Writing Fanfiction: Tips for Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Fanfiction is an often under-rated genre. Tons of authors have honed their writing skills with fanfiction, not to mention the millions of writers and readers who love exploring familiar stories and characters! Today, NaNoWriMo participant Villie V. Kokko has a few tips for making fanfiction writing shine:

Fanfiction is a popular form of writing and one of the recognized genres for novels on NaNoWriMo. Yet, it’s also stereotyped as an inferior—some might call it silly—form of writing. While denigrating any genre as a whole is never a good idea, there are some common patterns in fanfiction that may contribute to this stereotype.

Of course, one of the popular stereotypes is that fanfiction is full of “Mary Sues”: overpowered, supposedly awesome self-insertion wish-fulfillment characters. I’ll skip that familiar topic and dive a little deeper into what’s behind it and what other fanfiction tropes can appear for similar reasons.

1. Give your characters some depth.

Fanfiction is almost by definition created by people who were touched by the original work enough to want to build something more out of its foundation. This can be a great fount for good story ideas: what if, what next, what about this character’s unexplored story, etc.

However, the writer’s personal love/hatred/whatever for the original story and characters can also lead to stories that are rather subjective. If you’re motivated by your strong feelings about a particular character, say, it may affect your writing them and others as fully rounded characters. A disliked character might be shown as one-dimensionally negative, a loved character as so loved by others that it’s not logical.

None of this is automatically bad by definition. Palpatine in Star Wars is one-dimensionally evil with style, leaving the hidden nuance and backstory for Darth Vader. Hilarious humorous stories may be built around characters reacting to another unrealistically.

However, it’s a good starting point to write your characters realistically. A story that doesn’t do that, and hasn’t carefully considered why not, may feel off to most readers.

2. Include elements that make your story’s plot interesting. 

There’s a more general phenomenon behind this that may turn people off to a lot of fanfiction. The writer is so often writing what they want to happen—maybe because of how they feel about the characters or some other aspect of the story, but not necessarily because it will make a compelling story. This is why wish-fulfillment, while not inherently bad, can be seen as something to be avoided: it may sacrifice other aspects of the story. It’s the opposite of being ready to “kill your darlings.”

3. Try something new!

Another consequence of this is that fanfiction writers may write a lot of the same kind of story—which others might get bored with sooner rather than later. Fanfiction communities may also collectively prefer kinds of stories and tropes that seem repetitive from an outside perspective.

4. Write what makes you happy. 

All of that said… it’s fine to do whatever you like.

There’s absolutely no rule saying you can’t do this or that, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. If you’d enjoy writing a total wish-fulfillment story, go for it. Even if it’s got a Mary Sue. The reward that you (and maybe a bunch of other fans, too) will like it is reason enough.

I would be hypocritical of me to offer any other kind of advice, anyway. In 2021, I wrote fanfiction for NaNoWriMo for the first time. And it was based on a work where one of the central themes is that anything that makes someone happy is valuable. I was even working on a sequel that makes the ending happier for the characters, even though I think the original ending was just right for the story.

It all depends on what you’re doing. You’re allowed to write for yourself or a particular community. Even if you want to aim for something bigger later, it’s all practice. The only thing is to know what you’re doing. So maybe if you actually want to focus on good characterization, you’ll be careful of some fanfiction tropes that might hinder it. Although, again, nothing automatically does.

Ville V. Kokko is a Ph.D. student and aspiring writer of both fiction and nonfiction living in Turku, Finland. He keeps getting short stuff published in smaller outlets all the time, but is working to make it bigger and publish whole books. He started participating in NaNoWriMo in 2010 and has, separately from that, written a few hundred thousand words of fanfiction. His Goodreads author page can be found here and his general blog here.

Top photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.