@@Notfallkaramellthis is why I ALWAYS give constructive feedback if I have it, if I see they are open or requesting of it. Because I am also open and requesting of it. In every end note I ask for feedback, and I rarely get it. Which is fine. But I always do the favor of giving it if I have it.
@@Notfallkaramell I've sometimes saw fics from obvious reasons grammar mistakes I want to point out, others which want to get to the point of there story so fast they skip any emotional impact, and more recently read one that was so verbose that if you deleted half the descriptive words there wouldn't be an act substance. A thing most these fics had is that the user would moderate who could post, it just told me they don't accept feedback.
It's rude to make comments criticising people for something minor like spelling, fanfiction is a homemade gift, you don't complain about homemade gift unless upu desperately need to lose the high ground.
I had a friend that legit drew the operator symbol on his wrist. And was completely confident in that he was a proxy. And so one time he got a piece of notebook paper, and drew the operator symbol on it with a message that said: "If you recognize this symbol you're one of us..." And a very childishly gorey fanfiction paper clipped to the back. And by God I was in love with this boy holy fuck
Writing "farting" out the door rather than "darting", and then publishing it. I didn't realise until someone pointed out the flatulence right after the funeral divorce. (The character got divorced in a funeral for their own son. Major sad.)
SAMEEEE. I keep on thinking "I want to write a fic about this", AND THEN I NEVER DO! Sometimes I even think about the wording I want to use in certain scenes, even the start of it, but I _just. don't. write it!_
This might seem like a small issue but, making a character who cannot see colors (achromatopsia) describe a character only by what color they were. On multiple occasions.
Lmao. I have an entire fantasy race that can't see colors and I definitely try to make sure I only use light and dark. This is also reflected in the set design as well.
4:10 I actually respect the fact they made their intruding author notes bold, because sincerely, it’s easier to mentally skip them if they aren’t in the same lettering as the story
I think my worst mistake was making the chapters too short. It also had no plot when I started it and the plot that it had later was rushed and done awfully. The villain wanted to kill celebrities that I (the mc) was a big fan of and I decided to stop him by myself.
when i was writing the backstory for my creepypasta OC as a child, i was aware of all the overused tropes and took note of them. (getting bullied, wearing a hoodie, etc.). i ended up giving her those tropes anyways. pretty based of little me tbh.
Oh man. I thought I was sooooooo much better than other CRP fans because my OC was neither bullied at school, nor wore a hoodie. She did, however, have a shitty stepmother, wore a stupidly long scarf, had red eyes and was a teenager who killed with a kitchen knife. I am so glad that I dropped her into the trash where she belongs. Granted, I used aspects of her appearance (straight dark hair, rosy complexion) for my current CRP OC like five or six years later. I guess that means she was in the spare parts room of my brain and not the actual garbage disposal.
Now that I think about it, my first fanfic was when I was 12 in English class creative writing and I wrote like half the first Avengers movie except they were all dogs. Nick Fury was a Scottie dog. That’s all I remember.
I bet Steve Rogers/Captain America was a golden retriever, and Tony Stark/Iron Man was either a German shepherd, a Doberman pinscher, or a great dane, LOL. XD.
Oh God, I was given the option of writing an additional chapter of a book to serve as my report. My poor English teacher had to read my imitation of Jules Verne.
Oh man, this took me back to a memory that made me cringe myself into the fetal position. Age nine or ten, shared the Sonic X, self insert fanfiction I wrote in my little pocket notebook - with - my - f a t h e r- My soul will never be clean-
Your father was likely having a grand old time seeing your child brain do its thing and you have nothing to worry about. At age 9-10, you can perceive media, but not always absorb media. That is a great concoction for absolutely unhinged combos that adults are too hung up about logical details to even conceive of.
At least you showed it to him willingly. Do you know what it's like to have your mom approach you one day about the lego ninjago fanfiction your little 10-12 self had been writing for a few weeks and tell you that she'd read a chapter of it before she'd even started talking to you about it, and the way that she found it was because you'd been posting it on this website that you were supposed to be using primarily for education, but you were also using it for the social aspect it had, which included a "newspaper” function that let users post their stories on the site, which, little did you know at the time, notified the parents who signed their kids up to the site whenever their kid posted something to the newspaper? And let them read it? Which meant for the whole time you'd been writing and posting the fic your mom had been getting emails about it with full access to each chapter, and you didn't know? ...And of course the chapter she just HAD to have read was the one that you dedicated to your online friend who was inactive on the site and had a really heartfelt personal message to them at the end of the chapter...? Yeah...I don't know what that's like either...
@@freshcupofangst While I don’t know what that exact memory is like, I do know what it’s like to have your mom discover your fanfiction and read it aloud to the household to shame you about it... Kindrid spirits, my friend-
@@kiera6326 A difference in understanding the nuances and messages in the unspoken story telling. What might be obvious clues to an adult audience about the narrative is not always so obvious to someone who has never encountered it before. There's a metaphor for death in the cowboy riding off into the sunset that genre savvy people see so often, it's cliché at this point. Some kid seeing a western for the first time? Right over their head. They have no clue and might invent their own meaning for it, or decide it means nothing at all.
When I was like... 8 years old? I wrote a Warrior Cats fanfic. Before finishing the first book. Wich, among other things, resulted in me naming a character Sandstorm, and then being absolutely devastated when I read the second book and Sandpaw _became Sandstorm_
My biggest mistake was not planning it and entirely going off the initial idea 😭 nowadays I have very detailed checklists for each chapter so I can actually tell the story I want to tell properly
Huh. You must be great at writing stories. I get a craving for something I want to read, find that it doesn't exist, and then daydream it onto a page. The fun part is reading it and revising the scenes. I pretty much just write disjointed scenes that I want to see. I have one framing device that mildly works with that: it's just an older version of the character reflecting on their past. I remember the past nonlinearly, so it somewhat excuses the nonlinear storytelling.
i tried doing this but it just got insanely stressful for me 😭 so i kind of try to wing it while also keeping a general outline of what i want to do in my head
When I was 12 I wrote a not-the-best self-insert pokemon fanfic. My biggest mistake was telling my cousin about it. She called me cringe for liking childish things and I was so embarrassed that I stopped liking pokemon. I found it a while ago and I still look at it fondly.
If anyone criticizes you for liking what you enjoy, remind them that there are plenty of adults who like "childish things"! Artists, animators, authors, illustrators, mascots, employees at public places meant for all ages, etc!
Making it out of obligation, not because I wanted to. I'm autistic, and so growing up my parents hired a bunch of people to support my learning, and for some reason these people were REALLY fixated on getting 9-year-old me to write. The first thing I wrote was a terrible "stranded on an island story", and then when I was told to write another, I decided to write fanfic for this Dragon City knockoff I was into. I never finished it because I had no idea where to take the plot, and didn't enjoy writing it at all lol
Probs wanted to be part of your success story if you DID have knack for writing and got famous. Like an “i was there from the BEGINNING! I’m the one who PUSHED them to start writing!“ thing.
exact same for me, except it was in school with like 5 different teachers and teachers aids trying to force me into it and instead my 8 year old autistic ass started getting overwelmed and just...ran out from the classroom 💀 boy, it was not a fun day
I wrote what I consider my first "real" fanfiction at 13, it was a pregnancy fic. It didn't start as one but there was a big plot twist halfway through that, if I remember correctly, a guy in the group had been impregnated by an alien at a time before the fic even starts (even though that was definitely not canon), and they are now just getting diagnosed with pregnancy. I grew up watching my mom play Sims 2 and she got one of her male sims impregnated by aliens and that just really stuck with me, especially once I started playing the Sims 4. And I still write pregnancy-related content on the regular, a lot of mpreg too, I'm 21. I think I have a problem because I'll never have kids of my own.
there are worse ways to deal with that feeling, but I'll admit to some curiosity, as I'm not above reading pregnancy fic & liking it & its kinda cool to know where it comes from on an emotional level for some people.
in my first ever novel, i had zero ideas except for how the story would begin and how it would end. nothing else in between, so it was absolutely PACKED with filler. i once wrote and entire chapter dedicated to my Static and his best friend, Scam, making a sandwich…THE. WHOLE. THING.
My very first fic...? No plot. I had a *semblance* of what I wanted, I wanted a romance between two characters. But then when it got to the actual WRITING part, I had no idea where the story was going and just stuck them in whatever setting I wanted with no explanation.
A lot of people say that they regret writing their first fic in the first place because it was that bad. I personally don't. It IS terrible, and I did cringe when I was rereading it, but... I think the first thing I have ever writen in a way HAD to be terrible, so the second one could be slightly better. And the third one, and so on
As someone who's been writing since childhood, I love my old stuff. I cringe so much at the comics I made when I was 9-13; the less developed drawings, the fact that there was no plot, the fact that I accidentally made a yandere (yes that happened). But I wouldn't have improved without it. I wouldn't change a single moment of that time. And as the person above said: If you cringe at your past work, that's how you know you've improved.
i… honestly cant tell if i regret my first fic or not. yes, it was cringe, yes it taught me how to write, i made friends from it, and people really liked it… but it was also disgustingly problematic and had many dark topics that my younger self should not have been writing about, even if my younger self was going through a lot at the time. i feel terrible whenever i think about it now, but at least ive improved from that point.
The pointless outfit descriptions are SO REAL. You could always tell which characters were important because I would dive into describing how they looked when the mc first encountered them lol
My first published Fanfiction story - which has since been discontinued and deleted - was an AU story titled "Hunter M.D." that was a recreation of the TV sitcom "Becker" using the canon characters from "Robotech: The Macross Saga". The mistake was not properly using the right amount of creativity to make the concept work for the "Robotech The Macross Saga" characters being used and instead just copying the events of the "Becker" show bar for bar with only minor changes being made to accommodate.
My biggest mistake was trying to avoid clichés. While I understand why that's advice people give new writers, it's important to understand WHY the clichés work before you try to subvert an idea you don't understand out of fear of getting bullied by grown adults online (plus the avoidance of cliché is so common it actually invents more clichés in the process. so.) Just have fun with what you're writing, don't stress yourself out too much, I guarantee that most people can tell when a fanfic author is enjoying themselves + it usually makes the story more enjoyable
This ^ Who cares if something in your story is "overused"? It's YOUR story and if it's part of what you're going for, then it's fine the way it is. Avoiding clichés at all costs can actually create a lot misfortunes when writing. Like ending up with things not making sense, or being "boring" to the readers
That's not that bad. Kinda reminds me a bit of a Warriors book where the beginning has a map and a list of all the characters, what clan they belonged to, and their ranks. Sometimes there's just a lot to keep track of and something like that at the start can help.
My first fan-fiction mistake would be that I was always eager to upload my chapters without proofreading them. I was enthralled seeing how my audience reacted to each new upload. You can imagine the horror and cringe I felt years later when I finally proofread it and found SO MANY grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. There were even times when I left an unfinished sentence in the middle of a paragraph. Funnily enough, my readers were awfully kind to rarely mention any of the mistakes. In the end, they enjoyed the story and were okay with glossing over my mistakes.
My biggest mistake was letting my teachers make a book out of my fic and put it in the school library... I was young at the time, so there were certainly no naughty scenes, but oh GOD the little experience I had back then makes me cringe...
@@42seven Nope, my innocent self wrote self-insert Pokémon fanfiction. I only vaguely remember it being kinda edgy, but other than that it was safe for kids. Like, I wrote it long before I started swearing like a sailor lol
my first fanfic was written in my notes app when I was 12. it was a fanfic that my friend asked me to write of her dating mettaton. it was honestly kinda good but the pacing was garbage
I started writing fics when I was 9. In Wattpad. My first fandom was MLP. I wrote stories based around Sunset Shimmer, because I was literally obsessed over her at that time. And no, I didn't write because I had an idea. I purely just wanted to satisfy my obsession with making Sunset the top in everything. So I wrote the most cliche story ever. It literally had like, 100 words per chapters, and overall the story had around 10 chapters. I'm not kidding.
The first mistake I can remember is I wrote a Fan fic withs witching povs. I normally like a pov switching fic - provided it ticks some other boxes- however the characters I was writting about was a murder and a detective. It really took tension out of the fic when you read the murder killing someone and the detective being unable to figure it out for several chapters.
First mistake i remember making is publishing a fic without having it beta read. Now, this isnt much of a problem on its own, but i graphically described two panic attacks (TWO!) without knowing anything about them. I didnt do an ounce of research, i just took "panic" and ran with it. Literally. The character literally fled and told himself it was a panic attack. Both times.
I have a similar story. I managed to successfully write a few panic attacks by accident. I didn't even notice until my discord server with other creators was trying to rank our aus by trauma level and a few people said mine was fifth because of the two panic attacks I didn't notice 😭
My first fic wasn't terrible (aside from having 21 "main" characters for some reason), but my first major mistake was pretty bad. Read someone's fic and decided I didn't like their writing style... so I rewrote it in my own style. I was originally going to keep it to myself but some friends peer pressured me into posting it. When the original author eventually found me and called me out, I got mad even though they were completely valid. I did end up rewriting the stolen bits, but also ended up dropping the fic because I was so mad at them for making me change it. I was 14 at the time and now will never rewrite someone fic without their permission. I will borrow concepts, but I will never just yoink a fic. I still feel bad for going off on them even though they were right and I ended up deleting my wattpad account.
I'm 19. I've been on both sides. I stole a concept when I was 13 (and did it poorly! I'm still embarrassed!), and I've had my fic plot stolen. At first I was like... uh... this is literally my fanfic, but written in different words. Then I felt incredibly flattered. Someone was inspired by my writing. I had an active impact on someone's life, and they wanted to put their own art into the world. That's so sweet to me? It's absolutely what I want? I've been reading fics for 7 years and I only have three bookmarks -- this is one of them. Of course, I completely understand that others may not feel like that. But it's just a positive experience on a little plagiarism. At the end of the day, we are literally writing fanfiction, it's not that deep
First fanfic I ever published was a smutty one shot fic for a ship I didn't even like all that much. I think I set people up for disappointment when I proceeded to never post any of that ship again and made my mark on the fandom with a different one. I was in high school, not taking writing seriously enough. I'm now 30 with a full time job and after taking a break from fanfic for years, I decided to start writing again to cope with stress, particularly during the Pandemic and I think I take it a little too seriously now XD. I keep telling myself I'm going to write oneshots and then get 60 pages into it before deciding I really ought to split it into a multi chapter story, and then because it's now a multi chapter fic I add detail to things that were originally going to be summarized in a flash forward, creating entire chapters worth of events so now I have novel length fanfics averaging 20 pages each, tackling tough subjects like war, death, love, change and even struggles with addition and internalized prejudices... about characters from my niece's favorite cartoons because she wanted to share these characters she loves with her auntie. Sorry, baby, don't ever read my fanfics, they'll fuck you up.
Writing a self insert character for a rpf, while pretending to be a straight girl (I am a pansexual man), and not really knowing the people I was writing about other than one person. It was full of bad cliches, writing mistakes, and unrealistic scenarios, also, I had no idea what was happening until I finished the chapter.
My first fanfic had each chapter be an episode of the tv show. I rushed wayyy too much plot into one episode and each episode was only around a thousand words. I also derailed the characters a lot and wrote almost entirely dialogue.
Not a fanfic but a 9 page book I was super proud of as a kid. It was kinda a mess since I was like 8, but my favorite part was that the characters were on an airplane and I wrote “the plain landed” That sounds like several casualties waiting to happen
hahahah me too, except for me it was at 8. I wrote like, what, 30-ish pages in relatively large font and made my main character the generic bullied girl 💀
I was a very depressed 11-year-old who was in an environment of friends who are absolutely fucked up and my first fic consisted of all of the most unhinged shit and it was practically considered Dead Dove in the wattpad world. Unsurprisingly my friends loved it and SOMEHOW it gained supporters??? Well everything in that was completely bad-written and will never see the light of day again since I completely deleted it after rereading and realising just how utterly fucked up and dumb it was ngl also it's in first person.
@@bogwife7942 yea ngl I couldn't read a fic without heavy angst sh all of that shit now I'm just reading tooth-rotting fluff with a bit of smut, heavy angst is fine but happy ending is a MUST
When I wrote my first fic, I made the character's relationship very...toxic? Like one moment they are all happy and cute and lovey dovey, and the next they argue over the most random things and one of them literally ran away. (Oh, and they shouldn't even have been all cutesy in the first place since one of them was literally a murderous monster who canonically has ZERO emotions or regards for other life forms)
I went so long without knowing that I should have made a new paragraph for each new dialogue. So many years of me just having 7-lined paragraphs with several characters talking. Sure I wrote after each dialogue which character was talking. However, I never realized how some of my readers struggled with differentiating the characters. Even worse some of them had dyslexia, and I did not make it easier for them... at least now I know, and it was a relatively easy fix.
Good thing you at least marked everyone. I always felt a little silly with how chopped up it got but did it anyways because otherwise I never could keep track of what was said. At 15 I finally properly learned that was supposed to be the thing done, after having read so many fics where it wasn’t done. I had spent 6 years only even thinking of paragraph breaks because I was a big Redwall fan.
(7:27) Sometimes I feel like the only one who actually doesn't mind when someone "writes the accent". So long as it's not meant to be insulting or impossible to read, I kind of like it.
My first mistake was having too many ideas and putting in too little effort. I'd suddenly spark a shiny new plot concept, get really excited building it down to the tiniest details, then get bored after only 1 or 2 chapters, delete it and move on to the next shiny new plot. Of course, there's nothing wrong with writing just for fun, especially when I was still a child, but I still feel bad for all my readers who would get just as hyped up for my story as me, only to be disappointed because I never had any intention of putting in the necessary work to finish it.
Not my first published fic, but my second. It was a POV Outsider for a ship and I ended up making the “outsiders” (OCs I made up on the spot, for the record) way more important to the plot than they should have been. I think the main ship showed up like twice throughout the whole story lmao
I never start a new paragraph every time someone else speaks (I do use paragraphs, though). When I was in school, we were taught ‘new speaker, new line’, not ‘new speaker, new paragraph’…
I wrote a book where the main character was a sociopathic death eater (from Harry Potter) at eleven, and each chapter was about one paragraph long Edit: she also tortured Snape for embarrassing her in front of her crush
My first public fic was a chatfic with characters I didn't fully understand enough to write correctly, probably not great humor and chapters so short that once I accidentally put the whole chapter as the summary instead and just never noticed because it could fit. That's four whole mistakes there (since I consider me starting a chatfic in the first place one mistake), and the fifth was that I didn't even want to write the fic that much. It was not for me at all, and I even let people suggest ships in the comments despite the fact that I didn't really like a ton of the ships in the fandom, especially not the popular ones. That fic is now dead and buried, and while I learned from it (kind of. At the very least, I became much more self-indulgent afterwards), I still dance on its grave.
My first fanfic was a creative writing assignment in 3rd/4th grade. We had to write a fake chapter to insert into any book we'd read. Anway i wrote a story about the Weasley twins stealing stuff from Filchs office mission impossible style.
I want to encourage people to write, no matter what. Even if it turns out "terrible", keep at it. You will improve, I gurantee it. As long as it's something you enjoy, keeping doing it. At the end of the day, there's always someone out there who will read it.
2:33 is a problem that made it into my novel manuscript. My critique partner told me where I needed to show more and gave me examples of how to do so, but even after I applied her suggestions, my beta-readers unanimously agreed that there I have to do _a lot more showing._ I feel like my work is in black and white and I’m relying on others to color it for me.
Im actually in the middle of writing my first fanfic right now and I think my mistake is posting the first chapter without having any plan for what’s next
I wrote a screenplay for an episode of a show because I couldn't translate the scenes in my head into a reading medium. This meant I included long stage directions where I tried to direct the imaginary show from the page. The weird thing is, I went out of my way to make it fit into the show's timeline even though I tweaked backstories to fit my headcanon.
I was in the fifth grade so honestly I’m just happy I discovered my love for writing and honestly, the fic itself was pretty wholesome. No swearing, no romance (I was an undiscovered Lesbian and all the characters where men), no intense angst. Though my biggest mistake was deleting it out of shame the next year. I’d love to look back on that relic of history and maybe even rework it one day (though I doubt it’s salvageable) but I can’t because I was to scared of other people’s opinions on the writing I had spent so much time loving.
My first big story I was writing was about a main character who has superpowers and knows nothing, so the story was really cool since there were scenes were nobody knew what was going on but the audience finds out later, scenes where the audience understands what is happening but the main character doesn't, and scenes where the main character understands but the audience doesn't find out until later. The major mistake I made was not making the superpowers of the main character fully fleshed out in my head/outline, so there were several times where I couldn't write scenes accurately because I didn't know how the powers worked. Especially because the entire first part of the story is the main character learning how their powers work while also learning how to understand English. Eventually, I put the whole thing on hold until I get around to writing down a complete power set for them.
My first 'book' was a clumsy piece of warrior cats fanfic, i couldn't even decide what color i wanted the main to be so i jumped back and forth. I still have a copy of the e-book on my kindle. i honestly love the plot! it was simple but... i loved writing it so i love reading it. It was simple: mc leaves her house with the cat who raised her and joins the nearest clan, tigerclan, who were treeclimbers (I still love the idea of cats hunting and living in trees, so im glad that facet stayed the same). Before she is able to complete the challenge needed to officially join the clan, the leader, Goldstar, dies in battle, losing his last life. The mc is blamed for his death with some logic i can still understand. (Goldstar gave the mc his dinner last night because she was hungry and there wasnt enough food, being winter, so he was weaker then normal.) I can remember writing it and how wonderful it felt to get my ideas onto my moms computer.
My first fic (fandom was either BNHA or Voltron) was an OC fic, with the main character being this super-talented, powerful girl who had all the boys fighting over her affections. Yes, BOTH fics had this feature, even when I wrote them at different times. But I chose the most common love interests for both fics. I chose *Keith and Bakugou,* and made them both jealous, angsty, and super protective towards the main character. I think I was 11 or 12 when I wrote both fics, and if I could go back in time and punch my younger self in the face, I would, because I will never understand what she was thinking.
I don't think that warrants punching, writing those sorts of fics is harmless even if it’s a little corny to look back on. As long as kid you had fun imagining the idea and creating it, that’s all that matters.
2:42 what's funny is that my old fiction had the opposite problem, i no joke wrote an entire page (as in a sheet of paper) of one character getting ready. one page!
4:11 they're so real for that tho, that's 100% the superior way to write, just don't post it in the final version. but that's absolutely how my writing looks in the original word files
Oh, gosh. My old stuff was so bad. One-page chapters, no paragraphs, most of the characters had the personality of a wet sock, no plot, I *skipped over fight scenes* , worldbuilding was nonexistent, and worst of all, I made one character fall in love with the guy who killed her parents. 💀 (I was twelve and stupid) I've kept three of the most-complete stories and have been working on them to the point they don't even look like the same things.
I renember that when I was younger, I wrote fics in THE NOTES APP. Tbh I still do it but I still have some of that old fanfics, and gosh, the problems with them were: No paragraph breaks, almost all characters were almost stolen from other places but they had different names, and everything was dialogue... I phisically cringe when I read that fanfics again :(
Making two chapters and dipping. I already wrote a lot before, but my pacing was absolutely horrible for the first of my drafts just on my writing. I also have horrible procrastination
I started writing at around 12 and my first ever fanfic was a dsmp crackfic about a dream i had about everybody being replaced by killer robots It was written like a screenplay except the robots names were done differently For example the real ranboo would be typed in all lowercase and the fake one would have an uppercase R Which sounds sort of cool in thought but REALLY confusing in execution
I wrote a book back in 7th grade and finished at the end of 8th grade, and I was TERRIBLE at charachter development and making charachters. There was little to no growth in anyone and they all were cardboard charachters with less personality than a wet dishrag. And the overall storyline wasn't thought out through and I had a really bad written ending. And the couple (not a self insert of me and my crush at the time) didnt really have any tension and they just kissed at the end lol. Thankfully I reflected back and have improved on storywriting Believe in yourself! If you're not proud of your work, its okay because there is someone who will like it and you have all the time to improve :)
first writing mistake: zero overarching plot, just "y/n in a mansion with a bunch of canon characters" (because that's all i read). each chapter was episodic and i ended the fic by killing off the reader, turning them into a ghost who became a skeleton on nights with a full moon. also, it was an undertale AU sans x reader fanfic. i deleted the fanfic off of quotev but still have the original google doc.. it's never seeing the light of day.
Writing Cars fanfiction in math class instead of taking the tests and then recording an audiobook of it and playing it for my dad. I was NOT young enough for this behavior to be brushed off
my first writing mistakr was copying the words from the first chapter of the first harry potter book, replacing the names with the names of my online friends and posting it on the animal jam blog. i was 8 at the time but that will forever haunt me
Biggest mistake for me was hating myself for not writing more. I'd write a quart of a page a day as a beginer and think "why cant i be like book authors?? How can people even do 'one shots?' " like, as if those authors didnt work hard for months and years to have the motivation and actual skill to do that.. Yea so anyways, over the last 2 years of writing I've been consistent with 4-6 pages a month. (We dont talk about november 2023, flipping odd ball for having 11 OUT OF 16 PAGES DONE??)
When I first started writing my story I would structure my extremely short chapters like an exercise routine, a quick warm-up (aka a chapter of light action introduction), the real exercise (actual plot progression) and the cool down (random sweet intimate moments between characters, aka the book version of filler).While this seems great over all, if not planned well you end up with way too much filler and if your posting chapter by chapter it's super hard to find what you've written before in the sea of filler and the soon the gradual natural flow of the plot would get lost. I would spend more time then I could count just tracking back the plot and making sure there are no contradictions. So don't be like me the exercise writing formula is really great for the reader just really hard when not done by an experienced writer.
As someone who started writing fan fiction at 10 (by accident, mind you, I had no idea what fan fiction even was) and is now 13, this makes me feel significantly better about my own writing, (mostly because I speed ran through most of the beginner mistakes by making all of them at once and only ever started realizing what the fuck I was writing when I got a beta reader, overwise known as my brother)
My biggest mistake was writing it all on my school account in google docs Now I'll never get to cringe at my old stories since I don't access that account anymore :(
my first writing mistakes included things like not using paragraph breaks, making one of the characters based on me and describing her as 'edgy and cool' (my exact words). in my defense, i was 8.
Oh boy here we go. - Pointless POV changes that have no effect in the way the audience sees or understands events or characters - Writing without planning out the stories or the characters - Failing to look up words and phrases I didn’t understand and used them incorrectly - Using the wrong naming system for a specific location in a fanfic - Repeated words and sentence structure, no variation - Vaguely describing everything for a *long* time, which just takes up a lot of time without actually painting a picture - The story was *all* dialogue So yeah there’s that.
Not a fanfic but I once got pretty far into a story without even really knowing what "motivations" or "personality" meant in terms of fictional characters. The result was a monotonous plot with a character that only did things because the plot required them to do it and not because they had any core beliefs about the world or themselves.
Using any word other than ‘said’ because my English teachers in like 7th grade or below drilled in my head that I could NOT use something as plain as that 😭 Ex: “Why can’t cheese puffs be in burritos,” she muttered. “Eating doors isn’t a great idea Dan,” he commented.
I think my first writing mistake was putting random English dialogue in a fic that was supposed just to be in my native language, but no, I wanted to be cool and edgy and show how good I was in English, so it became this chaotic bilingual fic that was difficult to decipher for myself as well.
My first fanfiction mistake…. Tell not show Literally an entire paragraph about the main character I added in. Also they were overpowered but I like to think of that as normal quirk of mine.
4:20 As a fanfic writer who is currently playing a lot of Sims 3 alongside(occasionally even simultaneously), I guess I'm glad that I write in third person then.
Predictable "Plot Twist": Having my the "normal" boy-girl twin cuties' extremely specific premonition warning about the very unsubtle true villain get brushed off by the also supernatural and notorious ace detective, who realizes and remembers too late upon investigating his horribly framed husband that HE has been the hypnotized victim the entire time...
Oh boy, where do I start... 1. No plot 2. Mostly dialogue, too little narrative 3. Worst pacing ever, everything escalated so fast 4. Very short chapters and very few chapters But of course, I was still learning as we all were. If we didn't start bad, we couldn't get good. ❤
My first piece of writing was when I was about 9 or 10, and the whole thing was meant to be a whole ass BOOK… that was just five thousand words long. It was the epitome of “this happened and then this happened and then this happened….etc” storytelling. The main character also didn’t have a personality or motivation, literally they were the chosen one in the story to make the plot happen and that’s all it was. Honestly now that I think about it, I could probably try to use it as an outline rather than try to tweak it as an actual story lol I wrote it all in a day when I first started ADHD meds, and then never touched it again XD
The main mistake I made (besides not planning ~*at all * while writing "Jaggedshadow's Vengeance",) was that I wanted to avoid making the protag seem like a Gary Stew so much that it made it boring. I also had a few unnecessary subplots that I included largely because I didn't have a place to put them, (such as Operation Manifest, my story and story ideas archive document) and I feared I would lose them if I didn't use them.
I saw 4:20 so much when I first got into fanfiction. Idk if this means anything, but it was in the Riddle School fandom on Wattpad in 2016. Ironically, I _didn’t_ POV-hop often (if at all) despite the fact that, at the time, I spent majority of my free time playing Sims 3.
To those asking why nobody told them: Some Fanfiction communities can be very supportive sometimes.
Too supportive at times. It is hard to get better via constructive criticism when no one dares, even when asked!
@@Notfallkaramellthis is why I ALWAYS give constructive feedback if I have it, if I see they are open or requesting of it.
Because I am also open and requesting of it. In every end note I ask for feedback, and I rarely get it. Which is fine. But I always do the favor of giving it if I have it.
@@Notfallkaramell I've sometimes saw fics from obvious reasons grammar mistakes I want to point out, others which want to get to the point of there story so fast they skip any emotional impact, and more recently read one that was so verbose that if you deleted half the descriptive words there wouldn't be an act substance. A thing most these fics had is that the user would moderate who could post, it just told me they don't accept feedback.
It's rude to make comments criticising people for something minor like spelling, fanfiction is a homemade gift, you don't complain about homemade gift unless upu desperately need to lose the high ground.
@@Geyser39 What if an auther, i.e me, wants exactly that criticism to get better at writing? Still rude even when I ask for criticism?
As someone who started writing fics when I was 13, I can't even remember when I made my first writing mistake because of how many I made.
that's... too relatable.
Oof
yeah
Same 😅
✨Same✨
My first fanfic was a Slenderman horror story written as a part of a TEST in SCHOOL. IT GOT FUCKING GRADED.
Well.. what grade did you get?
@@sheatemyhearttan S.
For Slenderman.
Duh.
Me too (it was Harry Pitter tho)
I had a friend that legit drew the operator symbol on his wrist. And was completely confident in that he was a proxy. And so one time he got a piece of notebook paper, and drew the operator symbol on it with a message that said:
"If you recognize this symbol you're one of us..." And a very childishly gorey fanfiction paper clipped to the back. And by God I was in love with this boy holy fuck
@@ladymandible2056i mean when i was younger i totally would have considered that a cool kid 🤷♀️
a girl at my school got expelled for writing smut about one of the staff, so... it can always be worse y'all
And i thought my fanfics were bad... 💀😬
Holy sh!t why???
Oh my lord. If I was that staff member, I would die.
Holy shit and I thought that's just a stupid backstory for a video game character
WHAT.
Writing "farting" out the door rather than "darting", and then publishing it. I didn't realise until someone pointed out the flatulence right after the funeral divorce. (The character got divorced in a funeral for their own son. Major sad.)
Major sad indeed
🚪🏃💨
IM CRYING IMAGINING THIS AHAHHA
My first mistake was not writing it. There's been too many ideas that get forgotten because I'm just too lazy to write it out lol
this is where an ideas doc comes in handy. you gotta word vomit them out to save 'em for later
@@bogwife7942Yup. I’ve labeled a google doc “Random Notes” for this purpose.
SAMEEEE. I keep on thinking "I want to write a fic about this", AND THEN I NEVER DO! Sometimes I even think about the wording I want to use in certain scenes, even the start of it, but I _just. don't. write it!_
Yes!!! The lethargy and simultaneous anxiety are like concrete to my fingers!!!
That was a blessing in disguise for me! Pruned out almost all of the garbage childish ideas like teleportation and mars colonies.
This might seem like a small issue but, making a character who cannot see colors (achromatopsia) describe a character only by what color they were. On multiple occasions.
Lmao. I have an entire fantasy race that can't see colors and I definitely try to make sure I only use light and dark. This is also reflected in the set design as well.
That sounds like quite a funny mistake 😂
LMAO THATS KINDA FUNNY
My first thought was when the blind man can see you pickpocketing him in Bit-Life
@@naturescorruptedinfactorie8062uh oh! The blind man saw you and ran off!
pressing "set different publishing date" instead of "has multiple chapters"
4:10 I actually respect the fact they made their intruding author notes bold, because sincerely, it’s easier to mentally skip them if they aren’t in the same lettering as the story
I think my worst mistake was making the chapters too short. It also had no plot when I started it and the plot that it had later was rushed and done awfully. The villain wanted to kill celebrities that I (the mc) was a big fan of and I decided to stop him by myself.
to be honest, the fact you decided to stop him by yourself sounds funny to me
@@hoothoot1791 I'm just imagining a preteen kid going full John Wick to protect their celebrity crushes
Wow-
@brare45996 that was the length of the prolonge. Most of the rest were like 2-3 pages and the longest I think was 4
when i was writing the backstory for my creepypasta OC as a child, i was aware of all the overused tropes and took note of them. (getting bullied, wearing a hoodie, etc.). i ended up giving her those tropes anyways. pretty based of little me tbh.
GIRLIES, GAYS AND THEYS
*THIS COMMENTER’S PAST SELF IS NOW WHO I WANT TO BE AS A WRITER!* 👏👏👏
i want to be like you when i grow up
I wrote my OC with my experience and got told it was “basic” and “overdone”
But it’s FUN to give characters these things, it’s why everyone does it
Oh man. I thought I was sooooooo much better than other CRP fans because my OC was neither bullied at school, nor wore a hoodie. She did, however, have a shitty stepmother, wore a stupidly long scarf, had red eyes and was a teenager who killed with a kitchen knife. I am so glad that I dropped her into the trash where she belongs. Granted, I used aspects of her appearance (straight dark hair, rosy complexion) for my current CRP OC like five or six years later. I guess that means she was in the spare parts room of my brain and not the actual garbage disposal.
"If people use these all the time,they gotta be great,right?"
-OP when little
Now that I think about it, my first fanfic was when I was 12 in English class creative writing and I wrote like half the first Avengers movie except they were all dogs.
Nick Fury was a Scottie dog. That’s all I remember.
Honestly, I would read that.
@@tsifirakiehl4250tbh same lol
I bet Steve Rogers/Captain America was a golden retriever, and Tony Stark/Iron Man was either a German shepherd, a Doberman pinscher, or a great dane, LOL. XD.
Oh God, I was given the option of writing an additional chapter of a book to serve as my report. My poor English teacher had to read my imitation of Jules Verne.
OK why do I actually want to read that
Oh man, this took me back to a memory that made me cringe myself into the fetal position. Age nine or ten, shared the Sonic X, self insert fanfiction I wrote in my little pocket notebook - with - my - f a t h e r-
My soul will never be clean-
Your father was likely having a grand old time seeing your child brain do its thing and you have nothing to worry about. At age 9-10, you can perceive media, but not always absorb media. That is a great concoction for absolutely unhinged combos that adults are too hung up about logical details to even conceive of.
At least you showed it to him willingly. Do you know what it's like to have your mom approach you one day about the lego ninjago fanfiction your little 10-12 self had been writing for a few weeks and tell you that she'd read a chapter of it before she'd even started talking to you about it, and the way that she found it was because you'd been posting it on this website that you were supposed to be using primarily for education, but you were also using it for the social aspect it had, which included a "newspaper” function that let users post their stories on the site, which, little did you know at the time, notified the parents who signed their kids up to the site whenever their kid posted something to the newspaper? And let them read it? Which meant for the whole time you'd been writing and posting the fic your mom had been getting emails about it with full access to each chapter, and you didn't know?
...And of course the chapter she just HAD to have read was the one that you dedicated to your online friend who was inactive on the site and had a really heartfelt personal message to them at the end of the chapter...?
Yeah...I don't know what that's like either...
@@freshcupofangst While I don’t know what that exact memory is like, I do know what it’s like to have your mom discover your fanfiction and read it aloud to the household to shame you about it... Kindrid spirits, my friend-
@@YourWaywardDestiny”At age 9-10, you can perceive media, but not always absorb media.” That’s interesting, what’s the difference?
@@kiera6326 A difference in understanding the nuances and messages in the unspoken story telling. What might be obvious clues to an adult audience about the narrative is not always so obvious to someone who has never encountered it before. There's a metaphor for death in the cowboy riding off into the sunset that genre savvy people see so often, it's cliché at this point. Some kid seeing a western for the first time? Right over their head. They have no clue and might invent their own meaning for it, or decide it means nothing at all.
When I was like... 8 years old? I wrote a Warrior Cats fanfic. Before finishing the first book.
Wich, among other things, resulted in me naming a character Sandstorm, and then being absolutely devastated when I read the second book and Sandpaw _became Sandstorm_
One of my fanfic Clans is FireClan, so the founder is named Firestar but he’s completely unrelated to the canon one 😭
Oh, now i understand what " Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder " really means
My biggest mistake was not planning it and entirely going off the initial idea 😭 nowadays I have very detailed checklists for each chapter so I can actually tell the story I want to tell properly
unrelated but ROTTMNT PFP >:D
@@koineko. eyyyy
Huh. You must be great at writing stories. I get a craving for something I want to read, find that it doesn't exist, and then daydream it onto a page. The fun part is reading it and revising the scenes.
I pretty much just write disjointed scenes that I want to see. I have one framing device that mildly works with that: it's just an older version of the character reflecting on their past. I remember the past nonlinearly, so it somewhat excuses the nonlinear storytelling.
i tried doing this but it just got insanely stressful for me 😭 so i kind of try to wing it while also keeping a general outline of what i want to do in my head
I DID THAT FOR A WHILE!
Started writing before I learnt the difference between there, their, and they’re…
As a linguistics major, I teared up while re-reading those 💀
When I was 12 I wrote a not-the-best self-insert pokemon fanfic. My biggest mistake was telling my cousin about it. She called me cringe for liking childish things and I was so embarrassed that I stopped liking pokemon. I found it a while ago and I still look at it fondly.
This gave me an idea
@@flickcentergaming680what's the idea
If anyone criticizes you for liking what you enjoy, remind them that there are plenty of adults who like "childish things"! Artists, animators, authors, illustrators, mascots, employees at public places meant for all ages, etc!
@@tinypinkittycat I think of the woman who thought children's cartoons were animated by children.
@@osheridan I don't even, man. XD
Making it out of obligation, not because I wanted to. I'm autistic, and so growing up my parents hired a bunch of people to support my learning, and for some reason these people were REALLY fixated on getting 9-year-old me to write. The first thing I wrote was a terrible "stranded on an island story", and then when I was told to write another, I decided to write fanfic for this Dragon City knockoff I was into. I never finished it because I had no idea where to take the plot, and didn't enjoy writing it at all lol
Probs wanted to be part of your success story if you DID have knack for writing and got famous.
Like an “i was there from the BEGINNING! I’m the one who PUSHED them to start writing!“ thing.
exact same for me, except it was in school with like 5 different teachers and teachers aids trying to force me into it and instead my 8 year old autistic ass started getting overwelmed and just...ran out from the classroom 💀
boy, it was not a fun day
I wrote what I consider my first "real" fanfiction at 13, it was a pregnancy fic. It didn't start as one but there was a big plot twist halfway through that, if I remember correctly, a guy in the group had been impregnated by an alien at a time before the fic even starts (even though that was definitely not canon), and they are now just getting diagnosed with pregnancy. I grew up watching my mom play Sims 2 and she got one of her male sims impregnated by aliens and that just really stuck with me, especially once I started playing the Sims 4. And I still write pregnancy-related content on the regular, a lot of mpreg too, I'm 21. I think I have a problem because I'll never have kids of my own.
there are worse ways to deal with that feeling, but I'll admit to some curiosity, as I'm not above reading pregnancy fic & liking it & its kinda cool to know where it comes from on an emotional level for some people.
Oh boy.oh no.
PLEEEEASE IM DYIBG
in my first ever novel, i had zero ideas except for how the story would begin and how it would end. nothing else in between, so it was absolutely PACKED with filler.
i once wrote and entire chapter dedicated to my Static and his best friend, Scam, making a sandwich…THE. WHOLE. THING.
breaking bad fly episode
My very first fic...?
No plot. I had a *semblance* of what I wanted, I wanted a romance between two characters. But then when it got to the actual WRITING part, I had no idea where the story was going and just stuck them in whatever setting I wanted with no explanation.
A lot of people say that they regret writing their first fic in the first place because it was that bad. I personally don't. It IS terrible, and I did cringe when I was rereading it, but... I think the first thing I have ever writen in a way HAD to be terrible, so the second one could be slightly better. And the third one, and so on
If you cringe at your past work, that's how you know you've improved
As someone who's been writing since childhood, I love my old stuff. I cringe so much at the comics I made when I was 9-13; the less developed drawings, the fact that there was no plot, the fact that I accidentally made a yandere (yes that happened).
But I wouldn't have improved without it. I wouldn't change a single moment of that time.
And as the person above said: If you cringe at your past work, that's how you know you've improved.
Exactly, especially with fandoms, and people who act toxic in general!
This exactly! The only way to not make some of those 'mistakes' is by never writing anything in the first place
i… honestly cant tell if i regret my first fic or not. yes, it was cringe, yes it taught me how to write, i made friends from it, and people really liked it… but it was also disgustingly problematic and had many dark topics that my younger self should not have been writing about, even if my younger self was going through a lot at the time. i feel terrible whenever i think about it now, but at least ive improved from that point.
The pointless outfit descriptions are SO REAL. You could always tell which characters were important because I would dive into describing how they looked when the mc first encountered them lol
My first published Fanfiction story - which has since been discontinued and deleted - was an AU story titled "Hunter M.D." that was a recreation of the TV sitcom "Becker" using the canon characters from "Robotech: The Macross Saga".
The mistake was not properly using the right amount of creativity to make the concept work for the "Robotech The Macross Saga" characters being used and instead just copying the events of the "Becker" show bar for bar with only minor changes being made to accommodate.
Thanks so much for your comment!! I'm very grateful. 💛
Your fanfic sounds like a really interesting way to create a crossover! :)
@@tonkajoey08 You're quite welcome. I agree it does; I just didn't execute it the right way, is all.
My biggest mistake was trying to avoid clichés. While I understand why that's advice people give new writers, it's important to understand WHY the clichés work before you try to subvert an idea you don't understand out of fear of getting bullied by grown adults online (plus the avoidance of cliché is so common it actually invents more clichés in the process. so.) Just have fun with what you're writing, don't stress yourself out too much, I guarantee that most people can tell when a fanfic author is enjoying themselves + it usually makes the story more enjoyable
This ^
Who cares if something in your story is "overused"? It's YOUR story and if it's part of what you're going for, then it's fine the way it is.
Avoiding clichés at all costs can actually create a lot misfortunes when writing. Like ending up with things not making sense, or being "boring" to the readers
I once wrote a fanfic wherein Chapter 1 was just full of descriptions and exposition, whereas Chapter 2 was where the story started.
I don't think the plot in my au started until chapter seven of part 2
Unless the sub plot in the first part counts (which was like chapter 10)
I think what you had was a prologue, and your second chapter was the real Chapter 1.
That's not that bad. Kinda reminds me a bit of a Warriors book where the beginning has a map and a list of all the characters, what clan they belonged to, and their ranks. Sometimes there's just a lot to keep track of and something like that at the start can help.
My first fan-fiction mistake would be that I was always eager to upload my chapters without proofreading them. I was enthralled seeing how my audience reacted to each new upload.
You can imagine the horror and cringe I felt years later when I finally proofread it and found SO MANY grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. There were even times when I left an unfinished sentence in the middle of a paragraph.
Funnily enough, my readers were awfully kind to rarely mention any of the mistakes. In the end, they enjoyed the story and were okay with glossing over my mistakes.
My biggest mistake was letting my teachers make a book out of my fic and put it in the school library... I was young at the time, so there were certainly no naughty scenes, but oh GOD the little experience I had back then makes me cringe...
what do you mean there were *certainly* no naughty scenes? i thought almost everyone tried to write about how they thought sex worked
@@42seven
Nope, my innocent self wrote self-insert Pokémon fanfiction. I only vaguely remember it being kinda edgy, but other than that it was safe for kids. Like, I wrote it long before I started swearing like a sailor lol
@@42seven I didn't try to write about how sex worked. Still don't. Smut makes me uncomfortable.
my first fanfic was written in my notes app when I was 12. it was a fanfic that my friend asked me to write of her dating mettaton. it was honestly kinda good but the pacing was garbage
I started writing fics when I was 9. In Wattpad. My first fandom was MLP. I wrote stories based around Sunset Shimmer, because I was literally obsessed over her at that time. And no, I didn't write because I had an idea. I purely just wanted to satisfy my obsession with making Sunset the top in everything. So I wrote the most cliche story ever. It literally had like, 100 words per chapters, and overall the story had around 10 chapters. I'm not kidding.
The first mistake I can remember is I wrote a Fan fic withs witching povs. I normally like a pov switching fic - provided it ticks some other boxes- however the characters I was writting about was a murder and a detective. It really took tension out of the fic when you read the murder killing someone and the detective being unable to figure it out for several chapters.
Idk, I think that could've worked if you built up the tension in other ways.
@@deen7530 this is true its tecnically the plot of any given Colombo episode. 15 year old me however was not Colombo writer... Saldy
First mistake i remember making is publishing a fic without having it beta read. Now, this isnt much of a problem on its own, but i graphically described two panic attacks (TWO!) without knowing anything about them. I didnt do an ounce of research, i just took "panic" and ran with it. Literally. The character literally fled and told himself it was a panic attack. Both times.
I have a similar story. I managed to successfully write a few panic attacks by accident. I didn't even notice until my discord server with other creators was trying to rank our aus by trauma level and a few people said mine was fifth because of the two panic attacks I didn't notice 😭
My first fic wasn't terrible (aside from having 21 "main" characters for some reason), but my first major mistake was pretty bad.
Read someone's fic and decided I didn't like their writing style... so I rewrote it in my own style. I was originally going to keep it to myself but some friends peer pressured me into posting it. When the original author eventually found me and called me out, I got mad even though they were completely valid. I did end up rewriting the stolen bits, but also ended up dropping the fic because I was so mad at them for making me change it.
I was 14 at the time and now will never rewrite someone fic without their permission. I will borrow concepts, but I will never just yoink a fic. I still feel bad for going off on them even though they were right and I ended up deleting my wattpad account.
I'm 19. I've been on both sides. I stole a concept when I was 13 (and did it poorly! I'm still embarrassed!), and I've had my fic plot stolen.
At first I was like... uh... this is literally my fanfic, but written in different words.
Then I felt incredibly flattered. Someone was inspired by my writing. I had an active impact on someone's life, and they wanted to put their own art into the world. That's so sweet to me? It's absolutely what I want? I've been reading fics for 7 years and I only have three bookmarks -- this is one of them.
Of course, I completely understand that others may not feel like that. But it's just a positive experience on a little plagiarism. At the end of the day, we are literally writing fanfiction, it's not that deep
21 main characters howwwww
@@YoCelKreSunt take a number and get in line, you'll get one (1) sentence eventually
@@YoCelKreSunt lots of POV shifting
@@dbarrett1539Do you have a link for the stolen fic? Cuz that sounds really interesting!
i didn't know how to end chapters, so all of them ended with someone passing out
There are 2 kinds of responses:
"I was so dumb and still am lol don't laugh at me haha"
"I was a genius even back then no?"
First fanfic I ever published was a smutty one shot fic for a ship I didn't even like all that much. I think I set people up for disappointment when I proceeded to never post any of that ship again and made my mark on the fandom with a different one. I was in high school, not taking writing seriously enough.
I'm now 30 with a full time job and after taking a break from fanfic for years, I decided to start writing again to cope with stress, particularly during the Pandemic and I think I take it a little too seriously now XD. I keep telling myself I'm going to write oneshots and then get 60 pages into it before deciding I really ought to split it into a multi chapter story, and then because it's now a multi chapter fic I add detail to things that were originally going to be summarized in a flash forward, creating entire chapters worth of events so now I have novel length fanfics averaging 20 pages each, tackling tough subjects like war, death, love, change and even struggles with addition and internalized prejudices...
about characters from my niece's favorite cartoons because she wanted to share these characters she loves with her auntie. Sorry, baby, don't ever read my fanfics, they'll fuck you up.
Writing a self insert character for a rpf, while pretending to be a straight girl (I am a pansexual man), and not really knowing the people I was writing about other than one person. It was full of bad cliches, writing mistakes, and unrealistic scenarios, also, I had no idea what was happening until I finished the chapter.
My first fanfic had each chapter be an episode of the tv show. I rushed wayyy too much plot into one episode and each episode was only around a thousand words. I also derailed the characters a lot and wrote almost entirely dialogue.
Also using emojis in the fic, like if someone raised their hand I would just plop 🤚randomly into the story
I’m planning to make a fanfic with a similar pace, one chapter per episode of the season, and now I know what to avoid so thanks lol
Not a fanfic but a 9 page book I was super proud of as a kid. It was kinda a mess since I was like 8, but my favorite part was that the characters were on an airplane and I wrote “the plain landed”
That sounds like several casualties waiting to happen
the plain landed
the plain landed
hahahah me too, except for me it was at 8. I wrote like, what, 30-ish pages in relatively large font and made my main character the generic bullied girl 💀
the plain landed
Repeatedly changing massive plot points halfway through the book
I was a very depressed 11-year-old who was in an environment of friends who are absolutely fucked up and my first fic consisted of all of the most unhinged shit and it was practically considered Dead Dove in the wattpad world. Unsurprisingly my friends loved it and SOMEHOW it gained supporters??? Well everything in that was completely bad-written and will never see the light of day again since I completely deleted it after rereading and realising just how utterly fucked up and dumb it was ngl
also it's in first person.
I can excuse poorly-written Dead Dove, but a first-person fic is UNFORGIVABLE!
ah, that takes me back. reminds me of something I would read when I was 12
@@bogwife7942 yea ngl I couldn't read a fic without heavy angst sh all of that shit
now I'm just reading tooth-rotting fluff with a bit of smut, heavy angst is fine but happy ending is a MUST
@@deen7530 Poorly-written dead dove on wattpad is normal tbh, but first person? damn that's a crime against humanity....
@@deen7530You can excuse poorly written Dead Dove? (this is a reference)
When I wrote my first fic, I made the character's relationship very...toxic? Like one moment they are all happy and cute and lovey dovey, and the next they argue over the most random things and one of them literally ran away.
(Oh, and they shouldn't even have been all cutesy in the first place since one of them was literally a murderous monster who canonically has ZERO emotions or regards for other life forms)
thats a good note to end on. The worst part of writing is that, unfortunately for all of us, its worth it.
I went so long without knowing that I should have made a new paragraph for each new dialogue. So many years of me just having 7-lined paragraphs with several characters talking. Sure I wrote after each dialogue which character was talking. However, I never realized how some of my readers struggled with differentiating the characters. Even worse some of them had dyslexia, and I did not make it easier for them...
at least now I know, and it was a relatively easy fix.
Honestly, I still don't start new paragraphs. My dialogues aren't usually long enough to warrant that IMO
Good thing you at least marked everyone. I always felt a little silly with how chopped up it got but did it anyways because otherwise I never could keep track of what was said. At 15 I finally properly learned that was supposed to be the thing done, after having read so many fics where it wasn’t done. I had spent 6 years only even thinking of paragraph breaks because I was a big Redwall fan.
I'm working on my draft for my novel and since I just want to get shit out im guilty of doing this shit - even though I already know
I'm very guilty of the outfit descriptions-
I love my complex outfits, and believe me when I say I use a few words as possible for them!
(7:27)
Sometimes I feel like the only one who actually doesn't mind when someone "writes the accent".
So long as it's not meant to be insulting or impossible to read, I kind of like it.
I swear, this channel is the only one where I hear people misspelling definitely.
You’d be amazed how often people type defiantly instead without noticing or realizing it’s a completely different word
In my first fic, I had the narrator chuckle
I know, flog myself for it to this day
My first mistake was having too many ideas and putting in too little effort. I'd suddenly spark a shiny new plot concept, get really excited building it down to the tiniest details, then get bored after only 1 or 2 chapters, delete it and move on to the next shiny new plot. Of course, there's nothing wrong with writing just for fun, especially when I was still a child, but I still feel bad for all my readers who would get just as hyped up for my story as me, only to be disappointed because I never had any intention of putting in the necessary work to finish it.
That one with the octopus got me screaming
Not my first published fic, but my second. It was a POV Outsider for a ship and I ended up making the “outsiders” (OCs I made up on the spot, for the record) way more important to the plot than they should have been. I think the main ship showed up like twice throughout the whole story lmao
I never start a new paragraph every time someone else speaks (I do use paragraphs, though). When I was in school, we were taught ‘new speaker, new line’, not ‘new speaker, new paragraph’…
I wrote a book where the main character was a sociopathic death eater (from Harry Potter) at eleven, and each chapter was about one paragraph long
Edit: she also tortured Snape for embarrassing her in front of her crush
Lol stan
My first public fic was a chatfic with characters I didn't fully understand enough to write correctly, probably not great humor and chapters so short that once I accidentally put the whole chapter as the summary instead and just never noticed because it could fit. That's four whole mistakes there (since I consider me starting a chatfic in the first place one mistake), and the fifth was that I didn't even want to write the fic that much. It was not for me at all, and I even let people suggest ships in the comments despite the fact that I didn't really like a ton of the ships in the fandom, especially not the popular ones. That fic is now dead and buried, and while I learned from it (kind of. At the very least, I became much more self-indulgent afterwards), I still dance on its grave.
I'm sorry but the whole chapter as the summary is kinda funny 💀💀
My first fanfic was a creative writing assignment in 3rd/4th grade. We had to write a fake chapter to insert into any book we'd read.
Anway i wrote a story about the Weasley twins stealing stuff from Filchs office mission impossible style.
I want to encourage people to write, no matter what. Even if it turns out "terrible", keep at it. You will improve, I gurantee it. As long as it's something you enjoy, keeping doing it. At the end of the day, there's always someone out there who will read it.
2:33 is a problem that made it into my novel manuscript. My critique partner told me where I needed to show more and gave me examples of how to do so, but even after I applied her suggestions, my beta-readers unanimously agreed that there I have to do _a lot more showing._ I feel like my work is in black and white and I’m relying on others to color it for me.
Im actually in the middle of writing my first fanfic right now and I think my mistake is posting the first chapter without having any plan for what’s next
I wrote a screenplay for an episode of a show because I couldn't translate the scenes in my head into a reading medium. This meant I included long stage directions where I tried to direct the imaginary show from the page. The weird thing is, I went out of my way to make it fit into the show's timeline even though I tweaked backstories to fit my headcanon.
You know what they say: if you cringe looking back at your past, it means you’ve grown as a person since then.
my worst mistake was trying to write a 18+ scene. chickened out halfway through so now the plot is totally different
I was in the fifth grade so honestly I’m just happy I discovered my love for writing and honestly, the fic itself was pretty wholesome. No swearing, no romance (I was an undiscovered Lesbian and all the characters where men), no intense angst.
Though my biggest mistake was deleting it out of shame the next year. I’d love to look back on that relic of history and maybe even rework it one day (though I doubt it’s salvageable) but I can’t because I was to scared of other people’s opinions on the writing I had spent so much time loving.
My first big story I was writing was about a main character who has superpowers and knows nothing, so the story was really cool since there were scenes were nobody knew what was going on but the audience finds out later, scenes where the audience understands what is happening but the main character doesn't, and scenes where the main character understands but the audience doesn't find out until later.
The major mistake I made was not making the superpowers of the main character fully fleshed out in my head/outline, so there were several times where I couldn't write scenes accurately because I didn't know how the powers worked. Especially because the entire first part of the story is the main character learning how their powers work while also learning how to understand English. Eventually, I put the whole thing on hold until I get around to writing down a complete power set for them.
as a certified fanfiction writer i think i spelled a word wrong once
My first 'book' was a clumsy piece of warrior cats fanfic, i couldn't even decide what color i wanted the main to be so i jumped back and forth. I still have a copy of the e-book on my kindle. i honestly love the plot! it was simple but... i loved writing it so i love reading it. It was simple: mc leaves her house with the cat who raised her and joins the nearest clan, tigerclan, who were treeclimbers (I still love the idea of cats hunting and living in trees, so im glad that facet stayed the same). Before she is able to complete the challenge needed to officially join the clan, the leader, Goldstar, dies in battle, losing his last life. The mc is blamed for his death with some logic i can still understand. (Goldstar gave the mc his dinner last night because she was hungry and there wasnt enough food, being winter, so he was weaker then normal.) I can remember writing it and how wonderful it felt to get my ideas onto my moms computer.
My first fic (fandom was either BNHA or Voltron) was an OC fic, with the main character being this super-talented, powerful girl who had all the boys fighting over her affections.
Yes, BOTH fics had this feature, even when I wrote them at different times. But I chose the most common love interests for both fics. I chose *Keith and Bakugou,* and made them both jealous, angsty, and super protective towards the main character.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I wrote both fics, and if I could go back in time and punch my younger self in the face, I would, because I will never understand what she was thinking.
I don't think that warrants punching, writing those sorts of fics is harmless even if it’s a little corny to look back on. As long as kid you had fun imagining the idea and creating it, that’s all that matters.
2:42 what's funny is that my old fiction had the opposite problem, i no joke wrote an entire page (as in a sheet of paper) of one character getting ready. one page!
4:11 they're so real for that tho, that's 100% the superior way to write, just don't post it in the final version. but that's absolutely how my writing looks in the original word files
Oh, gosh. My old stuff was so bad. One-page chapters, no paragraphs, most of the characters had the personality of a wet sock, no plot, I *skipped over fight scenes* , worldbuilding was nonexistent, and worst of all, I made one character fall in love with the guy who killed her parents. 💀 (I was twelve and stupid) I've kept three of the most-complete stories and have been working on them to the point they don't even look like the same things.
I renember that when I was younger, I wrote fics in THE NOTES APP. Tbh I still do it but I still have some of that old fanfics, and gosh, the problems with them were:
No paragraph breaks, almost all characters were almost stolen from other places but they had different names, and everything was dialogue... I phisically cringe when I read that fanfics again :(
Making two chapters and dipping. I already wrote a lot before, but my pacing was absolutely horrible for the first of my drafts just on my writing.
I also have horrible procrastination
In an MLP fanfiction I posted to FFN when I was about 8 or 9, I literally wrote animation errors into the story.
I started writing at around 12 and my first ever fanfic was a dsmp crackfic about a dream i had about everybody being replaced by killer robots
It was written like a screenplay except the robots names were done differently
For example the real ranboo would be typed in all lowercase and the fake one would have an uppercase R
Which sounds sort of cool in thought but REALLY confusing in execution
Plot was aggressively “And this happened” to set up the climax and big reveal.
Printing it out and handing copies to my teachers. English teacher was supportive (god bless her), history teacher fucking hated it
I wrote a book back in 7th grade and finished at the end of 8th grade, and I was TERRIBLE at charachter development and making charachters. There was little to no growth in anyone and they all were cardboard charachters with less personality than a wet dishrag. And the overall storyline wasn't thought out through and I had a really bad written ending. And the couple (not a self insert of me and my crush at the time) didnt really have any tension and they just kissed at the end lol. Thankfully I reflected back and have improved on storywriting
Believe in yourself! If you're not proud of your work, its okay because there is someone who will like it and you have all the time to improve :)
first writing mistake: zero overarching plot, just "y/n in a mansion with a bunch of canon characters" (because that's all i read). each chapter was episodic and i ended the fic by killing off the reader, turning them into a ghost who became a skeleton on nights with a full moon. also, it was an undertale AU sans x reader fanfic. i deleted the fanfic off of quotev but still have the original google doc.. it's never seeing the light of day.
Writing Cars fanfiction in math class instead of taking the tests and then recording an audiobook of it and playing it for my dad. I was NOT young enough for this behavior to be brushed off
my first writing mistakr was copying the words from the first chapter of the first harry potter book, replacing the names with the names of my online friends and posting it on the animal jam blog. i was 8 at the time but that will forever haunt me
Biggest mistake for me was hating myself for not writing more. I'd write a quart of a page a day as a beginer and think "why cant i be like book authors?? How can people even do 'one shots?' " like, as if those authors didnt work hard for months and years to have the motivation and actual skill to do that..
Yea so anyways, over the last 2 years of writing I've been consistent with 4-6 pages a month.
(We dont talk about november 2023, flipping odd ball for having 11 OUT OF 16 PAGES DONE??)
rewrote an episode of a show, some lines word for word. then submitted it for a school writing competition. and won in my year.
When I first started writing my story I would structure my extremely short chapters like an exercise routine, a quick warm-up (aka a chapter of light action introduction), the real exercise (actual plot progression) and the cool down (random sweet intimate moments between characters, aka the book version of filler).While this seems great over all, if not planned well you end up with way too much filler and if your posting chapter by chapter it's super hard to find what you've written before in the sea of filler and the soon the gradual natural flow of the plot would get lost. I would spend more time then I could count just tracking back the plot and making sure there are no contradictions. So don't be like me the exercise writing formula is really great for the reader just really hard when not done by an experienced writer.
As someone who started writing fan fiction at 10 (by accident, mind you, I had no idea what fan fiction even was) and is now 13, this makes me feel significantly better about my own writing, (mostly because I speed ran through most of the beginner mistakes by making all of them at once and only ever started realizing what the fuck I was writing when I got a beta reader, overwise known as my brother)
My paragraphs were either ten sentences long with unnecessarily lengthy descriptions, or a single sentence. There was no in between.
My biggest mistake was writing it all on my school account in google docs Now I'll never get to cringe at my old stories since I don't access that account anymore :(
my first writing mistakes included things like not using paragraph breaks, making one of the characters based on me and describing her as 'edgy and cool' (my exact words). in my defense, i was 8.
Oh boy here we go.
- Pointless POV changes that have no effect in the way the audience sees or understands events or characters
- Writing without planning out the stories or the characters
- Failing to look up words and phrases I didn’t understand and used them incorrectly
- Using the wrong naming system for a specific location in a fanfic
- Repeated words and sentence structure, no variation
- Vaguely describing everything for a *long* time, which just takes up a lot of time without actually painting a picture
- The story was *all* dialogue
So yeah there’s that.
My chapters used to be at 300 words max. That was it. At least that way I managed to get out one each day lmao
Bro the first mistake I made was the wall of text. Now i am remembering that I made EACH chaper a SEPERATE DOC. what was I on?
Not a fanfic but I once got pretty far into a story without even really knowing what "motivations" or "personality" meant in terms of fictional characters. The result was a monotonous plot with a character that only did things because the plot required them to do it and not because they had any core beliefs about the world or themselves.
Using any word other than ‘said’ because my English teachers in like 7th grade or below drilled in my head that I could NOT use something as plain as that 😭 Ex:
“Why can’t cheese puffs be in burritos,” she muttered.
“Eating doors isn’t a great idea Dan,” he commented.
"Holmes, that can't be right." I ejaculated. ~ Dr. Watson
Teachers stay doing that 😭
I feel you. I was the same, but then I joined a writing community and they knocked that crap out of my head xD
I think my first writing mistake was putting random English dialogue in a fic that was supposed just to be in my native language, but no, I wanted to be cool and edgy and show how good I was in English, so it became this chaotic bilingual fic that was difficult to decipher for myself as well.
My first fanfiction mistake….
Tell not show
Literally an entire paragraph about the main character I added in.
Also they were overpowered but I like to think of that as normal quirk of mine.
4:20 As a fanfic writer who is currently playing a lot of Sims 3 alongside(occasionally even simultaneously), I guess I'm glad that I write in third person then.
Predictable "Plot Twist": Having my the "normal" boy-girl twin cuties' extremely specific premonition warning about the very unsubtle true villain get brushed off by the also supernatural and notorious ace detective, who realizes and remembers too late upon investigating his horribly framed husband that HE has been the hypnotized victim the entire time...
_"Nothing like a pair of two year-old uni-pega-dragons breaking up a fight between two gay Yankuns!"_ ~2013 Me
Oh boy, where do I start...
1. No plot
2. Mostly dialogue, too little narrative
3. Worst pacing ever, everything escalated so fast
4. Very short chapters and very few chapters
But of course, I was still learning as we all were. If we didn't start bad, we couldn't get good. ❤
Bruh that's literally everything that's wrong with my manuscript for my first novel
👁️ 👄 👁️
My first piece of writing was when I was about 9 or 10, and the whole thing was meant to be a whole ass BOOK… that was just five thousand words long. It was the epitome of “this happened and then this happened and then this happened….etc” storytelling. The main character also didn’t have a personality or motivation, literally they were the chosen one in the story to make the plot happen and that’s all it was. Honestly now that I think about it, I could probably try to use it as an outline rather than try to tweak it as an actual story lol
I wrote it all in a day when I first started ADHD meds, and then never touched it again XD
The main mistake I made (besides not planning ~*at all * while writing "Jaggedshadow's Vengeance",) was that I wanted to avoid making the protag seem like a Gary Stew so much that it made it boring. I also had a few unnecessary subplots that I included largely because I didn't have a place to put them, (such as Operation Manifest, my story and story ideas archive document) and I feared I would lose them if I didn't use them.
I saw 4:20 so much when I first got into fanfiction. Idk if this means anything, but it was in the Riddle School fandom on Wattpad in 2016. Ironically, I _didn’t_ POV-hop often (if at all) despite the fact that, at the time, I spent majority of my free time playing Sims 3.