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.

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...

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.

…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 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-

You are not alone.