Subject: Additionally...
Author:
Posted on: 2012-12-21 05:11:00 UTC
Thou Shalt Not Write Giant Block Paragraphs With Multiple Speakers And No Spaces Between Punctuation Marks.
Fortunately that one never saw the Internet...
So, way back in 7th Grade, eight years ago (My God, has it really been that long?) I wrote a Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus fic. For those of you unfamiliar with the canon, the protagonist, Vincent Valentine, is already borderline-Sue. Tragic Past, 133t powaz, red eyes, Really Cool Weapons, nigh immortality, etc.
So yeah, fic about a near-Sue, written by a seventh grader. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
At the end of the year, the notebook I'd been writing it in disappeared. Like, freaking vanished. I've been looking for it for years. Because, like most other people, I tend to remember only the good things about my past writing. I wanted to find it so I could continue it.
So yesterday, I finally found the notebook. Overjoyed, can't wait to read thi-
...
.......
Oh sweet Eru, what have I done? Purple Prose, rampant Sue-ishness, scenes stolen from Halo: Combat Evolved, shipping that made NO sense at all, and general horribleness. Don't get me wrong: it's actually fairly well-written. No SPaG issues, no awkward sentences, decent dialogue...but My God. It's depressingly bad.
I think I'll keep it, for use as a guide to the Thou Shalt Nots of writing. If whatever I'm working on at the moment starts resembling it, it's *BLAM!*-ing time.
I honestly have no idea why I'm posting this. It's kind of on a whim, actually. Make of it what you will, I suppose.
Thou Shalt Not 'Dumb Down' the Language in Thy Fic. For in Doing so, Thou Insulteth Thy Reader's Intelligence, and Verily, Doing So Maketh Thee Sound Preachy and Patronizing.
Thou Shalt Not Name Thine Characters After Thyself, For Doing So Inevitably Leads to Self-Insert Sueishness, As Well As General Fail.
Thou Shalt Not Place Badly-Labelled Author's Notes in the Middle of thine Fic, Lest Thou be Cast into Iniquity.
Thou Shalt Not Create Ships that Make No Sense, For We Do Not Do That.
(Should we make a Wiki article about the Thou Shalt Nots of writing fanfiction?)
Have I written badfic when I was young? Well, yes. Did it get published? Hell no. I do remember writing a Red Alert 2 badfic for a creative writing lesson back in elementary school, but I think I threw it away last time we moved house. Or the time before.
To the point that I considered making Agent!Sergio Turbo go on a mini-mission spree to kill his alternate universe versions... as they were all self-insert Stus. Blatant ones too.
So, here's a couple of Thou Shall Not
- Thou shall not make Mickey Mouse the mentor figure of your OC protagonist if all the other characters are from anime. (Don't ask.)
- Thou shall not make your character into an improbable detective who has to save the Cartoon World from an even more improbable supervillain.
- Thou shall not give your character improbable stun laser weapons to try to put together "cool" and "non lethal".
- Thou shall not give your character an absurdingly powerful car that makes you need to upgrade the antagosists' ones too in order to make a chase scene longer than fifteen seconds.
Improbable seems to be a favorite word in your "Thou shalt nots."
Hey, I'm making my prospective agents go back and spork a story I actually once submitted to a school contest way back in sixth grade. (No wonder I only got honorable mention for having the longest and most involved story - the sue was terrible.) I guess my agents aren't really versions of those characters, so it doesn't get quite so meta, though. :)
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2322724/Qwizbo There, take a gander. There's five fics there, and only one of them is complete. Not coincedentally, it's the only one I'm even remotely proud of. But I had major plans for all of them, and I keep wanting to write something new someday. Who knows? Maybe I will...
A lot of the worst stuff from grades 5-8 was wiped out in the great hard drive crash the year before I went to high school. I didn't know fanfiction existed until I was 18, so... yeah, my original fiction was terrible enough to make up for that. I just started early enough that none of my peers ever noticed, and had limited internet access until I was fifteen anyway, so I never discovered fanficiton or fictionpress until much later.
However, I have a lot of Thou Shalt Nots
- Thou shalt not assign a seperate color and font to indicate the thoughts of each character.
- Thou shalt not designate clip art to show transitions between points of view.
- Thy character shall not have been orphaned, abandoned or disowned of more than one set of parents or parental figures.
- Thou shalt not romanticize Epilepsy. (Yeah, that one makes me cringe worst - I don't really think I understood it at the time other than that it made for medical drama that didn't have to be life-threatening... no, wait, I'd just read The Last Book in the Universe, and I was dumb. [and twelve, that helped too.])
- Thou shalt not write original characters that can be summed up as "A blend of Sabriel, Ged, and Gandalf," nor shall you exceed more than one magically pulled from thine pants new power per person.
- Thou shalt not spend eight chapters cataloging all the obviously alien furniture in a house in order to establish that the occupant can travel between worlds. (In my defense, this story was almost a complete fanfic of Myst, except without any reference to the main plotline of that series, because I'd only ever played Riven.)
- Thou shalt not defeat laser guns with tinfoil suits, ray-bans, sheilds made of trashcan lids, and a slip'n'slide.
- Thou shalt not introduce mystical species that have no reason other than to be a conveniently intelligent pet of your main character.
... I'm sure if I actually dug that stuff up I'd have more, but...
You just nailed my three favorite series. My day, it has been made.
That one's not actually so bad, the basic concept got taken back out, brushed off, and forms the foundation of one of the stories I'm currently working on. It just follows more logically than it used to now, really...
I tried writing a story once, when I was in Year Nine. The plot was tacked together from whatever I thought was cool, the characters had no depth and the whole thing was completely and utterly sad. I'm so glad I abandoned it.
There was this one, okay three, okay three OCs and two corrupted next gen canons. In one story. And that's without mentioning Morgana's angsty backstory, Jen's telepathic manipulation skills, Sebastian's Heroic BSOD at being Sorted into Ravenclaw, Morgana's insane skillz with the shield charm, James Sirius Potter owning the invisibility cloak, Scorpius' mad potions skillz, the fact that they were all Animagi or the time travel. Oh and the fact they were all basically in one big polygamous relationship.
It was about this time I discovered a Mary Sue litmus test and having failed spectacularly hid that notebook from the light of day.
Including me, and it's so horrible, that is painful to look at.
I completely understand how you feel.
-huggles-
If you guys really want me to, I can upload for your viewing... pleasure???... my very first crossover fanfic.
Oooh yeah. Nope.
It'd be interesting to have a yardstick to measure my old story by. Go for it.
I really like how it's in Comic Sans.
Snarky commentary provided by a post-Blurring House Lines Lily, which was about three years ago, so...
The actual fic was written when Lily was in fifth grade. Yeah. Three years from this she joins the PPC. Oops.
All the same, if nobody else has claimed it, you may just end up responsible for it. :)
Hmmm... I think I read the first three Charlie Bone books, but I'd always been morbidly curious to find a crossover between Charlie Bone and Harry Potter. And hey, your OC's are no worse than mine were at that age, and I only wrote original ficiton. (Primarily because I had limited internet access and didn't know that fanfiction was a thing...)
At least the poetry rhymed - mine sucked, much worse than that, consistently until I was about nineteen.
Analgesia? *Snickers.* Well, could be worse. You should see what I named characters, way back when... and I totally second the never name them after birds thing. That was on beyond stupid.
I had much worse OC's when I was in fifth and sixth grade - so much worse, in fact, that I got more than 190 points on the litmus test. (That's almost twice as many as Twilight [when my friends and I went through that we took some of the vampire ~symbolism~ to it's logical conclusion, though,] and more than three times as many as anything else I've tested, mine or anyone else's. 0.o )
WTF did I just read? Oo
But I loved your comments xD
They were awesome :P
Oh, I too have written horrendous pieces of literary work when I was younger ..
In 5th grade, a Twilight fanfic for God's sake! (About a Mary Sue detective trying to prove the existence of vampires ._.)
And a year latter a HP one, though written better than the former badfic, was a Mary self-insert with a ridiculous plot. Thank god I never finished it.
It was about the lost daughter of Harry Potter, stolen from birth by ex-death eaters, who was raised by muggles until her 12 birthday(12!?), when a wizard brings her and her best friend a Hogwarts letter.
WTF.
Can... Can I MST this? There's so much beautiful failure here (no offense)...
So much potential hilarity here.
Riese, bring Kilroy along so we can torment have an insanely awesome reunion-majiggy with him and Caroline.
Lily, of course you can help MST your own badfic. And then maybe we can all MST female!Neji together. :D
Also I think most of the hilarity comes from how I couldn't stick to one plotline and thus jumped around plotlines like woah. The end result kinda looks like Gollum on psychedelic drugs.
Also, the comments about the Charlie Bone/LotR/HP sequel are absolutely true. That was basically the plotline of the sequel, if I had actually ever gotten around to it.
Can I help you?
…Kidnap characters and force them to go to your high school and fall in twoo wuv with you and your friends' blatant self-inserts.
…Or attempt to parody Sues without the writing skills to do it (which leads to it backfiring and creating a Sue).
I have done both of them. Thank the Powers That Be that I didn't have a ff.net account when I wrote the first and that I realized the second was a Sue in time, so neither was ever posted.
For this very reason I still have yet to delete my old Happy Tree Friends fanfics. They're complete crap, and I still die a little inside whenever I get an email alert saying someone's favorited it.
I think I deleted mine after I found the PPC, plus I cleaned out most of the copypaste junk on my profile. I hadn't even looked at it in years, since I'd just used the account for commenting... Wish I'd kept some record, though, even if they were short they could've been interesting for missions.
I wrote a handful, but they never got beyond (quite short) first chapters.
So, are we doing a Shall Not of writing in general, or can we toss in specific fandoms?
Thou Shalt Not overdescribe thine characters, unless thine description beith plot-relevant. If thine character's emerald eyes, glittery tank-tops, or flawless skin play no part in the progression of thine plot, thy description shalt be deletedeth. And nay, thy use of descriptors to explain thine character's True Love doeseth not counteth as a part to play.
Thou Shalt Not over-reference other works, especially when thine has only seen the first episodes (I once did something where I described a process as 'basically the beginning of Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles' opening sequence. *shudder*)
Thou Shalt Not use the 'makeover' sublot, especially if thine makeovered character is A) already attractive B) of a character to object to said makeovering C) is directly antagonistic to the makeovering party. Neither shall thine characters kidnap the makeover-ee or in any other way disrespect personal boundaries because that gets awkward and Unfortunate-Implications-y real quick, unless you're aiming for that sort of thing, in which case proceed with utmost caution... eth.
Thou Shalt Not overuse thou, thine, or similar Ye Olde Butcherde Englishe, unless thy be parodying said writing style or if a character speaks canonically in such a way (see: Princess Luna). Should thou be writing a character for which this be appropriate, thou must researcheth the proper grammar. Thou shalt not approach writing in this style without a significant amount of research into said writing style.
...Their Gender.
To this day, I cannot bear to write fanfics about Neji Hyuga. I really should have waited to see an episode where he got to say a few lines before trying to. You haven't lived until you've written badfic that accidentally turns your future favorite male character into a chick...
Also, Thou Shalt Not Write Thy Character Into A Four-Way Love Shape With Characters She Would Logically Hate. That one got ugly...
And Thou Shalt Not Name Thy Character After GEMSTONES. Nor BIRDS. Nor SENSATIONS. Nor ANYTHING ELSE THAT INDICATES A SUE, EVEN IF THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT SHE TURNS INTO BY CHAPTER THREE. -weeps-
If I ever find my (hopefully lost to the Internet) Naruto badfic, I will slaughter it gleefully.
...
Also: RIESE. -tacklehug-
Thou Shalt Not Write Giant Block Paragraphs With Multiple Speakers And No Spaces Between Punctuation Marks.
Fortunately that one never saw the Internet...
I didn't learn to separate paragraphs until after I'd written maybe two notebooks full of fanfiction. Luckily, I didn't have an account back then.
It's painful to look at them.
Oh so painful.
What the hell was I thinking!?
Who are you asking? Because if you're asking me, I would but for the fact that my beloved laptop is dead. I'm really hoping I get a new one for Christmas, but until then, I'm stuck on my phone.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to transfer them to a new computer. It all friends on whether the cord to the new one (if I get a new one this Christmas) will work with my old computer...
You are not alone.