Fanfiction Writing Style

What even is good writing really

Ikoku Nikki (Journal with Witch) Chapter 1 progress update: like 10 pages in lol it’s both easier and harder than Haikyuu chapter one and I’ll go more into detail about that when I finish it hopefully by the end of next week.

So, right now, I have a post popping off on Tumblr.¹ As is typical of Tumblr posts I make about media (general), many people are reblogging the post without having the faintest idea of what on earth I was thinking about when I made it and interpreting it all wrong.

The post I made was inspired by a conversation with my fanfiction writer friends about, well, writing fanfiction, in which one of my friends trying to branch out into original fiction worried if her original prose was doomed to be in a “fanfic style.” This reminded me that there are certain phrases that pretty much only appear in fanfiction and original fiction by people who learned to write in fanfiction communities, which is pretty neat and interesting. It’s also one of the things that shows Rachel Reid’s books are “written like fanfiction.” But even published authors known to have come out of a fanfiction background have visibly different writing styles. Look how Casey McQuiston introduces the love interest in Red, White and Royal Blue, compared to Rachel Reid introducing Ilya in Heated Rivalry.

McQuiston’s use of close-third present tense is much more common in fanfiction than published fiction that I’ve seen, but I’ve also noticed it becoming more common in published fiction recently than it used to be. I think about “blinks, seethes” like once a week, like that’s great

Vague…

Our conversation quickly swerved off of specific phrases and language decisions and into characterization, and the observation I made that is now approaching 7k notes² on Tumblr was “fandom loves to see a unique and interesting story and go ah this would be great in my little boxes that make everything the same”.

I was specifically thinking about how fandom tends to simplify and reduce character relationships into Neat Little Boxes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Chaotic Bisexual/Repressed Gay, Found Nuclear Family. Of course, a bunch of people reblogging my post are tagging it with stuff like “ban shipping forever” and “coffeeshop AUs are evil” and like, that’s literally just not what I meant. Not even what I was thinking of. There’s a lot of ways to do a coffeeshop AU that doesn’t sand off all the edges of your favorite little supervillain! Actually, I feel like coffeeshop AUs have fallen out of favor lately. I’ve been seeing a lot more… fantasy stuff that could potentially be turned around for a book deal, last couple of years. But that might just be my imagination.

I read A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske without knowing that I’d also read her fanfiction years earlier under a different name, but I don’t remember feeling like I was reading A Fanfiction Book when I started reading it. This was how Marske described the first meeting between her two protagonists:

That feels totally different from Heated Rivalry or Red White and Royal Blue, and not just because it’s an Edwardian-era fantasy story. McQuiston and Marske both give their descriptions a sense of subjectivity, but Marske’s narration has a little more space between the reader and the viewpoint character. If I changed all the identifying nouns in all three excerpts, I’d still be able to pick out who wrote what. It’s not a mass of indistinguishable Extruded Fanfiction Product.

So, back to my friend’s plight. Do writers who learned to write through fanfic write in a fanfic style? That’s something I’ve been wondering too, about myself. Do I write in a fanfiction style? Is it obvious I spent most of my early fiction-writing years toiling in the AO3 mines for kudos and bookmarks? How can I know? What are the tells?

I started writing fiction on… Neopets, where I won the Petpet Spotlight and got a few short stories into the Neopian Times when I was like 11 years old. Then some fanfiction on the Scholastic dot Com kid’s forums called The Stacks (a Harry Potter nextgen fic I wrote about 5 paragraphs of across three forum posts, and a Hunger Games OC RP thing about my self-insert Mary Sue <3). I entered the Scenario Writing short story contest a couple of times and got third place in the state in I think… 8th grade? I tried to write a spy school novel riffing on Ender’s Game and Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series and got about 10k words into it before giving up. I tried to write a different novel for NaNoWriMo in 9th grade and got about 10k words into that before giving up and switching to a Homestuck fanfiction I never posted anywhere because it was an AU based on my summer camp and therefore unbearably cringe (but that one I somehow wrote 30k words of???). I wrote a short story my school literary magazine rejected even though I was on the editorial board. Then, in college, I started writing fanfiction again.

I got back into writing fanfiction because I, a Russian-American queer, watched Yuri!!! on Ice as it was airing, and then I opened AO3 and saw hundreds of writers being Wrong about Russian things, and my irrepressible need to correct people jumped out and I ended up writing a deeply self-indulgent AU about what if the Russian characters in YOI were college students in a place I knew well and did things I have done in my life. Since this was a big fandom at its peak of activity, I experienced a rush of engagement with my shitty 1500-word written-at-2-AM fic I would never see again. That burst of numbers going up very fast gave me the motivation to write another fic in that world, and then a third. And then, when I got into another sports anime fandom a few months later, I had the confidence to try writing something for it, since it went okay for me in the recent past. That led me to a discord server for that fandom, which led me to other similar discord servers, including the one I was having that conversation in about fanfic styles. I’ve been internet friends with some of these writers for almost a decade!

And about… three years ago, I guess? I decided I wanted to try and get a novel published traditionally. Graphic novels did not appear to be working out for me, writing was faster than drawing, and I seemed to be okay at it, at the very least? My fics mostly don’t get a lot of attention, but my kudos to hits ratio is higher than average, and I’ve gotten into a lot of fairly competitive fan anthologies for my writing. I figured that was good enough to get a book deal, or at least an agent. So I wrote a book, sent it around. Dead silence and form rejections. Wrote another book. Sent that around. I’ll let you know if anything ends up happening with that.

Scrolling through my published works now, I realized that I usually write fanfiction when I want to put the characters I enjoyed in one context into a different context more familiar to me: giving them a hobby I have or an experience I’ve felt before, or physically transplanting them to a place I know well, or introducing them to other characters I also really like so they can hang out (underrated form of entertainment btw. Crossovers 4ever.) It’s fun! My original fiction also… shines a spotlight on my niche interests. That first book I pitched around was about a group of friends in a fictional anime fandom trying to organize a fanzine together. It was going to have illustrations! My friends all loved it and not a single agent wanted it. ³

Do my fanfiction pursuits put the characters I love into boxes? Am I sanding off their quirks and edges to make them fit into the new environments I make up for them? I’d like to think not, but I can’t really tell. When writing fic was my main hobby, I remember really admiring writers who could pull off introspective, descriptive character studies with very poetic prose and lots of imagery and atmosphere. My work tends to have a lot of dialogue, and action, and scenes. Commenters praise my pacing and sense of humor. Whenever I try to be poetic I just end up repeating things in a way that seems clumsy instead of intentional, and I don’t know why I’m so incapable of something that seems to come easily to so many of my friends. It’s like drawing all over again!

My part-time job cuts all the part-timer’s hours in January, as the mostly-outdoors sculpture park where I work reaches its slowest time of year. As I start making less money than my student loans take out every month, I get more desperate about making up the gap: promoting my online shop more, posting a lot on Tiktok in a bid to somehow become an artfluencer, applying to sketchy Indeed postings, etc, etc. This year, I’ve started rotating in my mind the idea of a fully-funded Creative Writing MFA program. There’s a university nearby that offers it. I’m still paying $500 a month for my Cartooning MFA, and the thought of doing crit groups again makes me want to die a little. But getting a stable salary to basically continue to do what I’ve been doing anyway sounds soooo niiiiiice. Even if it’s not a huge salary, it’ll still be more than what I’m making right now. But can I even get into a fully-funded MFA program? How do people do that? Is my writing too fanfic-y to make it through an academic program? Are my fanfics even good?

Part of the allure of the fully-funded MFA for me is the idea of someone Official, someone Credentialed, taking apart my prose on a sentence and line level and handing down their verdict on whether or not it’s Good. I never feel like I know what I’m doing when it comes to writing. I’ve studied comics inside and out, but every writing opportunity I’ve ever gotten I kind of stumbled vaguely into. I joined the high school lit mag because my friends were in it, I joined the college paper because the only lit mag was at my school’s other campus, I started writing reviews because the editor of that section asked me when he needed an article on a short turnaround.

When I decided I wanted to get a book published, I started reading more prose fiction. I tried to seek out stuff that could be good comps for what I wanted to write and stuff totally different from what I wanted to write, trying to read broadly and deeply in my areas of interest, taking advantage of my short-lived bookstore job to learn as much as I could about The Market. I read and write a lot of book reviews, because I think being able to articulate what I like and dislike about what I read makes my own writing better. And I would like to think all of that reading made my prose less fanfic-y, but I have no way to tell.

I last published a fic a few months ago, revisiting one of my earliest fics for that pairing and that fandom and telling a new story of how those characters could have gotten together. I think I’ve gotten better since the first fic, but for all I know, maybe I got worse.

It feels like fanfiction is an ongoing presence in my life, something I’ll always come back to, even if I set it aside for months or years at a time. I have too many friends in fandom to want to leave it forever, completely. And though I’ve mostly been reading books lately, I still like reading fanfiction. I’ve read a lot of really, really good fanfiction that was more stylistically interesting and better-written than some published books. I can’t even say I’ve read a lot of bad fanfiction because it’s so easy to hit the back button the moment someone punctuates their dialogue wrong. I can’t think of any examples of bad fanfiction that does what I referenced in my Tumblr post because when I click on a fic I don’t like I just close the tab and pretend I never saw it.

I want to know that I’m a good writer, but I don’t want to give up something I love so I can be sure of that.

Anyway, if you read to the end of all this rambling and were moved by my part-time-job woes, I do have a tip jar here! Or you can like-share-subscribe as you wish. Or don’t. Either way, thanks.

1. I will not be linking to my Tumblr or my AO3 accounts directly here. If you’re not at the Devil’s Sacrament already I will not be responsible for inviting you. They’re both easy enough to find if you want to.

2. As of me writing this. It’ll probably be closer to 8 or 9k notes by the time this posts lol

3. Maybe I should self publish it! Tell me if that’s something you’d want me to do!