The Best Policies

It’s been a while. The past few months haven’t been exactly prime time for this project.

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There are a few keys to good writing, whether with original fiction or fan fiction, or just writing in general. I felt like going over a few of them in this write-up, which include honesty, integrity, and balance. I’m guessing that there are official/specific terms for these things, but I’m just going to call them as they are for now.

Honesty is key to producing good ideas. As a writer, you have to be honest with the audience and honest with yourself first and foremost. Why I mention this is simple: if you’re so busy trying to hide who you are, then it’ll show in how and what you write when you decide to make a script or story. I’ll explain. Let’s say you like…I dunno, a bit of fanservice every now and then with female characters. That’s not bad in and of itself. Some people might say it is, but whatever. You can’t please everyone. The moment you try to appease people and/or fool yourself into thinking that you’re not about that, it then starts to put a strain on your writing. It’s noticeable since you’re constantly trying to get around it and/or erase it. This isn’t the same as having self-control; this is straight up denial of what it is you want. If it’s a thing that you like, like maybe grappling hooks or something, include it in your story in some way and then take a look at the results. If you can see it’s goofy, remove it. That way, if you haven’t made that piece/chapter/etc. final yet, it’s out of your system. Creators need to do that, they need to vent and get stuff off of their chests once in a while. Now, if all you vent about is say, fanservice, then there’s probably a problem somewhere. But otherwise, you need to be honest about what it is you like or like to do. I realize what I’m saying, considering what fandom I’ve been talking about for the past while, but to improve the quality of the product you put out, no matter your level of skill, you need to be honest. And that might be the problem. People are so scared of being ignored that they just “go with the flow” so to speak and never really express themselves, only writing to appease the audience that is right here and right now. Many people whine about how they feel restricted by sites with some semblance of standards, like FanFiction.net, but in reality they’re not being creative in any sense.

This leads straight into the subject of integrity. Integrity is consistency in what you believe and what you’re about – it’s about sticking to what you say you are and how your represent yourself. Having integrity means that you don’t attempt to jump from one stance to another whenever it suits you. It means that you deliver on what you promise each time and that people can expect certain things from you. Integrity is also key to good writing on the whole. Establishing a style of writing, subject matter, and content means that you’re not jumping all over the place to make everyone happy. This doesn’t bar you from experimenting with different things – that’s very much justified if you want to grow as a writer. But having a set of principles that you know you can and will adhere to will help keep you in check and give some unspoken guidelines to your work. Integrity means being honest about the content you produce, your work ethic, thought processes, scheduling, and other things. It means that you understand both your strengths and limitations, and work within them until you are ready to make a change. Trying to just “accept” everything and not trying to grow because you believe that you’re not good enough or something isn’t being honest. Either you like writing and you want to get better, or you don’t and should just stop. Forcing the issue just makes you look and feel bad in the long run, no matter how much of a long masterwork or massive pile of stories you may produce.

Finally, we come to balance. Balance in this case means balancing what you love with what you put out – in essence, it is self-control. Having a healthy balance of content is probably the biggest thing that hampers fanworks as well as original works that are more or less inspired by existing franchises/subjects/etc. Most authors fall into the extreme directions for one reason or another. Commonly what you see is one extreme brought on by bored teenagers, which is that they try to bring in real world drama into a stylized, fictional world. That’s not to say that there can’t be ‘human’ reactions and emotional states, after all, it is humans that make these worlds after all, and we relate to characters by way of the humanity they show us. But taking your high school drama and shoving it onto Sonic, Amy, and Shadow to make a story doesn’t work. I would rather see high school fics banned altogether for how horrible most of them are, but since that won’t happen, I’ll just comment on the phenomenon. The issue isn’t necessarily that they are in high school, but it is that they are going through someone’s very human high school routine, complete with whining about teachers, simulated classes, lunchroom conversations, and so on. It’s not even charged with any flare that might come about as a result of the characters and their personalities. There’s rarely any witty banter at the lockers, nothing that has any action in it that isn’t scripted to the tune of a sports game, no twists that would be reasonable for a high school and couldn’t be carried out anywhere else on the planet, and there’s no real redeeming quality to the whole thing. Instead we get a smattering of Sonic the Hedgehog characters driving fancy cars and wearing expensive, brand name clothing with generic stock teenager personalities, made-for-tv issues, and inane plot twists and love triangles or squares or whatever. There is no balance between the new setting and the characters that are in them, or the information that we have gleaned from the series. It’s all just forced in and a mess. That is why high school fanfiction does not work. There’s no thought process, no balance, no anything. Just cardboard cutouts and projections onto existing characters.

The other end is people going too far into the fictional universe…so far that they don’t come up with anything new at all or actually expand on the universe they’re writing for. It’s recycling at its pinnacle, and these stories are worse off for it. Remember that this fanfiction that you’re writing. While it’s perfectly fine to draw from existing elements of franchises and stick to their roots, balance is still required to make the story work and be interesting. If all you’re doing is rehashing the same things over again, and not actually trying to bring a few new things out of the work, then what’s the point? Adaptations aren’t as bad, but they’re usually still overly safe. I say usually because a handful of authors have managed to pull off the adaptation angle, but they’re good writers at their cores, have an interest in their material, and are still very creative regardless. That is what makes those stories work. As for everyone else, they’re again running away from what their strengths are. And as a result, their writing suffers for it.

If you’re just starting out, it’s understandable to set out and try to find out yourself. I know the feeling because I’ve been there. My first story on FFN was an overly melodramatic story for the Megaman section. It took me about four or five years to actually put up a Sonic story, and even that was left on the backburner for a year before I really put myself into it. I had to put work into whatever I did until I reached that point. I rarely even wrote anything that was more than a single chapter, but I eventually broke into multiple chapter stories as well. Now I have one with almost 60 chapters at this point in time.

But above all of that, I was honest with what I could and could not do. It’s the first step you need to take if you want to be a good writer.

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Until the next time.