Updated on 6/12/09

Wow, a new year and a new post? Amazing. Anyway, my naruto stories are dead. Time to make it official. Realistically, I have no motivation to finish them. Ever. Sorry for all the fans out there of Black Sheep; I know it was kinda popular, but I just can't write for it. Believe me, I've tried. It's boring to write for it and when a story gets boring it's dead. However, I will be redoing "Eight Deadly Sin", so that's something if you enjoy my work. Also, taking back up the Ranma mantel. I'd like to at least get one fiction done for it, if only to relive the glory days of Ranma Fan Fiction.

More and more, I'm seeing low-quality fics in fandoms that used to have quality work. Dialog should flow, people. It doesn't need to be verbose to sound well, but it does have to give the reader a sense of being there. When I write, I like to imagine I'm watching whatever it is I'm writing playing on a television screen and it's my job to translate that into story form. I think that's the best way to write fan fiction. If you go into it thinking "I'm going to write a book" then you're doing it wrong. This isn't a novel, this is fan fiction. That means there is a source media, be it a show or a comic, that you draw from. If you try to make something too original, it will be very hard to put into writing.

Next, I'd like to address dialog and exposition. Exposition is "all that stuff" between the dialog. It's the setting, the action, and the physical description of the scene you're trying to project. Although some may disagree with me, I believe that you cannot write a fiction with dialog alone. This goes back to my previous point of playing out what you're writing in your head first and then writing it. You have to explain it to the reader; they don't read fan fiction for a script, which is what just dialog is. Most of the time, if they use that much imagination, they can just imagine their own scenes in their head and not read your stuff at all. Painting the picture for them is an absolute must. Stemming from this, you don't need more than one punctuation at the end of a sentence. If you've framed it correctly, the reader will be able to gauge how powerful something the character does is, rather than being beaten over the head with several exclamation points.

Finally, mix it up. Don't annotate every piece of dialog with "he said, she said". Use adjectives! That's what they are there for. Good dialog should flow seamlessly with exposition and vice-versa. Having the same things over and over again distracts the reader and they are more likely to give up reading altogether and counting how many times you repeat the same adjective for fun. This, of course, doesn't mean you have to have a certain amount of exposition before you have your dialog. Instead, you should just read what you've written and see that the scene is adequately rendered. There's no magic number of words for this and it will vary between writers.

I am not perfect, however. Even after doing this on and off since 2005, I still have a long way to go. I have trouble ending chapters, creating logical break points for scenes, and doing enough exposition to frame the scene correctly. However, I do like to think I know what I like to read. Scripts without exposition, monotonous word usage and overabundant punctuation are among my biggest pet peeves and I usually won't finish reading fics that do these things.

These are, I emphasize again, my own personal thoughts. Some people may like fics that I don't; it's up to the reader. However, I wanted to at least put down my keys to a good fiction. I hope all of this will help someone because it has certainly helped me over the years. I'll add some more tips when I think them up, alright? Thanks for reading.