There are a few unspoken rules of proper writing, things I can’t help but notice that happen in the writing of fanfiction, particularly. This guide will hopefully help you straighten up your stories so they won’t sound like an 11-year-old girl wrote them.

1. Stop spelling things wrong. Use your word-processor’s built-in spellchecker, for heaven’s sake. And learn your homonyms– words that sound the same but are spelled differently, as the spellchecker often doesn’t notice these. For example, “I put on a pear of shoes” does not make any sense, but may end up in your final product if you don’t know any better.

2. Stop teasing with short chapters. Drabbles don’t count, as they are normally mini-oneshots and have their own plot, but if you’re churning out a full-length story, don’t publish two paragraphs of pithy content and call it a chapter. More importantly, DO NOT make your whole story consist of these! It is incredibly ridiculous.

3. Will you shut up about hair color, already? Something I see FAR too often in some stories nowadays is referring to characters by their hair color. IE: “The redhead gestured to the blonde to come closer.” It’s fine once in a while, but not every other paragraph. Pronouns, if not the actual character names work just fine.

4. Annoying “speaking” verbs. “‘The soup was great!’ she thundered.” No, no, no. You don’t need to describe every bit of dialogue with a fancy verb to describe how the subject spoke. Use these only when it’s really needed, like “he yelled” or “she whispered”. Did you know that when reading, the human brain doesn’t spend too much time on the word “said”? It interprets and skips right along to the next word. So you don’t need to worry about being repetitive by using “said” all the time.

5. Avoid Mary-Sues. A Mary-Sue (or in male form, “Gary-Stu” or “Marty-Stu”) is a character with little to no flaws, the “perfect” character. It is often a portrayal of how the author wishes they were, or a self-insert. Think Bella from Twilight.  They often have no character development. Avoid these like the plague.

6. A little more on “self-inserts”: A self-insert is basically self-describing, it’s inserting yourself as a main character who is most likely a Mary-Sue. As tempting as this may be, it is not good form and you probably shouldn’t publish anything like this expecting great reviews. I once saw a story where the author (we’ll call her Sally) wrote a fic about her favorite pairing having a perfect little child. Guess what the child’s name was? Yup, Sally.

7. Songfics. We get it, you’re passionate about your music. But it gets really annoying when you copy and paste entire songs into your story. I normally just skip completely over these stories once I see “Songfic” in the description, as songfics are just an easy cop-out to increase your wordcount. Do you really think anyone’s going to sit there and read all those lyrics?

In conclusion, you are now armed with several “best practices” of fanfiction writing, even fiction writing in general. You’ll now be able to more easily point out vital flaws in your fanfiction and hopefully be able to curb these bad habits of fanfic writing.