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You know what really dills my pickle?
Fanfiction writing guides.
What is it that possesses people to write these exercises in futility and uselessness? I swear, every single fic archive I've visited (with the exception of very large, multi-fan archives like ff.net and AO3) feels the need to provide a 'Fanfiction tips' page, usually written by the archive admin or one of its mods, usually with a focus on ideas that just don't work and some simple grammatical guidelines.
This bothers me to no end.
For one thing, nearly all of the grammar rules are listed are limited to the good ol' "Using the wrong your/you're" or "Using the the wrong they're/their/there" which, while helpful, is certainly not the end all of common grammatical errors commonly found in fanfic. I almost never see sections about proper subject/object pronoun use, even though it's just as common an error as the your/you're/they're/their/there confusion. Or there will be a part where the guide writer complains about comma abuse, but will only offer 'don't be afraid of using periods! :Db' as advice. Why not discuss other forms of punctuation, like semi-colons, colons, dashes, and so on? Or the different ways in which a sentence can be structured?
I suspect many of the guide writers don't have a particularly deep grasp on grammar rules in the first place, and harp on the obvious, easy to pick out and easy to correct mistakes because they are not confident about their own knowledge of other rules - or they are not aware of other rules in the first place, so they do not discuss them.
Most annoying of all, sometimes guide writers don't even mention how to correct a mistake. I have read at least two 'guides' that essentially said "Make sure you're using the right form of your/you're/they're/their/there" and THAT WAS IT. No follow up on methods writers can use to determine if they are using the correct word or not. HOW VERY HELPFUL.
Grammar fail aside, what really bothers me about these guides is the oh-so-useful 'how and what to write' sections. Oh, they're never titled 'How and What to Write,' and any guide of this sort is littered with "...but anything can be great if it's written well!" caveats, but let's be honest: for the most part, guide writers aren't writing a guide so much as an extended rant about genres or ideas they don't like.
(Kind of like this post. GO HYPOCRISY!)
Nearly every guide of this sort will 'warn' ficcers away from certain genres, namely crossovers and Mary Sues/Gary Stus/whatthefuckever they're calling poorly written original characters these days. This will be followed by an exhaustive list of why crossover suck (too absurd! confusing! nonsensical! too many plots at once!) and how to tell if your character is a Mary Sue. (purple-hued body parts that have no business being purple! names that sound like a bunch of gemstones scrambled together with fairy dust! can slice, dice and make julienne fries!)
Which...misses the point, somewhat. Knowing what aspects of a genre/character type people find most annoying can be useful, but a 'list of annoying things' is not particularly enlightening. Yes, crossovers are often absurd, confusing, and have too much going on at once, but so do a lot of other fics, in all genres - saying you should avoid the crossover genre completely isn't encouraging or helpful to someone who really, really wants to write a crossover.
As for original characters - frankly, making a list of superficial character traits and declaring that, if your character has none of these traits they are 'good' and some/all of these traits they are 'bad' is not helpful either. PROTIP: people don't like Mary Sues because they're boring and they make the characters around them boring - it's not because they are usually sparkly and lovely. It's not the purple eyes that are the problem, it's the fact that purple eyes are used as the equivalent of painting I'M SPECIAL!!! on your character's forehead. The Mary Sue guides treat the symptoms and not the causes, to make a clumsy metaphor.
These guides end up being counterproductive - they're generally too vague to be helpful, and their tendency to focus on what goes wrong with little attention to what one can do to improve leads people to second-guess themselves without giving them a way to fix their problems. It encourages people to stop writing what they want and what interests them, or to write fearfully. NOT COOL, INTERNETS.
TL;DR: If you are going to write a guide, people of the internets, take the time to write something truly useful, encouraging, and helpful, instead of writing a rant about common fanfic/amateur writing mistakes and labeling it a guide.
Fanfiction writing guides.
What is it that possesses people to write these exercises in futility and uselessness? I swear, every single fic archive I've visited (with the exception of very large, multi-fan archives like ff.net and AO3) feels the need to provide a 'Fanfiction tips' page, usually written by the archive admin or one of its mods, usually with a focus on ideas that just don't work and some simple grammatical guidelines.
This bothers me to no end.
For one thing, nearly all of the grammar rules are listed are limited to the good ol' "Using the wrong your/you're" or "Using the the wrong they're/their/there" which, while helpful, is certainly not the end all of common grammatical errors commonly found in fanfic. I almost never see sections about proper subject/object pronoun use, even though it's just as common an error as the your/you're/they're/their/there confusion. Or there will be a part where the guide writer complains about comma abuse, but will only offer 'don't be afraid of using periods! :Db' as advice. Why not discuss other forms of punctuation, like semi-colons, colons, dashes, and so on? Or the different ways in which a sentence can be structured?
I suspect many of the guide writers don't have a particularly deep grasp on grammar rules in the first place, and harp on the obvious, easy to pick out and easy to correct mistakes because they are not confident about their own knowledge of other rules - or they are not aware of other rules in the first place, so they do not discuss them.
Most annoying of all, sometimes guide writers don't even mention how to correct a mistake. I have read at least two 'guides' that essentially said "Make sure you're using the right form of your/you're/they're/their/there" and THAT WAS IT. No follow up on methods writers can use to determine if they are using the correct word or not. HOW VERY HELPFUL.
Grammar fail aside, what really bothers me about these guides is the oh-so-useful 'how and what to write' sections. Oh, they're never titled 'How and What to Write,' and any guide of this sort is littered with "...but anything can be great if it's written well!" caveats, but let's be honest: for the most part, guide writers aren't writing a guide so much as an extended rant about genres or ideas they don't like.
(Kind of like this post. GO HYPOCRISY!)
Nearly every guide of this sort will 'warn' ficcers away from certain genres, namely crossovers and Mary Sues/Gary Stus/whatthefuckever they're calling poorly written original characters these days. This will be followed by an exhaustive list of why crossover suck (too absurd! confusing! nonsensical! too many plots at once!) and how to tell if your character is a Mary Sue. (purple-hued body parts that have no business being purple! names that sound like a bunch of gemstones scrambled together with fairy dust! can slice, dice and make julienne fries!)
Which...misses the point, somewhat. Knowing what aspects of a genre/character type people find most annoying can be useful, but a 'list of annoying things' is not particularly enlightening. Yes, crossovers are often absurd, confusing, and have too much going on at once, but so do a lot of other fics, in all genres - saying you should avoid the crossover genre completely isn't encouraging or helpful to someone who really, really wants to write a crossover.
As for original characters - frankly, making a list of superficial character traits and declaring that, if your character has none of these traits they are 'good' and some/all of these traits they are 'bad' is not helpful either. PROTIP: people don't like Mary Sues because they're boring and they make the characters around them boring - it's not because they are usually sparkly and lovely. It's not the purple eyes that are the problem, it's the fact that purple eyes are used as the equivalent of painting I'M SPECIAL!!! on your character's forehead. The Mary Sue guides treat the symptoms and not the causes, to make a clumsy metaphor.
These guides end up being counterproductive - they're generally too vague to be helpful, and their tendency to focus on what goes wrong with little attention to what one can do to improve leads people to second-guess themselves without giving them a way to fix their problems. It encourages people to stop writing what they want and what interests them, or to write fearfully. NOT COOL, INTERNETS.
TL;DR: If you are going to write a guide, people of the internets, take the time to write something truly useful, encouraging, and helpful, instead of writing a rant about common fanfic/amateur writing mistakes and labeling it a guide.
