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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35790
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35790
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Do not post online as you write it; even most professional writers do not like their first drafts, and IMO a beginner should never like their first draft, so you are just inviting criticism of something you would never actually try to call a finished product. I hope that is the case.

Next, review the other fan fiction in your same fictional universe, and see what is received well. What are people responding to?

Is it good writing? Classify it. For example,

Is it wish fulfillment (e.g. consummation of some implied relationship, explicit sexual content, resolution of some crisis not yet resolved in the fictional universe)?

Is it an actual new adventure that does NOT change the characters?

Perhaps the most important skill you can develop as a writer is being able to read **your own** writing as if it were written by a stranger. You absolutely cannot depend on other people to critique what is wrong with your writing, you must learn to do it yourself.

The easiest way to do that is to use such fan-sites the **opposite** of the way nearly everyone uses them! Use them to train yourself to find **specific, exact** things you do and do not like in other people's fiction. Narrow it down, to a "formula" you can generalize and copy when you do like it, and also to something you can generalize so you can recognize something you don't like if you should do it in your own fiction.

Some of those generalized problems you can find here on this site, with some advice on how to overcome them. How to show don't tell, or avoid walls of text, or avoid world-builder's disease, or purple prose, or avoid deus ex machina problems. Others can be your own; based on just writing you don't like when you realize they are bad _in the same way_ in some sense, so figure out what that same way is!

It is important to become a diagnostician in this endeavor, so you can diagnose your own failures and not rely on strangers to do it for free. Be happy when you read something awful, it is a chance to find something obviously wrong. Don't just discard it, read it as many times as it takes to say "THIS is the big problem with this, THIS is why it makes no sense!" Or why the characters sound stupid, or like the author is forcing them into unrealistic actions (for those characters), or whatever.

It is much harder to pinpoint exactly why good writing is good (although you can begin by finding the line with the most impact and seeing how the author set that up to HAVE impact). It may be good just because there is nothing wrong with it! More likely, it has some poetry or imagery that appeals to you, and it is good to try and figure that out, too.

There are many other things to learn. How long sentences are in prose, versus how long they are in dialogue. How many details to provide in a description of a person / room / scene / landscape. How to effectively (or ineffectively) show various emotions; love, lust, anger, hatred, sexual excitement, joy, melancholy, relief, fear, terror, worry, etc. You may find 10 bad ways for every good one, but you will learn something.

The best approach for a beginner is to read analytically enough that you can refine away everything _wrong_ with your writing, and leave something that at least doesn't inspire hatred, and if you are imaginative in the bargain, people may like it a lot.

Original score: 7