Fanfiction: A Case Study

How I Learned How To Write

Now... you might be thinking, Joyce... what are you doing? This blog post is called a fanfiction case study and you've started it off by saying how you learned to write.

To which I'd respond, well... the correct wording is how I learned to write well, but yeah. I was an awful writer for a good chunk of my life. Fanfiction saved me. (Quite literally if you think about how many grade deciding papers I've had to write during my college career.) 

So buckle up, this is a... weirdly serious story.

Let me give you some backstory. In elementary school, I was awful at reading and writing. I failed almost every spelling test and was so bad at reading that they had to give me a special tutor. I remember hating it so much especially after I missed our luna moths hatching from their chrysalis'. I thought it was dumb and would rather be doing just about anything else. Then, I was introduced to the Harry Potter series. I became a much better reader after that and by fourth grade, I'd already managed to finish Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. 

How awful is 'awful'?

So, thanks to Harry Potter, I'd kickstarted my ability to read, but my grasp of the English language was still... rough. 

My sophomore year of high school I was in an advanced English class (I really don't know why) and the first paper of the year my teacher put the total grades on the board.

A: 3

B: 15

C: 7

D: 1

Guess who the D was. 

I was going to have an excerpt from an old letter I wrote back in high school, but after spending three weeks looking for it, I'm just going to give you a... brief overview of some issues with the letter. 

• Every time I tried to use they're, their, or there I used the wrong one.
• Somehow I thought using a semicolon was a good idea.
• Commas, were, everywhere.
• Don't forget the run on sentences that just kept going and going even though the letter was only like 300 words, and don't get me started on commas...
• Did I mention spelling? Yeah, I'm really bad at spelling words. Never look at stuff I write by hand, even now I spell 50% of everything I write wrong the first time. 
• I used the word funnest unironically. 

It hurts just thinking about it. I'm not sure how I managed to do that bad since I was using Word and the few pieces I opened looking for the letter have my spell checking software yelling at me to fix it, but that's how I was. 

What changed?

I stumbled onto a website called fanfiction.net a couple times while looking for fan art for some games and stories I liked. At first, it was just a passing read, one story here and there, but that all changed my Junior year of high school. I found the surprisingly large collection of Transformers fanfiction and kept reading, and reading. (You don't have to click on those, they're just some stories that are good.)

It was easy, I got new stories on my phone, got to see all the creative tellings of these characters that I had no idea so much backstory (thanks, Michael Bay). Soon enough, I had so many story ideas bouncing around in my head I had to start writing them down. 

That Christmas my parents had gotten me a new laptop to help pursue my interest in digital art and with schoolwork. So I started typing. Just quick summaries of every story I could think of at first. Then I started writing. It was horrible, but I thought I was doing really good. All the while I kept reading. I read over 300 stories (not all of them very long, very good, or remotely finished) and then I started to notice things. Things that bugged me, plot points that bored me, spelling errors, grammar errors, plot holes, you name it. I started noticing it. When I went back to my own writings they were just as obvious. 

By reading horribly written stories, I started noticing what was wrong with my own writings. 

What happened next?

I kept writing. One day my senior year I even worked up the courage to post one of my stories online. I won't post the link, I've... grown a lot as a writer since then and I'd rather not share it with the world. (I know what you're thinking, it's nothing inappropriate. I just would rather remain anonymous with it.) By the time I took a... very prolonged hiatus I'd hit 30 chapters, 70,000 words, 280 reviews, 255 followers, and 51 people had added me as a favorite author. Unfortunately, I was really busy the summer between high school and my first year of college so I took a break... I haven't posted a chapter since. 

At the same time, I've gotten an A on almost every single paper I've written and have received a bit of praise for my creative writing works... so there's that I guess. If you want to see some of that I have two in my portfolio. 

The Tales of the Orange Sun, a short story about a girl whose father is in the military.

A Different Point of View, a very short story that was a point-of-view writing prompt that made my dad cry. Oops.

Moral of the Story?

1. If you want to get better at writing... read a bunch of really bad writing. If you choose to go down the fanfiction route like I did... watch out for descriptions that sound like gross stuff is going to happen. Maybe avoid those, they're often worse than you'd think. Just stick to normal bad stuff. 
2. Write. Keep writing. Write some more. Find something you love to write about. I HATED writing. HATED IT WITH A BURNING PASSION. Mostly because the only time I wrote was for school papers that bored me so much and for a majority of my life I was going about it the wrong way. If you read my post about Heather Armstrong you know I have ADD. I wasn't diagnosed until freshman year of high school after my little brother was diagnosed. (Which means I get to fight my insurance company every time I need a refill since I was diagnosed after the age of 12, yay me.) I couldn't concentrate on the papers, I hated writing the papers, I hated writing the rough drafts, I got horrible grades, and the only time I'd get corrections was when it was already too late. Find something you don't hate. It works.
3. Seriously, follow point 1. There's some weird stuff out there. Sometimes, I wish I could bleach what I've seen out my brain. Stay safe out there.

Yeah... that's about it. I could probably write a novel about this, but I'll leave it at that. 
Happy writing!