ and I cannot figure out why my voice, which works so well for the story I’m almost done with, seems so inadequate for the one I am just starting. I was wondering if anyone else has had this experience, and how you dealt with it? Is this a common thing? Not sure if I’m looking for advice or simply an excuse to have a good whinge about it. Either way, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Muscle memory man, you gotta use it or you lose it. Start with short stories about day trips or funny things that happened. Get back into the groove. Also, having just spent 2 years on your project you gotta consider burn out.
I'm someone who started out writing fanfic and eventually transitioned to original fiction (although I still dabble in fanfic from time to time). For me, the hardest part was not only creating characters and settings from scratch, but learning how to write them in a way that conveyed the picture I had in my mind of how everything and everyone would look and act. With fanfic, all of that work is really done ahead of time for you - your readers know what the characters look like, the layout of the town/school/workplace/whatever, exactly why Character X uses that catchphrase, etc. How I worked through it was by coming up with and writing out a ton of backstory for each character, even knowing that 80% of it would never find it's way into the actual book. It helped me to discover and know my characters just as well as the ones from the show I was writing for, with seasons worth of cannon exposition to fall back on. And as far as setting, I found research and reference photos to be very useful, especially when trying to describe real places. Hopefully that helps! Many authors have come through via fanfic, it can be challenging to make the transition, but you have plenty of company.
I don't like the idea that we work hard and then we put our hands together and say 'okay! We're good writers now.' It isn't like that. Every time I sit down to write I am tested and have to prove myself once again. It does not matter what I did before.I have to struggle to reach those heights again. I might be more aware of techniques to do that with experience, but it's not automatic. I might forget some of those techniques, let them slide, or be complacent and so lack the drive to push through 'good enough' to great. If the project isn't one that allows me to engage with emotional truths I have lived, I do not write good fiction. I think I am more creative when I am enjoying my life and have a balance of things outside of my head to focus my attention on.
Like @Laurin Kelly (Hey!) I also fic (AO3 for me), and I think there are some dynamics to the whole fic paradigm that make for some incompatibility with the original fiction process and its really a matter of looking at the process, not so much the writing because it's still you, the same writer. As ever, YMMV. These are just some differences I've noticed playing in both realms. Assuming you're the typical fic writer, you likely post a chapter at a time. You may have a couple of chapters in reserve as buffer in case you hit a dry patch. Like, you just posted Chapter 5, but you've actually already written up to Chapter 7. You do that so that your followers can rely on your posting schedule and they don't abandon you when you get writer's block. Sound familiar? This dynamic gives rise to a few other dynamics. Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Chapter Length Perhaps not as unexpectedly strange to the uninitiated as, say, omegaverse, the obsession over the perfect chapter length is 100% a thing in realms of fic. In the groups I follow, someone starts that thread literally every - single - day. And I understand where it comes from. You're posting a chapter at a time, in a serialized format, so you want to make sure the reader gets a goodly chunk of story each time, enough to keep them coming back for more. You see the conversations scroll by about what constitutes a "goodly chunk" and you give your opinion. Soon, you're invested in the idea. Next, you're obsessed. You try to hit a very specific word count. You start engaging your chapters as a concept that is numerically sourced rather than structurally. You level up to the next round and start churning out massive chapters because you see conversations where people speak disparagingly about small chapters while other people post things like "My chapter is 40k long and I'm not done yet!" and get resounding praise and applause from the group. Why? Seriously, why? Any chapter being praised for that kind of size is deeply suspect. That's a novella unto itself. Why is it so long? Is it really that long or is it all pointlessly pointless naval-gazie filler? Or maybe it's actually the chapter equivalent of a comma splice sentence where several chapters have been mashed together into one Frankenchapter? Regardless, the serialized nature of multi-chapter fics has a way of making the writer engage the story numerically rather than structurally. This skews the way we engage a whole bunch of subsequent concepts. How can you properly engage pace in a chapter if you're focused on trying to hit a certain number of words? How can you discern the difference between character development and pointlessly meandering navel-gaze when you're focused on a number? If you've fallen into the pitfall of trying to make your chapters even and homogenous in length rather than structurally and contextually sound, that's something to think about. Immediate Praise and Reader Guidance It's like a generous bag of high-test heroin delivered personally to your inbox. You post your chapter and your regular readers transform into Care Bears ready to blaze the shine. And it feels wonderful! No sarcasm. I get plenty of comments on my fics, and yeah, it's fucking addictive. And then you come to rely on it. And when you post a chapter that only gets crickets, your motivation drops through the floor. Maybe that's where you are now because in the typical original fiction paradigm, there is no immediate feedback at all. You have to keep on keep'n on without it. "But what if what I just wrote was shitty? How will I know?" You won't. You won't get the gushy-gushy comments letting you know about exploded ovaries or how much you nailed the character exactly to canon or... anything. And - insult to injury - you come to a venue like this one where constructive critique is the name of the game and it feels like a kick in the dick because what happens here is simply not part of the world of fic. Huge numbers of fic-group conversations are about someone getting some comment, which reads pretty mildly to me, but which feels fatally cruel to the fic-writer recipient and everyone comes into the thread to give first aid to the gunshot victim. Those gushy-gushy comments are the devil in disguise. Readers will lead you in the direction they want, satisfying their needs, granting their wishes, and none of it is overt or demanding. They do it in pavlovian style. (You write hurt-comfort) X (Reader leaves gushy comment as long as your actual chapter) = You keep pumping out the hurt-comfort no matter what's going on the story That's bad mathematics. Conflation of Terms Sweet Jebus, it goes like this: You - "What do you all think of OC x Canon for main ship?" Person - "I hate Mary Sue inserts." You - "... what? I didn't say that. I said..." Person - "Every OC is a Mary Sue insert. Fact. Own it." I've had that actual conversation. It was so fucking bizarre not to be able to move past this obtuse conflation and to have every other member of the group agree with the person telling me this. How the fuck can every OC be a Mary Sue? OC just means original character. When you write an original fiction story, every single character is an OC. If all OCs are Mary Sues then every original fiction story ever written is populated by just Mary Sues? WTF? There's a lot of rather sloppy conflation of terms in fic, I hate to say. I've stopped even trying to have these conversations with people in those groups and just write what I write. Make sure the words you use to talk about writing actually mean the things you think they mean, otherwise you're going to get responses that answer to other things and the entire paradigm of communication breaks down. Overemphasis on Trope You've seen the post: "I want to write a Drarry fic with hurt-comfort, non-con, and also soulmate mark. How should I start?" Well, maybe don't start by trying to insert a bunch of rando tropes you happen to like into the same story just because. I mean, I dig bubble-gum and I dig pizza. I do NOT want them together on the same plate! And I'm not saying that a story cannot begin from a trope-seed, but over-focus on trope is bad for the same reason that over-focus on hitting a numerical goal with your chapter is bad. Your focus is in the wrong place. But, just as @Laurin Kelly stated, lots of people start in fic. The transition can be hard. There will be no kid gloves and a lot of the support you're accustomed to isn't present at all. But stick with it. What you will learn getting knocked around in places like this forum will teach you things that feel almost forbidden to discuss in fic circles, and this will improve your overall game, original or fic.
Ooooh, @Wreybies pointed out another tough one - Immediate Praise and Reader Guidance. I mostly write one-shots now when it comes to fanfic, but I remember those halcyon days of putting up the newest chapter in my novel length WIP fanfic, and waking up the next day to so many Kudos and Reviews I couldn't wait to start on the next chapter. Motivation to keep going gets hard when all of that is absent.
You have to write the bad stuff to be able to write the good stuff. I've written novels, short stories, essays... that just weren't good enough no matter how hard I worked are how badly I wanted them to be good, be better than what I actually had on the page. But if I hadn't written all those, I wouldn't have been able to write the stuff that did get published. A wise writer once told me you always write what you're supposed to when you're supposed to. Just keep moving forward and you'll get there. And, oh, I say just forget about that whole writer's voice thing. It doesn't sound like you're in a place where you've developed that yet, and, really, it doesn't matter too much. I never think of it. Even when someone comments on my so-called voice, it's not much too think about. It's just the way I write.
There's a few things to unpack here. 1) Even the best writers will write clumsy and artless on occasion. Some do it regularly. You have to smash the idea out of your head right now that every time you sit at the keyboard and type it should be instant gold dust. Most writers mold their creations in the edit, after they've written it, two, three, four times over. None of the best writers sit down, write, and then publish. I highly suggest you watch some of Brandon Sanderson's lectures on youtube about this, especially his lecture on revisions and editing. 40-60% of writing serious fiction is done after you've written it. The first time you write something it is about ONE thing alone - getting thoughts down on a screen. Turning it into a work of art comes after with refinement. Imagine it's a piece of clay, sloppy and unshapen, you have to get that clay into a basic oval shape first if you want to create a beautiful vase. 2) The reason it probably felt like it came so easily before with fanfiction was because you had that writer's voice of a show in your head, and knew how to contextualize it. With your own work, you have to come up with your own. Again, this will come, but only after as @Room with a view said, with practice, persistence, and revising/editing. Finding your own voice as a writer, independent of fanfiction, will take time, and you have to go easy on yourself and not beat yourself up about it. 3) The only way you get yourself out of a demotivation hole is to force yourself. Write through it. It doesn't matter if its crap. What you have is valuable information, regardless. If you hate it, you have something on the page to look at and identify what you hate about it. Write a bullet list of what you don't like about it, ask yourself what you would like. Treat it like a study/research. Analyzing and identifying what you don't like is important to look at, so you can correct it and change it into what you do like. Doing this also makes you work on the project and move forward. Moving forward is progress, and progress helps motivation.
It's possible that the new story you're starting on just doesn't have a good flow to it. I've found some ideas just seem to flow out very easily and to work pretty well right off the bat, and some it's like pulling your own teeth to squeeze each word out. The ones that flow nicely are a joy to write, and usually turn out to have a lot better potential than the other kind. If I'm writing one that doesn't flow well, I usually scrap it and go back to square one, either with a totally different story idea or at least a serious revamp.
This happens to me. Sometimes I have to restart the piece. Sometimes I have to take some time thinking about the characters. Other times I disassemble the paragraphs using different words and phrases until I feel I have the write tone for the piece. I did that recently with a short story I was working on. I wrote a couple of pages - a lot of talk and explanation really boring. So I sat there thinking what would be the most exciting way to start the story - a scene or explaining - I went with a rather exciting scene of a forced surgery. The tone isn't exact but it's enough that when I want to finish the story I have a good strong start. Word usage for me is the key. When I can find something that sounds strong and evocative and not tentative that's when I'm pleased.
Don't belittle yourself. Writing good fanfiction is difficult. As for your troubles, a thing to consider is that fanfiction and regular fiction require somewhat different skill sets. For example, when writing original fiction you need to create your own characters and setting. More importantly, you also need to get the reader sold on them as early as possible. An original story has to actually explain who the characters are and why the reader should care. It has to present the setting in such a way that the reader understands it well enough once the plot needs them to. These things are not required in fanfiction since the original work already did that job for you. It's stuff like that. In short, you may have honed certain writing skills while neglecting others since you never needed them. Think of yourself as, a say, and electronic musician trying to learn an acoustic instrument, or an artist who've specialized in pencil drawings suddenly switching to oil painting. Yes, there is considerable overlap and many of the skills you've already acquired will help, but it probably won't be a smooth transition because the thing you are trying to do now is still markedly different from what you used to do. Another somewhat related issue is that... well, being a fan of something is different from having a creative vision of your own. Both are a source of enthusiasm and passion, which are very important when being creative. And they are not completely unrelated, as our original ideas are ultimately drawn from things we like and want to emulate. But still, one is an expression of admiration for something external, the other an expression of your own internal values and aesthetics. You may be very attuned to one of those but not nearly as much to the other. Maybe this story of yours just doesn't resound with you on a personal level, because you can't see it clearly enough, or it's missing something important and you haven't realized, or you've changed in the years since you firt thought of it. These things happen, I'm afraid. You simply have to contemplate what it is you're trying to express, and how important it is to you.
I started writing every day because of Fan Fiction and then moved on to my own, original stuff. The thing is, though, with Fan Fiction, the whole world is already there. You know it, probably, inside and out. You could say it’s easy. It’s not, but it seems much easier because you can just get on with the story you want to tell. With your own, original worlds, you have to fill in all the blanks. It seems harder because, not only do you have to write the story, but you have to build the world the story inhabits and it can feel more like a chore. Many people, myself included, simply build as we go along. They call people like me ‘Pantsers’, because we ‘fly by the seat of our pants’ when it comes to world building. It’s not for everybody. A lot of people need to build the world first and work out exactly where their story fits in with it. Perhaps you’re one of those types of writers? Maybe you need to know your world before you can invest in it? It’s just a thought to chew over.
I'm not a fan of fanfic, but I'll do my best to approach the question diplomatically and constructively. I got my start, as it were, in Flash fiction, writing to a 666 word maximum. I still love flash, but while it may seem that the it would be difficult to write to that sort of limit (here it's 500 words), the shortness of the pieces gives the writer a certain leeway. No one expects multiple well-drawn-out characters in flash. No one expects detailed scene-setting or world building in flash. When a writer is faced with a 500 word limit, she has to use her tropes to the maximum effect and let the reader use their cultural knowledge to fill in the details for her. From one of my stories: Beth. Megan. I've established that this is probably a whitebread family with the names alone. "We had her tested for autism." They've got a pretty good health plan, solid middle class or higher. That becomes important later on in the story, but if this were a longer piece I'd need to do a lot more work to show what kind of family it was, what their socioeconomic condition was. But with fanfiction you have to do even less work in establishing these sorts of things. Heck, even the character personalities are already there for you. You've got six movies, a TV show, uncounted comics, and a plethora of both authorized and unauthorized fanfic all scaffolding your story to your readers before you add a single original thought to it. I can already see Batman standing on a parapet of a tall building in Gotham, know that he's brooding because that's his superpower, and know that the city below him is corrupt and crime-infested with the notable exception of a few good cops and a plucky reporter or two. Now you're going to tell me what Batman gets up to, be it a new villain of your own invention, a return of one of the greats, or an M-M romance with Commissioner Gordon. That's not a criticism. I'm just saying that when I started to move out of flash I discovered that the "ideal" chapter length for a novel was about the same size as the longest short story I'd ever written, and there were "supposed" to be twenty-seven of them in a novel. So now you're trying to move from fanfic to your own original story. Great! But your hero is a dude named.... Roger Clarke. No idea why that name popped into my head, but let's go: Who is Roger Clarke? What's his job? What kind of a person is he? What city is he looking out over, and from what vantage? So much work to do that you never had to do before, just as I never had to do that work in flash or short stories. Maybe write some short(er) standalone stories about ol' Roger to work on fleshing him and his environment out. You don't need to show them to anyone, but you should try to make them something that you might want to show someone. That will build up the mental muscles that you haven't had to use while operating in powered exoskeleton of fanfic. Okay, that's all I got for now, good luck.
What a great thread you've started here! Lots of excellent replies. I'm starting late. But one thing YOU said struck me as worth exploring. Give yourself a bit of time, so you can look at what you've written dispassionately. Pretend this is somebody else's work, and you are giving a critique. What would you advise them to do? What's not working? What is working? I was struck by @Iain Aschendale 's example of Batman. If you are writing a story about Batman, folks already know who the character is, so you don't have a lot of work to do in getting the character established. However, if you are writing a story about a character nobody knows (yet) you have a lot more work to do. @Laurin Kelly 's examples of how she overcame this fanfic thing are very helpful. YOU have to create the character from scratch. And the situation. And the feelings you want your reader to experience as they read your story. Don't be afraid to slow down as you write your first draft. The first draft is when events and people need to jump from the plot outline and acquire life. Take the time to fully envision each scene. What do you want that scene to accomplish? And go beyond the event progression. What do you want your readers to FEEL when they read this scene. And then make sure that happens. See the characters in your head. Throw a few of them together. How are they acting? What are they saying? What is the emotional feeling you want each scene itself to carry? Contentment? Intrigue? Compassion? Despair? Worry? Fear? It's a misconception that a lot of detail is boring. It is, if it's just presented as a list. But if each detail MATTERS to your characters, and you can let us know how the detail affects them, a scene will jump into life. It's the emotional content that usually carries a reader, so don't be too 'he did this, then he did that' in a scene. An outline is there to guide you, so you don't forget to do stuff. But if your story reads like an expanded view of your outline, it's probably coming across flat as a pancake. What 'happens' is important—but how your characters and your readers FEEL about what is happening is just as important. If you ignore or sideline the emotional content in favour of simply 'moving the plot along,' you will be left with writing that doesn't contain the excitement you felt when you first conceived it. Take your time. OVER-write. Even get melodramatic! You can always pare the thing back, once you've hit your stride. But give yourself plenty of emotional content. Try not to include any detail that doesn't also contain some reference to how your POV character feels about it. Why is THAT detail something they notice, or care about? Not a hard and fast rule, of course, but it's a good trick to work with. We're in the head of your POV character, so what they care about, we'll care about. If they mention the colour of somebody's eyes, what strikes them about that eye colour? Why do they notice it? Presumably they're not going around clocking everybody's eye colour? So why that one? What do they notice ABOUT that eye colour? How does it make them feel? Do they hate it? Are they attracted to it? Explore that aspect of the situation, and your readers will not only remember the eye colour, but they'll already have a reaction to it. And get your story finished. Stick to the task until it's done. Don't fall into the editing mode before you know exactly what you've got. Obviously it's okay to skim over what you've just written for SPAG errors, etc ...but that's all. Just keep going. Finish it. And then let it sit. Get to the point where you can read it as if somebody else had written it. THEN tackle the piece with your editing/critique hat on.
