Fanficcers?

PLAN YOUR STORIES.

I know planning stories is hard, OMG. I know it takes time and you want to sit down and write. I know you feel you cannot wait to tell the entire world about your neat and totally original new character and how blisteringly important she is to the entire canonical cast of your favorite show, but if you seriously expect anyone else to want to read your story? And, more to the point, to enjoy it?

PLAN THE DAMN THING.

I mean that. And, of course, being as I am who I am I'm now going to explain quite why this is so important. Are you sitting comfortably? Given my tendency to teal, you probably better should be. Right then.

Fanthing authors, allow me to point something out that. Every scene - yes, every single blessed scene - in a story should move the plot forward somehow. Even scenes that are primarily there for character establishment need some kind of wider purpose apart from that. If it doesn't have that, it's just filler.

Yes, I know that some things you feel should be there for the purposes of establishing character - but you simply do not need to spend as much time on character establishment in a fanfic as you would in an original story. We all know who Han Solo is. Unless you can come up with a way to do this that serves to move the plot along - talking about Han Solo, for example, through the perspective of a new character who's never met him before in a way that also serves to tell us something about the new character - you don't need it. Cut it.

If you can't establish character and move the plot forward at the same time, then your writing is underperforming.

I know how easy it is to make this mistake: I've made it myself. Doesn't stop it being a mistake. I used to think that establishing the character of established characters was a good idea, and the first draft of the first chapter of a fic I'm planning to rewrite bears testament to it. When I sat down to plan the redraft, these scenes were the very first things I decided to cut. You know why? Because they're pointless, which makes them boring, and they waste time I need to be using to effectively kickstart the plot. They don't serve to go anywhere or do anything but introduce the readers to characters who - and this is the clincher - they know already. Because if they didn't know the characters already they wouldn't care about my fanfic.

The end result is that I hate the first chapter of this fanfic as it stands. It seriously underperforms. It dwells on trivia. It spins its wheels and leaves me scrambling, in the second chapter, to find a way to tell the regulars about the plot I'm trying to unfold when I could have used my space more wisely in the first chapter and actually shown it unfolding. Oh, there are worse first chapters out there - I've read them. But this is still objectively not a good opening because it could and should be doing so much more.

Stories are made or broken on their openings. If your first chapter underperforms or, worse, doesn't go anywhere? If it serves to do nothing but - essentially - show us an OC walking into a room, turning slowly on the spot then giving a sassy hip bump and saying 'dream on, boys'? People are not going to read on.

They're not going to read on because you haven't given them a reason to.

If your first chapter is all about starting the story and starting it well, after that the pressure's not off. You've establishes the momentum, now you've got to keep it going - more than just 'keep it going' thanks to a little something commonly known as rising action. You still can't afford to waste time on scenes that go nowhere or have absolutely no purpose aside from 'getting to know the characters better'. Writing a story is not a zero-sum game. Good writing doesn't draw a distinction between establishing character or moving the plot along: it does both.

In practice, what does that mean? It means that, unless something happens during the scene in question that would somehow serve to further the goals of the actual story, nobody cares about scenes which focus solely on any or all of the following:

• Characters eating together and bickering about who drank the last of the OJ.
  
• Characters trawling the nearest mall - story location be damned - for awesome new outfits or presents.
  
• Characters (especially if not from a school-based series!) attending school or college classes.
  
• Characters going swimming, clubbing, skating or otherwise passing the time doing nothing very plot-relevant.
  
• Characters sitting around ruminating on their own tragic pasts of tragedy.
  
• Characters (if OCs) sitting around talking about the regulars and how sexy they are.
  
• Characters (if canon) sitting around talking about the resident OCs and how hot or awesome they are.

If, in short, at the end of a scene the story arc you're describing is in the exact same place that it was at the beginning of it, that scene is dead weight. I don't care how much fun you the fanficcer would find it to write about your characters doing any or all of the following. This isn't your personal wish-fulfillment fantasy life you're describing, nor are you writing your main character's blog.

You're telling a story, or you should be. That means that unless something is actually going to happen while the characters are at the mall that somehow furthers the goals of the story you're trying to tell, nobody in the audience goddamn well cares that the cast went shopping and someone bought an awesome new dress that they look, like, totally hot in. Have someone break up with their boyfriend, or hit by a car. Have the cast taken hostage by crazed robbers or have the mall explode. But for God's sake don't just have them go shopping and expect your readers to be fascinated, because they won't be.

Yes, I know sometimes people have shopping montages in films and nobody complains - but this is because films are a visual medium. You're working in text, and these things don't work at all in text only. If something is only fun because of the visuals, it won't work in plaintext.

This isn't to say you can't have your characters do innocuous things. Of course you can. It just shouldn't be all they're doing.

It helps to know who your characters are as well. This applies to OCs as well as to the regulars - and, if you're going to change details of the regulars' pasts, you need to know exactly what has been changed and why it matters well before you sit down and start to write. You cannot make backstory up on the fly. It never works.

This is particularly important if you're going to attempt some kind of a dramatic reveal related to aspects of a character's past. You cannot introduce that aspect of their past a paragraph or so before the reveal shows up for the fairly simple reason that nobody is going to care. Say the bad guy is revealed to have killed an OC's lover. Nobody in the audience is going to give a damn about your OC's poor plot contrivance of a partner if they only found out that the OC in question even had a dead lover that they were totally devoted to and are utterly grief-stricken over five minutes before the villain revealed that Aha! It Was I! They're going to see it for what it is: a transparent ploy for their sympathy, and an equally transparent attempt to ratchet the drama up another notch or two by Making It Personal. They never heard of this person. Why should they care?

If something or someone was that personally significant to one of your characters, it or they should have come up earlier. Your character, unless they are very closed-mouthed, cannot have a dead lover they were devoted to but totally forgot to mention any time before it was dramatic for them to do so.

(Incidentally, this why claiming an OC is a regular's former lover or beloved younger sister almost never works very well. But I digress.)

In short? You need a plan. You need to know where you're going before you try to go there, so you don't end up getting lost in some weird back double and realizing that the more thoughtful portion of your passengers all got out ten miles back (or, in some cases, before you even left town). If you know where you're going and the stops you'll have to take along the way, you're far more likely to get to your destination - and, for that matter, find that at least some of the passengers made it all the way and enjoyed every minute of it.

A story is not just a sweet little choo choo train of loosely-related scenes focusing on the same characters and coupled together in vaguely chronological order. A story consists of a plot, which in turn consists of an opening, then rising action leading to a climax. It doesn't matter if the action in question refers to a Tango and Cash-style sequence of increasingly large explosions or a boy meeting a girl under a silvery moon, just as long as it refers to something.

If you don't have that, you're not even trying to tell a story and you have no right to presume that the rest of us are going to be even remotely interested.