°° There's A Solution To All These Things When It's Just Like Writing Fanfic °°

Hello, everyone. I'm Hana, self professed former fan fiction writer here to help you break some of your bad habits that you may have picked up writing fan fiction.

Starting with a disclaimer, I love fanfic. I mean, I used to write it as I just said, and I used to do every single thing I'm going to be talking about, but I had to actively work against writing habits.

I developed writing fanfiction, things that play perfectly well, in the fanfiction world that don't quite work when you're leveling up to do professional traditionally published writing. None of these in and of themselves are like horrible, horrible things that make you a bad writer because fanfiction isn't bad. I love fan fiction.

But I think that by sharing these things that I have learned over the years through my transition from fanfic writer to professional writer, will help you to level up your writing and make that transition as well. And it's so funny because when I read writing, I can usually tell him 95% of the time when someone comes from fandom, and the fanfiction world, like I read what they write and I go, Okay, this is one of my people.

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Sometimes I can tell this because of the tropes that they use, and very often it is through some of these writing habits. And I actually kind of love that including when I pick up a professionally published book, you know, traditionally published book very often I can tell when someone used to write fanfiction, even if they fixed all of these things, as I have done as well.

So the first thing a big huge tell of someone who comes from fanfiction is rampant, messy, just all over the place dialogue tags. And by this I mean your characters say anything but said, it's a lot of dialogue tags, it's a lot of action tags, your stuff that is packed between before and after dialogue that is just a little bit over the top. So it's a lot of whispering, yelling, saying things hoarsely. So there's like adverb abuse that goes into this as well. It's using everything in the kitchen sink, vocabulary lexicon, but said, which should be your default when you're doing dialogue tags. And also, as I mentioned, excessive action tags.

So just inserting lots of you know, bodily reactions, especially kind of dramatic responses to things. I still fake these urges all the time. Because, I mean, as a reader, I don't mind these things in moderation. And as a writer, I tried to do them in moderation, but it is a huge tell for me that someone comes from fanfiction when these things are used in excess, the writing feels overwrought, it's overwritten. And this is definitely something that you have to fight against in order to level up. The next thing is basically what I call fan and Draco. Even if you're not from Harry Potter, I promise you your fandom probably has this. So to me fan and Draco is the character almost always a boy. He's almost always gorgeous, but sometimes it is a female character. And they are just over the top sexy Koi fly there fan and Draco. So there's a lot of smiling, devilishly and winking slyly. And they're just a little bit too.

It's a flash trope, really, I say sometimes it's a woman. But this is pretty much a slash trope. And I see it creep into people who are then writing original work. And I can always spot it I'm like that is spannende Draco. And the thing is, this kind of feeds into the previous thing, the, you know, kind of over the top action tags, dialogue tags, this stuff is just really over the top, it turns the character into a bit of a caricature, not a kind of real and rounded person. And very often the things that they're doing are not things that people actually do in real life. I'm sorry, but people don't go like hey, sexy, that's not really things that people do. And really, if a guy did that to me in a bar, I'd probably punch him in the face, not you know, kind of turned him into my love interest in in my in my story. And of course, there's always a bit of creative license involved, but it's kind of like if you are familiar with fan and Draco specifically or if you have a similar you know, kind of trope in your fandom.

I think Harry Styles in one D fandom is a lot like this as well. You just kind of have that like over the top sexy, romantic figure who doesn't act like a normal human being and you definitely have to pull back from that a bit when you're transitioning in to original fiction and professional writing, which actually feeds into the third thing and really all of these things are kind of connected when I think about it all harkens back to overwriting This one is mellow drama, specifically what I call Bond villain ing. I did this hardcore I got it from fanfiction and I've had to work on it and sometimes I still do it intentionally. And that is overwrought, over the top, super dramatic unrealistic, like villain villain monologuing.

Like your antagonist is basically Voldemort. Just like someone who's really over the top, you have these big set piece scenes in your book, whether it is an antagonist computation, this can happen in romance scenes as well, melodrama, where no one's talking like a normal person, the words coming out of people's mouths and the things they're saying and the way that people are reacting, don't track with the character development of the character and the rest of the story.

This is where scenes are going to feel really kind of overblown and dramatic and out of place within the scope of the larger book, but also within the scope of human beings don't act like this ever. Like there's creative license, and then there's like, and here's the thing, it's perfectly fine in fanfiction, or even some kinds of kind of traditionally published or professionally published fiction, where these tropes and kind of genre conventions are okay. But generally speaking, you do have to learn to pull these things back. Because you're going to get notes, you're going to get notes from beta readers, if you're lucky, and you have an agent, you have a book deal, trust me, you're going to be taken to task on these things, they're gonna like, they're gonna push back on you and say, This isn't working, you need to fix it.

So it's supposed to be kind of aware of melodrama and your writing and when you're doing it, and specifically Bond villain syndrome. But I'm feeling syndrome means that your antagonist isn't well rounded enough, they don't feel like a real person, either, again, within the context of the story overall. So they might be well grounded in other parts of your book. But then when you have your big confrontation scene, they literally start acting like a monologue and Bond villain, or they don't feel realistic at all in the story, because you've written a Bond villain.

So it's just something to keep in mind. The next thing is very hyper specific. And it's very hyper specific because I do this. So I have it fresh in my mind this example it came up in my line edits. It came up in my line edits, a critique partner mentioned it to me, and then I was beta reading something and I saw that that person did it in access as well. And I was like, Oh, this person also wrote or writes fanfiction, I'm calling myself out and that is excessive. eyebrow waggling, eye widening, really anything where you're describing a reaction with the main character's eyes, the POV character's eyes, their eyes are doing something also blushing. This ties into blushing, it's bodily reactions that you write for your POV character. So the character through whom the reader is experiencing the story that that character could not possibly observe in themselves, or see, you're basically externally describing a bodily reaction but from the POV, the internal POV of the character, it's not good writing, you're going to get called out on it and they're going to make you change it because it takes the reader out of the story a bit it breaks the POV essentially.

Now in fanfiction, we're used to it like I said, I did it all the time when I was writing fanfiction, I still do it sometimes. So you really have to train yourself to go Okay, they can't see themselves blush. So I have to describe what it feels like to blush my character can still blush. But I'm not saying that my character blushed. This is also kind of an impact of telling. It's actually quite boring and telling to say they blushed. It's more interesting to describe the feelings in your character's body that communicate to the reader that they're blushing are flushing that's just also better writing, but specifically the eye thing.

People in real life don't actually waggle their eyebrows a lot. See how weird that is? They don't really do it, corking a brow. I do that one, in writing and in life, but most people don't speak with their eyes or their eyebrows in excess. So you're gonna have to weed that out of your writing because this is a huge trope. I know. It was huge. in Harry Potter specifically, I'm sure it's rampant in many other fandoms. But yeah, that's a super specific one. But I got caught out for it, you're gonna get cut out for it too. And really, I realized talk to you about it.

That's actually my fourth and fifth points brought together it's the excessive eyebrow waggling and the fact that POV character can actually see their own reactions of that type.

So those are really the five things I wanted to talk about these bad fanfiction writing habits that you need to learn to recognize and break yourself of, but I am going to give you a friendly authorly reminder that the best rule of thumb is, once you understand a rule once you understand why something is less ideal writing, you can break the rules and moderation.

As I mentioned, I still have some eyebrows working and the occasional waggle in my stories, but I've pulled way back on it I tried to I can get away with one or two per book, I don't do any eye widening, because it's really just not organic. You no one really does that. We don't really do that. And we certainly don't feel ourselves doing it. We don't observe ourselves doing it. And then blushing.

I've written myself of the POV character observing of themselves that they are blushing that you find other more creative ways to write it. You know, you abuse dialogue tags and action tags and you just try to catch yourself doing it. You fix it later, mellow drama very often, my first drafts have melodrama, and then I either remove the mellow drama, or I know that I'm intentionally having mellow drama, and I make the tone of the entire book fit the melodrama, and I make it work within my character arcs.

There are workarounds for all of these things, but when you are just kind of writing them as a matter of course you are writing like you write your fanfic people can tell you can spot original work that reads like fanfic, a book reading like fanfic can be a compliment, within reason. But a book reading like fanfic can be the thing that basically stamps you as an amateur writer and gets you rejected at query stage or even submission stage if you get there. So you have to essentially develop your craft and develop your writing consciously ridding yourself of certain kind of lazy or bad writing habits that you pick up and fanfic level up. And then you can still write books that feel like fanfic, all the best parts of fanfic, without the bad parts of fanfic. And you can be that writer because the readers are out there. I love reading books like that because I love fanfiction.

So this this is me fanfic writer helping you fanfic writer to level up and move on to the next steps in your writing journey. I know it's really dicey and tough to talk about fanfiction with any kind of negativity. It's so easy. It's an easy target to ship on fanfiction and I don't enjoy that. I don't like to be on the receiving end of it. And I don't like to do it. So this is more of like a kind of tough love video. And there's love because I love fanfic.

So I hope this helped. Let me know down below in the comments, any questions you have about these specific things I've talked about? Or even if you've kind of examined some of your own writing habits as a fanfic writer, what are some of the things you noticed that you were doing that you had to kind of challenge and, you know, interrogate and change to level up your writing? I'm really curious. These are obviously things I've had to work on, but also that I've seen other writers.

Give this article a thumbs up if you liked it. Thank you so much for reading, guys. And as always, happy writing and love fanfic.