Month: July 2021

Some texts suck us in so completely that we just can’t stop reading — though our eyes may have trouble keeping up, every word is so perfectly placed, and so easy to understand, that our minds are flying. Other pieces of writing are, well, a little trickier. These might require you to read the same paragraph over and over again, leave you wondering what just happened, or tempt you to abandon them altogether as you discover yet another page devoid of substance. Even worse, there might be careless typos, word choices that completely miss the mark, or aimless rambling. 

You, of course, want your creative writing to be the kind people simply can’t put down. By avoiding some of the most common mistakes creative writers make, you get a whole lot closer to that aim. What should you look out for in your own writing?

Your introduction is boring

What’s true for people is also true for creative writing — you can only make a first impression once. If people don’t like what they see, and aren’t curious what’s going to happen next, you are at risk of losing them. Just like it takes writers a while to get into the swing of a creative writing project, readers also need to be seduced. To make sure your readers stay with you until the end, hook them with a riveting beginning. 

Your pages are filled with purposeless details

Creative writers are continuously told to “show, don’t tell”, but if you take this advice to the extreme, you could easily fall into the trap of filling your pages with vivid and beautiful, but ultimately excessive, details that simply don’t advance the story or message in any way. Good questions to ask yourself when you decide what to cut are if the details show emotion, set the stage, or tell the reader more about your characters. If it’s not relevant, and especially if it’s also distracting, it’s got to go. 

The characters in your creative fiction don’t have any flaws

Creative writers who are attempting to write a short story or novel will want their readers to care about their protagonist. That becomes much easier if they create a three-dimensional, human character that people can root for and sympathize with. Flaws, hardships, and pain are essential parts of the human experience, so without them, you risk crafting robots. 

Your progression is too predictable

While you definitely want a coherent whole, don’t forget to add some turns and twists to the story to keep your audience on its toes! Nobody wants to see the end coming from miles away.

You’re trying to be someone else

As a creative writer, you are going to have role models — but to be the best writer you can be, you have to find your own voice. Try not to compare your work to the style of other writers whose work you admire, but instead ask yourself if your writing feels authentic. 

You don’t edit properly

This is the big one, because there’s so much ground to cover. Beginning creative writers often fall into these traps when they try to edit their work:

• If you try to proofread your work soon after you have written it, your brain is at risk of reading what you intended to write — rather than what you actually wrote. 
• You may get so attached to a word or sentence that you find it hard to let go, even though you know that it doesn’t belong in your text. 
• You constantly second-guess yourself, and end up deleting passages that were perfect just the way they were. 
• You think your writing isn’t sufficiently literary and you go overboard with the thesaurus. 

It’s nearly impossible to be objective about your own work, and very few creative writers are able to effectively self-edit. That is why it’s so important to bring a fresh pair of eyes in. You won’t hire a professional editor for every piece of creative writing you craft, but you can at least ask for feedback on a writers’ forum or get a friend to take a look.

Creative writing might be exciting, but it’s also hard work. The good news is that you get better with practice — so keep writing!

What if Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy had an affair? What if the characters in Game Of Thrones were to star in an edition of Big Brother VIP? What if Katniss Everdeen were to reflect on the loss of virginity just before the next Hunger Games?

Fanfiction is literature by the fans, for the fans. A tool to explore the themes that some successful sagas don’t dare touch. They are a phenomenon unknown to the general public, but it encourages millions of people to read and write, affects the scripts of television series, has its own jargon and is the origin of bestsellers like Fifty Shades of Grey. The communities are immense and their impact on popular culture is enormous from What about Brian to Mulberry.

A fanfiction is a story written by and for fans that draws on fictional universes of other authors to explore the empty spaces of the story, reinterpret facts and characters, or create a completely new plot. “It is a text created from the needs of a reader who wants to clarify points of a story, deepen the relationships between characters, translate them to another reality …”, defines Claudia ‘Misvan’, philologist and fanfics reader.

Viko, 24, reads and writes about series such as Naruto or Inazuma Eleven and explains it this way: “I like to read and I like to imagine stories beyond what the authors tell”. She adds that “there are wonderful characters who are left without history because they are secondary” and that “it is entertaining to look for details in the canon”, the original story, “to form other ideas”. Naruto is one of the most popular fandoms on sites like Commaful and Fanfiction.net.

In her story Dormiens, author Dryadeh narrates how Draco Malfoy has become a fugitive and will have to accept Hermione Granger’s help to survive: “Hermione covered her mouth with one hand trying to hide a giggle at the sight of Malfoy’s stupefied face. It was clear that Mrs. Weasley had decided to adopt him, and she doubts that he would like it if this practically unknown woman gave him orders as if she were his mother.”

In another fanfiction, Kirschtein Dawk placed the Game of Thrones characters in Big Brother’s confessionals: “Sixteen strangers will have to live on the same island apart from all kinds of civilization. This year we have chosen Rocadragon as our favourite place. One hundred and fifty-four video cameras will be hidden all over the house. We will leave nothing to the imagination.

There are brilliant ideas, but there are also stories that can send you to the hospital. Perla Shumajer became famous on the Harry Potter forums for her unpredictable and wild prose. This fan wrote: “Harry Potter waits for a punishment, and that is to go to Snape’s office, and wait for Snape, Snape to arrive and both declare their love, be boyfriends and have sex, because that’s life.” Perla was also able to imagine sex scenes with impossible script twists.

Fan communities gather on portals such as Wattpad and AO3. They produce hundreds of stories every day. Wattpad’s 40 million users have posted 100 million texts since 2006 and read for 13 billion minutes a month. The Fanfiction.net forum has been running since 1998 and has more than two million registered users producing stories in 30 different languages. They support all types of fandoms from Young James Herriot to 3 Ring Circus.

It is common to try writing fanfiction before launching into professional literature. For Viko it is “a natural intermediate step between the reader and the writer”. Since the author “does not have to face the complicated task of designing a whole world and characters to start producing by himself”. It makes an easier path to transition. With the help of sites like Reedsy, Squibler, and others providing resources to writers, many fic writers make the transition to publishing quite smoothly after building some skills.

In addition, the fanfiction writer has another advantage: the public will read about a fiction they previously liked. It’s a convenient way to start writing and lose the fear of publishing. Literary quality is not a problem. Most authors are not professionals and the community just wants to have fun. Trial and error are necessary to keep the conversation alive and the machine never stops. It happens the other way around in the publishing sector, where a bad book can label you as a mediocre writer for years.

Harry Potter, Twilight, Glee, Doctor Who, The Hunger Games, Dragon Ball or Buffy Vampire Slayer are some of the most popular franchises, but there is fanfiction about everything from the NBA to the One Direction. Fan communities or ‘fandoms’ expand and rewrite these universes collectively for the love of art. They function like a beehive mind that produces new material, filters it and improves it organically.

“Not only are they made to please,” says Elisa McCausland, a journalist and cultural critic, “you can also change them and test them. The consumer detects a need, covers it and perfects the product. “It is normal that capitalism is happy with this tool,” adds McCausland, “it is an interesting mechanism to know if something is going to be successful, that is test version.

One of the most lucrative editorial bombings of recent years, Fifty Shades of Grey, was born as a torrid encounter between the prude vampires of the Twilight saga. The story had already triumphed with Bella and Edward as protagonists, so it only needed a few touches and publicity to sell copies as churros.

Sometimes, this perverse test serves so that the plots that triumph in the fandoms end up reflected in the canon. Princesa Chicle and Marceline, from Hora de Aventuras, are a regular couple in fanfiction environments. The scriptwriters have supported the idea on several occasions, but have never made it explicit in the series. “The fandom legitimizes that in the series and in comics the winks can move on to something else,” says McCausland.

That “something else” happened in the Nickelodeon series Legend of Korra. Fans went crazy with an unofficial romance between the characters Korra and Asami. In fanfiction jargon, these love stories are known as ‘shippeos’. The shippeos are the soul of fanfiction. Everybody likes a good ship. The scriptwriters listened to the fans and ended up introducing romance into the series. The tandem ‘Korrasami’ was born on the internet and ended up in the canon.

In one of the first academic definitions of fanfiction, MIT professor Henry Jenkins said that “it is a way for culture to repair the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations rather than by the people.

Reinterpreting characters and modifying popular narratives is nothing new: oral tradition stories, from the Iliad to gestational songs, had as many versions as interpreters. These icons and stories belonged to the people, but today they are the property of large media groups. The fanfiction, in a way, recovers those figures and gives them back to the people.

Writing and reading fanfiction is a rebellious gesture, but with nuances. After all, fandoms are born from the cult of a product created by capitalism. “The opportunity to hack, the possibility of meme, troleo… is resistance, but it is also consumption”, underlines Elisa McCausland, “although it is another type of consumption, intervened and resignified”.

The community itself is already something groundbreaking. Fandoms tend to be made up mostly of women. This can be seen in the approaches, the themes, the protagonists and the tone of the texts. “The mainstream culture has a masculine, white, cisgender and heterosexist look, and the fanfic is a reaction to that look, it offers an alternative”, Zelsh points out. “Women have had very little voice in literature,” says Papaveri, “it’s a way of saying that we’re here, of showing your presence in an environment that doesn’t give you anything.

Society has assimilated the male writer’s archetype and the female reader’s archetype, explains Elisa McCausland. The fact that consumption is assigned to the feminine gender has an objective: “To subtract value from it”.

The Internet turns this situation around. We live in a time of the ‘prosumer’. The boundaries between producing and consuming are blurring. McCausland explains that the subject “no longer reads, listens and assimilates information, but constructs it, manipulates it, appropriates it and resignifies it”. He adds that “many, and especially many, have used this potential to build and project themselves through fiction”.

“When one writes or reads fanfiction, one looks for something that has not been seen in the canon,” says Viko. Is that why erotic stories and homosexual themes abound? It’s not the only reason, but it’s probably one of them: “A lot is written about novels and series in which romance is very much in the background or doesn’t exist at all,” Viko continues, “and homosexual themes abound because most of the characters and the best written are men. When someone writes, they want good characters. Unfortunately, female characters are often full of clichés.