Why I'm Not Going to Read Your Fanfic
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| Title: | Why I’m Not Going to Read Your Fanfic |
| Creator: | Shana Mlawski |
| Date(s): | September 22, 2008 |
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| Fandom: | |
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| External Links: | Why I’m Not Going to Read Your Fanfic, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Why I’m Not Going to Read Your Fanfic is a 2008 blog post by Shana Mlawski, a young adult author.
It includes some fanwork and attribution.
It is part put-down, part how-to, part explanatory, and a small part joy. It is also an example of the continuum of acceptance and recognition of fanfic, especially by those in the Young Adult Author world.
Some Excerpts
Embarrassing admission of the day: I read fanfiction. It’s hard to tell over the Internet, but that word “read” is in the present tense. I read fanfiction. Today.
But only sometimes! Once or twice a year – at most, I swear! – I indulge in what I admit is a very guilty pleasure. Some of you watch Gossip Girl; some of you unironically enjoy The Chronicles of Riddick. Me, I read amateur versions of anime and children’s books.
99% of fanfiction is terrible, of course. 95% of anything is terrible and I added 4% because this is the Internet we’re talking about. But every so often I find a fanfic I can’t keep my eyes off. It might capture the feeling of the original source, or attack the premise from an interesting and new point of view. I get to see my favorite characters come back to life through the power of words. The puppeteer might be different, but, in the best fics, anyway, my beloved puppets are back and better than ever.
The trouble is that it is very difficult to find good fanfic. Sometimes I go dumpster diving at Fanfiction.net, but it just takes too long. Why in the world doesn’t that site have a “sort by rating” feature or “sort by number of reviews” feature, anyway? Seeing as I am too lazy to wade through the slush, as those in the publishing world like to say, I’m just going to have to make every fanfiction writer on the Internet better. That means you. In my spare time away from this blog I teach writing, so I do this more out of habit than anything else. And, yes, I’m going to make the assumption that stories that meet my personal tastes are objectively better stories than those that don’t.
You guys better step it up.
I will not read your fanfic if nothing happens on the first screen.
But, really, I will not read your fanfic if nothing happens in the first paragraph. Maybe even the first sentence if I’m feeling ungenerous.
I will not read your fic if early on a character does something he or she would never ever do.
It is out of character to have anyone send presents to Anton Chigurh.
... It is also out of character for him to express gratitude over said presents. FYI.
Let’s say you’re writing a fic based on a show in which the male and female leads spent the entire series yelling at each other. And they never got together even though the subtext was so there. So you say to yourself, I’m going to fix this situation. Those two characters are getting together, whether they like it or not.
I will not read your fic if has too much dialogue or too little dialogue.
This one is kind of personal, I think, and it has a lot to do with computer screens. When I open a fanfic on the Internet and find a huge block of text without a break for dialogue staring at me, I will run away scared. I know my eyes won’t be able to take it. If you have to have long expanses of narration without dialogue, put in paragraph breaks every so often. For my eyes.
I will probably not read your fanfic if you tell me in the blurb who is going to get together in the fic.
Everyone else in the world is probably against me on this one. I’m going to say it anyway. Why would I, your reader, want to read a fic when you’ve already told me the ending in your blurb? What happened to surprise, Internet? Can’t I learn while reading your fic that Luke and Han are going to have hot sex? Why do you have to spoil it before I even start reading?... [snipped] To prove that I’m not naïve, yes, I understand that people scan blurbs for pairings so they can jerk off to their favorite fanship with ease. You Internet folks are strange.
I will not read your fic if there is a Mary Sue in it.You’ve heard this rule before. Let me first tell you what I don’t mean. I don’t mean no original characters. I don’t mean no female original characters.
But I’ll be suspicious if your original character is the main character of the fic. Especially if it’s in the first person. And if the character is a teenage girl. Who is so great the hero falls in love with her.
Some Comments at the Post
[Gab]: Mlwaski, your level of cool just went up about fifty points. Even *I* am not bold enough to read fanfic more than once or twice a year. I have a lot of friends that do, and I’m so sending them a link to this. They’ll appreciate it marvelous much.I *am* curious as to what your limit is on the bizarre pairings. I once came across a slash fanfic involving Jonathan and Ardeth from _The Mummy_. Not all that out there, right? But I’ve also seen Draco and the Giant Squid… Ew. Hagrid and Dobby? Yikes. Buffy and Spike? Not so out there.
Oh, btw. One of the problems I have with those Smeyer books is they read like bad fanfiction. The main character is a Mary Sue and there is all this cheesy dialogue and NOTHING she does makes sense and they SPARKLE and oh my God it hurts my soul. Seriously, I’m surprised none of the authors on this site have tackled those books yet- unless you’re waiting for the movie? Meyer has been called “the next JKR” and I just… No.
[Matthew Belinkie]: But Shana, the “Crossover” rule is a point where you and I disagree. Crossover fan fiction interests me more than non-crossover fan fiction, if it’s done cleverly. Remind me to explain my theory about how Mary Poppins is actually a Hogwarts dropout.
[sarielthrawn]:This is great.But I have to disagree about the crossover stuff too.
The best fan fiction I ever read was a Star Wars/Star Trek (TNG) crossover.
Luke Skywalker meets Q? Han Solo fighting alongside Riker?
Who wouldn’t want to read that? I just wish I hadn’t lost the file.
[cathrl]: Excellent article. Just one quibble:“Why in the world doesn’t that site have a “sort by rating” feature or “sort by number of reviews” feature, anyway?”
Because that would put every 200 word chatspeak Twilight or Naruto fic, every Legomance, and every Marriage Law fic ahead of every single fic in every one of my fandoms. I’ve been posting on fanfiction.net since 2004 and I have 167 reviews total. Not because I can’t write, but because I write Battle of the Planets and Thunderbirds fic. Heard of them? No, thought not :)
Better fics don’t get better ratings – because the fics with the top ratings (on sites that have them) are the ones which are given five stars by every one of their fellow pairing-fans even if they were typed with one elbow while the author was asleep. They’re also the fics with the most reviews, since they appeal to the largest group of fanfic readers. Better fics are reviewed less often, and are far more likely to be given reviews and ratings of “good but not perfect.”
But I’m actually not the only person on the internet who thinks the biggest sign of a fic not worth reading is a pairing label – any pairing label? I feel better :)
[Tasia]: I’m glad to see that someone else enjoys indulging in (well-written!!!) fanfiction as much as I do :) I wholeheartedly agree with everything you’ve said! Funnily enough, I was inspired to join marching band by fanfiction. I read this amazing story in 8th grade (in retrospect, it might not be that amazing. My standards were much lower back then) that set my favorite characters in a high school marching band. I was sold. There just aren’t that many people I can admit that to!
[delphia2000]:I joined a few ‘fic recommendations’ type communities on LiveJournal just so I could get right to the good stuff without having to wade through the morass of fanficnet. They are very helpful and I’ve read some great stuff in my favorite fandoms. I also admit to enjoying a few of the ‘mock the badfic!’ communities but have yet to write anything worthy of their attention, dang it.
[Mike Weber]:Oh – incidentally – David Gerrold’s “The Trouble with Tribbles” started out as a “Star Trek” fanfic (and a Heinlein Knockoff – check out the chapter “Flat Cats Factorial” in his “The Rolling Stones) that Gerrold submitted over the transom and beat the odds…
[pronker]:Hi, a note to say that I enjoyed your essay on the ins and outs of FFN. I agree that the crossovers make the mind melt. As a girl at sleepovers in 1969, we friends wrote legal pad after legal pad of death-defying Star Trek stories, mainly h/c, which were no better nor worse that what is on the site. FFN is a great source of both fun reads and moan-evoking prose. And poetry! Oh, the poetry! And songfics. Ah, well, thanks for the interesting article and happy writing.
[Valandihr]: I just read your little article here and laughed heartily. You nailed some issues of fanfic nicely. But why “admit” that you read fanfic now and then? It’s not a crime. I love reading books, and I amuse myself by reading fanfic if I feel like it. But to be fair – an admission on my side. I write fanfic now and then. Why? Because it forces me to write in English. You can’t imagine what doing some dozen pages for a fanfic can do for your ability to write a foreign language. And there’s always some nice soul willing to betaread your stuff and tell you what you are doing wrong.
[Noobmagick]:I personally don’t read fanfics because some “fanfic” writers rely too much on their strict grip on grammar and the story hardly takes on a life of its own. Maybe because the characters are too familiar that it’s hard to bring it somewhere. If there’s something to say about such writers, I’d say “tell me something I don’t know”.