Fanfiction has a kind of a disreputable reputation. This is based, I think, on the fact that it first came to the public's attention through the Star Trek fandom. Star Trek fans, as everyone thinks they know have no life (Everyone also thinks they know that once, at a fan convention, William Shatner told all the Trekkies to "get a life", but actually that's from a Saturday Night Live skit). Anything to do with them, is automatically vaguely comical. Also, fanfiction is not just associated with the Star Trek fandom, but with what a lot of people might think was the most embarrassing part of it, which is the pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as lovers. I don't know why it is, but the fact is, there are an awful lot of people in the general public, who are so conventionally-minded that they don't like to see any characters paired, except for the ones who are couples in the original material. And of course back when the Star Trek fandom was first getting big, and the first Kirk/Spock stories were being published, same sex love was still considered fairly disturbing by a majority of the general public.
Fortunately, times have changed. Fanfiction nowadays can lose its disreputable image. What is it really, when it's done right, but amateurs doing what TV and movie writers get paid big money to do, writing about other peoples' characters? There is of course, the problem that a lot of the time it's not done right, but why should that be a disadvantage? The same thing can be said of any genre, can't it? Have you ever tried to read a teenage girl's poetry?
Fanfiction is written by people who love a story (usually a book or a movie) so much, that they don't want it to end. Mostly, it's written by people who love a character from a story, so much that they don't want to say good-bye to them. Most of us start out by writing about our favorite characters. And we start out by writing as fans, reveling in every detail about them, maximizing the word-count we give to them, not trying to do anything but spend as much time on them as we possibly can, without driving all our potential readers away. Which brings me to the cardinal sin of fanfiction.
Driving potential readers away: The quickest way to do that, is to write your main character inaccurately. Remember, most readers of fanfiction are there because of their love for a particular character. This is why if you go to Fanfiction.net, which is the biggest source for fanfiction online, you will see that it's laid out so that first, you can find stories about the exact book or series you want to read about and that, inside all the most popular series, it's organized further so that you can find stories about your favorite characters.
Dirty secret, I still go to Fanfiction.net sometimes, just to see if anyone's written something new about my favorite series character of all time, Pegasus J. Crawford, from the series Yu-Gi-Oh! Most of the time there isn't. -- Pegasus was only the villain during one season of the series, and after that he showed up a couple of times, mostly as a sort of a comic figure. -- And when there is, a lot of the time it's written by somebody who doesn't understand him very well, so I don't bother reading it.
Some people understand a character intuitively, but for a lot of us, it takes practice. For most of us fans, there are certain moments in our chosen series, that just speak to us, that encapsulate in a moment or two, all that we love most about our favorite character. Sometimes it's hard though, to remember that it's the context of the rest of the series, that gives those moments their meaning. There are for instance, a lot of very popular villain characters, who spend most of their screen-time doing terrible, evil, awful things, and then at the very end of their time in the series, it comes out that they did it all because of their Tragic, Tragic Past. Novice fanwriters will often make the mistake of "woobiefying" these characters (from the slang term woobie), or in other words, writing them more endearing and pitiable than they ever are, any other time in the series, just because of this last little end-bit. I have a friend who automatically clicks away from any story where any of the characters have been woobiefied even the least little bit. Me? Well I'd never have any new Pegasus-stories to read, if I didn't read the ones where he'd been woobiefied a little.
It is rather nauseating though, to read a story where your favorite kickass-villain has been turned into something sweet and gentle and pathetic. It's also aggravating when a writer will notice a faint bit of tension between two characters, in one passing scene, get to thinking dirtily about it, and then wrench the characters' natures all around to write a fetish-story about them. There is a very popular pairing in the Yu-Gi-Oh! fan-community, for instance, a sort of a dom-sub thing, that is entirely based on the fact that one major asshole-character, Kaiba Seto, occasionally uses derogatory terms to address another character, Jounuchi Katsuya, whom he mostly doesn't notice at all. Personally, I find it annoying as hell, because neither character is ever shown as wanting to spend any time at all with the other one, except for maybe to play a card game together (and even that's one-sided), and the only way to write them as any kind of a steady couple is to absolutely mangle the personalities of both of them. It is a popular pairing though, so you can take my opinion with a grain of salt here.
Please don't get me wrong, I have no problem with stories that pair characters who are enemies in the original series. Enmity creates tension, and tension, well it's what wakes a lot of us up and makes us start thinking dirty. -- Indifference now? But, I'm not going to keep ranting about Puppyshipping. -- For some reason that I don't understand, most fanfiction doesn't seem to come out of romance series, but out of stories that are more action-oriented. And most action series don't have a lot of couples in them (and for some reason, the ones they do have mostly aren't the most popular pairings), so if you're going to write romance or erotic fiction about them, you're going to end up extrapolating a lot from the nonsexual tension between the characters. Villains always get paired with the heroes. Best friends usually get paired as well. And there is a subset of fanfiction that involves just finding ways to pair all the most unlikely characters together as plausibly as possible, which is very popular with both writers and readers.
Good fanfiction then, involves writing your characters as much like they are in the original material as possible, while putting them into pairings they would never have considered in the original material, in a hundred million years. If you can fit a fetish or two in there as well, that's all the better. Internet-anonymity makes people feel free, and believe me, whatever your secret quirk, you will have no trouble finding an audience that is delighted rather than squicked by it. What it doesn't involve ever though, is writing yourself into the story.
You will find fan-people who actually like to read stories with self-insertion in them, but for most of us they are taboo. A lot of times the self-insertion will be confused with the Mary Sue (AKA the character who is more awesome, more beautiful, and more perfect than anyone else in the story), and people sometimes take pains to distinguish the one from the other. Self-insertions do not have to be Mary Sue-type characters, they will say; there do exist writers out there, who are skilled enough to write themselves in fresh and interesting ways. Personally, I still think they suck. Fanfiction is all about seeing our favorite characters in action, not about learning something new, about some random person, and I no more want to see an author insert herself into a fanfic, than I want to see Dennis Snee traipsing around the set of The Simpsons with Homer and Marge.
Perhaps I'm just angry because like I said, there is not much written these days about my own favorite character, and a lot of what is getting written includes self-insertions. Girls for some reason like to fantasize about themselves being Pegasus' daughter, or the one really understanding woman, who can bring him back from the brink of tragedy and death. This is understandable of course. These are the kinds of fantasies girls have. They're also the kind of thing you should never let anyone else read, in the entire world, with the possible exception of a best friend or two. Anyone with aspirations of being a good fanwriter, needs to keep practicing until they have moved past these embarrassing experiments before they start posting (either that or be ready to do some heavy deletion to their FF.net account once they start to mature).
HyperSmash
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