incognitajones

Last month I posted some questions to Tumblr, asking for advice from people who write both fanfiction and original fiction.

I got many helpful responses in several different formats (reblogs, asks, PMs) so I wanted to collate them all into a separate document. I’ll post a link to Tumblr and Pillowfort as well but because this is so long, Dreamwidth is actually the perfect place for it.

1. What are some of the biggest challenges when switching modes?

@thegiddyowl
There are a few big differences between fanfic and original fic:
Audience expectations: You are your first audience for both fanfic and original fic, but expectations are weighted differently for each. Fanfic has a certain freedom in that you can basically write whatever you want because it’s your fucking sandbox and no one else’s. In original fic, you’re working with agents, editors, publishers, and trying to develop a readership that will buy enough of your book so that publishers will buy more of your books. A lot of filler stuff that’s the fucking bread and butter of fandom will end up on the cutting room floor as a result. Of course, there is self publishing, however that’s when you still need to deal with…
Getting people to read your original work, especially when you’re just starting out. Fandom you’ve got a prepackaged world and characters that people just want to read more of (for free), so I feel like people are more willing to give stuff they would generally never read in a million years a chance. It takes time and a bit of self-marketing to develop a readership, so you have to take what small victories you can get and use that to fuel you through your current project or next project. One of the reasons why I keep writing fanfiction is that it keeps me in the habit of writing at least every other day so I keep burnout or the spiral of self-deprecation at bay.

@englishable
This is going to sound a bit silly, but from a broader view I’d have to say it’s just the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting amount of creative control you suddenly have over everything. In fanfiction there’s always one or more stable factors - the characters, the plot, the setting, etc- to serve as your starting point, even if you’re writing coffee shop AUs or changing endings or writing delightful crack ships between characters who’ve never once in 200 episodes stood in the same room together.
In original fiction, it’s all you. From the color of those empty glass bottles on Character A’s office windowsill to the moral framework in which all the events of the story happen and its decisions are made, you are making every single choice and hoping there’s an underlying coherence behind it all.
The good news is that you don’t need to start out by trying to micromanage everything, and maybe that’s a Me Problem anyway. Build outward from the characters you’ve created—they’re going to change as you write, but it’s really fun when they surprise you—and give them things do, and eventually there will be a kind of internal logic or aesthetic to the narrative that helps you make those smaller (or larger) decisions in a way that feels natural.

@julesrkelley
For me, personally, the biggest challenge when switching modes is world building. Especially without info-dumping. When you write fanfic, unless you are writing a hard AU, your readers are already familiar with the larger universe, the rules by which it operates, the overall forces of good and evil, etc. You can say “the Empire” in a Star Wars fanfic, and people will know what that means. If you’re writing your own sci-fi, fantasy, or quasi-historical fiction, however, whatever “the Empire” means is up to you to establish.
But whole paragraphs and chapters of world-building are tedious as hell, especially for modern readers’ sensibilities. Most modern readers aren’t going to want to sit through the equivalent of The Silmarillion before they get to The Hobbit.
My advice for this is to show it through the mirror of what affects your character. How does your character feel when they hear someone mention “the Empire”? That’s going to go a long way toward telling your reader the relevant information.

@obfuscatress
Probably writing the exposition. It looks very different when you’re writing original fiction because you have to introduce your characters. it isn’t just a given that the reader already knows and cares for them.

2. What’s unexpectedly difficult (or easy) about creating your own characters and setting?

@thegiddyowl
Honestly, I find writing original characters way easier than writing fan fiction characters. If Star Wars hadn’t nuked 30 years of that mess of an EU I don’t even know if I would have ever started writing Star Wars fan fiction because I do try to be somewhat canon accurate in my fic. If you keep things organized and give yourself the time and space to explore your original characters, they can be a lot more fun to work with because I also find original characters contain a strain of yourself that you normally wouldn’t have found yourself exploring before. I also love the fuck out of world building and trying to keep the world of another universe accurate (especially when timelines are vague as fuck in Star Wars to allow for retcons/potential for future stories) also makes me frustrated lol.

@englishable
The most difficult thing about creating characters is probably getting a strong enough sense of their personal histories so that they have some authenticity, or at least knowing what the major plot points in their lives are before the story opens. What or who did they want to be as children? What do they believe in, what do they want or need, and why is that? How does it drive them? Why do they react to setbacks in the way that they do? With the setting, depending how far you deviate from the places or the world that you know, it’s a similar problem of having a detailed ‘map’ of everything, and what’s behind it, so that your world and its history don’t feel too much like a stage set.
(I remember thinking, once, while half-asleep and therefore deserving of exculpation for my stupidity, that I really didn’t know too much about a supporting character’s early life and that I should consult the fandom wiki, which was followed by the absolutely terrifying realization that I AM THE FANDOM WIKI.)
The easiest thing, which also helps the challenge mentioned above, is letting the characters or the setting be kind of messy and thinking up the smaller details that are not intrinsically, fatally wedded to the plot or the overarching framework, but that really (I can only speak from the kinds of things I like to read, here) give everything a real texture. Pull in things from your life, the people you know, the stuff you’ve read, the research you’ve done or the research you’ll do (and unless you’re writing a memoir, I think everything needs at least a little bit of research behind it?) but play it fast and loose.
And, again, don’t think that you need all these details laid out before you start. You won’t really be able to answer some questions about the characters or the setting until you’ve gotten them (or it) all the way through the story at least once.

@julesrkelley
Honestly, it’s easy to me to figure out how the world works, and how it affects my characters. Sometimes it’s more difficult to start carving characters out of whole cloth, but I’m a discovery-type writer, so the minute I know how they react to one or two things, I’ve got an idea of the basic tenets of their personality and can keep discovering from there. It’s like playing Minesweeper sometimes, lol.

@obfuscatress
Biggest challenge: You will inevitably still be getting to know your character while you’re writing them. This happens with fic too (to an extent), but it’s more pronounced with origfic and I’ve often found that the character I end up with is a new iteration of the one I started with. And I don’t mean that in a simple “the events portrayed in this novel changed them” kind of way; you discover nuances to them that often mean you’ll have to rewrite early parts.
Easier than I thought: Creating characters/world from scratch. I’ve learned to work off of loose templates and ideas and you know what? Things tend to flesh themselves out.

3. What advice would you give someone attempting to write their first original novel?

@thegiddyowl
Finish what you started. Even if you think it’s shitty as all get out, at least finish the first draft so you have something to work with. What I’ve been doing is handwriting my first draft, especially since I’ve got more notebooks than I can count. Give yourself that freedom to vomit whatever you’ve got out, beginning, middle, and end, because your first draft is not your final draft.
Write everyday is a goddamn myth. I mean, you’ll probably definitely have those bursts that will last for a few day of needing to write everything down over the span of a few days. Set up writing goals, incentivize yourself by either promising yourself something nice or that you’re emailing your draft, even if it’s under what you’d write, to someone you trust. It’s really easy to overestimate how much you can write, so either start off with lower goals or strive to do a little bit better with each goal past. The reason why I hate this myth so much is that all it does is encourage fucking burn out.
Schedule your time. This will take some trial and error. Like maybe you start off with a half and hour every other day of writing (no researching, no editing, no proofreading, just writing) for two weeks, and once you get into the swing of it you can push it to 45 min to an hour. I’ll set up playlists as well so I’m not checking my timer constantly, trusting that when the music ends, so does my writing session. Also, listening to certain music when I write it creates sort of a Pavlovian response so I’m more focused on my writing.
Or, try the NaNoWriMo approach. Sometimes you just need a fire under your ass to get shit done. You don’t have to do NaNoWriMo in November. Just pick a month and do the math for daily minimum of words to meet each day. This is the sort of situation where it’s optimal to write everyday, but the difference here is that you have a clear and non-negotiable deadline. It’s okay to write every day for 30 days because that’s part of the fun of the challenge, the exception and not the rule, so your risk of burnout is less.
Read original novels while you write your novel. This is more because fan fiction is generally serialized chapters released over a period, which has a different pace/structure/development than novels do.
It’s okay if it’s a fucking mess in the first draft. Revision of your novel is half the process, and can sometimes take longer than the initial drafting process.

@englishable
FINISH THE FIRST DRAFT. You can fix absolutely everything—do plot overhauls, kill off or write out characters, totally flip the theme, anything—except a draft that never gets finished. Let it be stupendously, catastrophically, incoherently bad, to the point of changing things half-way through as you go and making a note to fix them later so that it won’t make a lick of sense to anybody else, because the first draft is entirely for you and doesn’t have to please anybody else.
There will also be things you get just right during that phase, sort of like really strong lines in a sketch, and those are worth it. Once you have that first draft, you can shape the rest of the story around those and rework it all you want. But FINISH.

@julesrkelley
My advice for writing your first novel: HAVE FUN. write what interests you. write what you like. Don’t worry about what other people are going to think of it or what’s hot on the market or whether it’s going to sell. Honestly? If you want to write 300 pages of Silmarillion-esque worldbuilding? Go for it. It’ll flex your muscles, at least.

@obfuscatress
You’ll have a good number of hiccups. It’s normal. Also your characters can be OOC even if they’re your own. There’s no canon to refer back to and you are now a self-regulatory entity. In terms of getting through an entire novel, having a few friends invested in your story can be super motivating!

4. Any indispensable resources, tips, etc?

@thegiddyowl
Now you have a novel to mine for ideas for your second, third, fourth–however many novels or short stories or whatever it is you want to write in the future. What you make and what you learn from it becomes your greatest resource.

@englishable
The Lord did not see fit to make me a natural plotter, or even much of a pantser, and outlining helps you through that First Draft Marathon. There are lots of resources out there, but the one I’ve found that works pretty well (and that everybody may already be familiar with) is the Snowflake Method. Keep your different novel drafts as distinct files so that, if you cut something major that you decide actually makes sense later, you can still work it back in because you have the work saved. I also like keeping everything on its own flash drive, but that’s just (I think) for my own peace of mind.
I’ve mentioned this before, but Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft is a very companionable, unpretentious, and overall excellent little resource for untangling your prose and being more deliberate about things like point-of-view.
This may, again, be a Me Problem, and I’m afraid this resource is particular to writers of English, but one of the hardest things about writing dialogue is trying to “hear” the character’s voices as I go, not just in the sense of what they actually say (or don’t) but in their cadence, diction, dialect, any underlying accents, etc., the things that make every voice slightly different when you’re actually speaking with real people. The characters all, for somewhat obvious reasons, start out sounding kind of like me. Even if all your characters are from the same region, are of the same nationality, are around the same age, etc, perusing the International Dialects of English Archive can be pretty fun, if just to explore the breadth and depth of ways different people from all over the world can say the same thing; the archive records each person reading a short story, and then has them give a brief interview. It’s also good “ear training,” for lack of a better word, and I’m still a big work in progress myself when it comes to that.

@julesrkelley
You can’t edit an empty page. I have a hard time about getting caught up in perfectionism and thinking my writing isn’t good enough and not wanting to write. But you can go back and edit later. You can even rip out and re-write. But you can’t fix something that’s not there, so go ahead and write what you’ve got and fix it later if you have to.

@obfuscatress
Write down names of minor side characters if you use them at all. You might need to refer back to someone’s wife and trying to find a name you picked on the fly three months ago in a 40K document is a nightmare.
Befriend as many other writers as you can. Try to find a few people you can be closer with and form a sort of reading circle with for each other’s works—sort of like BETA readers.

General advice

@lillivati
The hardest thing about going from fanfic to original is you can do anything. You start with zero borders or boundaries or definition to what you are trying to create. Those boundaries are more constructive than they are restrictive; you don’t suffer from decision paralysis or Christmas tree syndrome. The hardest and most necessary task when creating a piece of original fiction is deciding where to lay your lines. After that I’ve found it’s largely the same.

@imsfire2
The biggest piece of advice I'd give anyone writing fanfic and thinking about writing original fic for the first time is, don't be intimidated by switching over. Most of what makes a good fic will also work in a good original story.
I've never personally had trouble creating original characters & settings, but sometimes that's all I have and there's no real plot. Those stories have to go on the back burner for however long it takes until a plot solidifies.
Don't forget that all stories grow out of other stories; something that starts in your mind as an AU which is fairly distanced from the canon story, can easily slide into being an original story where the characters are archetypal figures who have some things in common with certain other existing fictional figures; who are themselves probably drawn from mythology, earlier novels, etc.

@tehanufromearthsea
This may or may not be a writing tip, but one thing that makes me loosen up and forge ahead with writing is saying to myself that I'm comfortable with throwing out everything I've done so far if it doesn't fit the novel as it develops. I remind myself that even if I write five or six chapters about the characters' origins or whatever, if it proves to be unnecessary, it's not wasted work. I can throw it away and write more.

@predictableismymiddlename
1.) Worldbuilding. Make sure that you know what the world is like. Know the rules of the world. Understand how the characters live in the world. Even if it's based in modern society, know what the expectations are. This makes it easier to keep going when the plot is hard. 2.) Do your research if you have to. 3.) Stories are fluid and can change in vision.
Another big thing for me is having someone that I can talk to. Even if you need to find someone who has no idea what you're talking about, sometimes just verbalizing helps in a way that paper and pen/keyboard and document cannot do.
For me, though, the worldbuilding is the biggest thing, because you can figure out a plot arc as you figure out the rules of the world. What knowledge needs to come through for your characters to move through the story? I tried writing a novel without any worldbuilding and a vague idea, and it went nowhere, fast.
Another thing that really helped me, courtesy of the best writing professor I’ve ever had:
A novel is like a staircase. Each chapter should have its own complete story. It should be able to stand on its own and build up to the overarching plot. I think of chapters like short stories now, except they’re building upon themselves, each other, and the larger idea instead of being a standalone.

@cats-and-metersticks
One of the biggest challenges for me when switching modes is that in original work, your readers don't automatically know or care about your characters, so you have to put a lot more work into that kind of background—why should we care about these people? Do we even like them? You may, like me, often run into a character unlikeability problem—where your characters are accidentally too flawed/make too many mistakes and alienate readers.
Related—I think it's unexpectedly difficult to get your readers invested in your character, and to create an arc that will be satisfying without being cheesy or clichéd.
My creative writing professor would say that the most important thing is *planning* and the best way not to get stuck is to actually outline your entire story (even if you're not completely married to every detail) before you start—it'll help prevent you from getting stuck/burnt out if you know where it's going.
Here's a contradictory tip lol: take all writing advice and all comments on your drafts with a grain of salt—ultimately it's your story and your process no one can take that away from you.

Footnotes

Responses have been lightly edited (mostly for punctuation) and potentially identifying information removed
Respondents are credited under their Tumblr URLs since that’s how I received their comments
If you’d rather be credited under a different name or have your name redacted, please comment to let me know