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Welcome to Code Name D's Fan Fiction Underdround

So, you want to learn how to write fan fiction.  Not a problem.  At this point, I will give you a piece of advice that was given to me when I was starting out.  Take two aspirin, two beers (or two sarsaparillas, if your under age), and sleep it off.

This section is intended to be a sort of crash course in writing.  To give you the basics of the basics to at least get you started, or just enough to allow you to experiment with writing, if only to see if you like it.

If you're really interested in learning how to write, then I highly recommend you go to your library or book store and by a few books on the art.  Usually, the best type of book is the "write that novel" variety.  But until then, you can enjoy this crash course.  In the book stores, you can usually fined these books in the references

Code Name D's Field Training (A crash course on the art of writing)

Main Table of Contents  (TOC) Introduction (On this page) What is writing What is fan fiction How to start The Price of failure. Quality Counts How I Get By The Life Span of your Creative Process My credentials? Contributions are welcome Chapter I: The Basics of Writing  Chapter II: Technical Presentation Chapter III: Story Architecture. Chapter IV: The Role Playing Game. How to write for fun. Appendix I: Special Dictionaries Ranma 1/2 Japanese to English dictionary. Soul Trek Officer Indoctrination Manual (New) Other Web Pages of value. Cat Cafe's, English to Mandain Dictionary Links to other "How to write" pages.

It is also an underestimated media form.  Any fool can punch letters on a keyboard (case in point), and this leads some to conclude that writing is simple and easy.  Trust me, it's not.  But that doesn't mean that you can't master it, or that this isn't a hobby that you can't enjoy and explore.

This particular media that were talking about here, is called "whole writing", or that what you read on the page, is the finished product, and ready to be read by any one.  This is in contrast to "technical writing" (text books and instruction manuals) and "production writing" (scripts for movies and TV).

Contrary to what some might say or think.  Making fan fiction (say something about Star Trek) is not illegal.  What copyright laws are intended to do is to protect the original authors ability to make a living off their work.

The general rule of thumb is that you can not sell, or use to sell, any thing related to Star Trek without permission from Paramount.  And this vary reason is actually why fan fiction, fan art, and other fan based media have thrived on the Internet.   Every thing else, is quickly being integrated into "for pay" web pages.  But for Star Trek fan fiction, to do that without Paramount's permission is illegal.  And to post origianl Star Trek material free of charge doses not require permission from Paramount.

One might be incline to think this hurts Paramount's franchise.  But so far, this doesn't seem to be the case.  Entertainment companies in Japan have even concluded that freely distributing fan based material is advantageous, free advertising so to speak.

Current theory is that fan fiction (so long as it is not sold) is protected as free speech. (Ahem, at least in the US.  All bets are off for Grate Brition.)

Fan fiction is also something else to the novice writer.  Writing with some of the hardest elements of writing taken out.  Manly that of world building and a concept called the familiarity barrier.  In short, it's just a lot easier to write something about Ranma 1/2, working with a wide body of information, than to produce characters and the world they live in from scratch.  Thus, fan fiction is an ideal way for a novice to learn the basic art of  before having to learn the art of world building first.

Think of a piece of writing as a form of sculpting.  Your not just writing sentences, but shaping words to build an interesting sentence to read.  Repeat this some odd hundreds of times, and you have a story.  And like a piece of sculpture, there are four things to be concerned with.  Things that I will call "workable" shape, expression, texture, and baking.

Expression is the basic idea or story or plot that you want to present.  That's the easy part.  Chances are you already have one of those in your head right now.

Texture, is the words you chose to carry your idea.  This is where half of the art lies.  This web page is dedicated to giving you some of the basics to this texture.

Workable shape.  A piece of sculpture has other concerns, like gravity.  This is the other half of the art, and where many novice writers bite the dust.  The writer's equivalent to gravity is punctuation, spelling, sentence structure, grammar, and typo errors.  The stuff that you learned in English is not just important, but vary important, vital even.  After all, a poorly written piece that is hard to read, will never get read all the way though.

Then there is baking.  A sculpture made of clay is baked, or processed, in order to make the clay hard enough to survive the ages.  A writer also processes their work.  Its called proof reading.  Not a single professional lets others read their rough drafts.  Not even their editors.  This is not a mater of skill or experience, but a mater of pride and quality.

Keep those four things in mind when you work.  And you're ready to start now.  You heard me right.  Get going.  Pick up that pen, and start.  Not to say that you will produce a master piece, or even that what you make will even be something you want to show.  But writing, as any other art forms, is something that one that some one learns from experience.  This one rule applies  thought out this crash course.  If your inspired, write.

Not even.

For a writer, weather he/she is a novice, or has ten books on the best seller list, failure, is simply not being read.  That’s it.  If no one reads your work, then you need to work at it.  Of course, you have to take this into perspective.  You can't mark yourself as a failure if you don't sell as many books as Steven King dose.  Plus, just because a work you posted on the net isn't getting any hits, may only mean the  link is broken.

This is all of course assuming that you want to be read.  Actually, many writers don't want to be read.  I was that way for a long time, not thinking that any thing I did was good enough.  What a difference time and practice makes.

But also remember that every thing gets criticized.  Even Steven King (Only he can point at his book sales to cheer himself up.) gets some scathing reviews every now and then.  Actually, for a novice writer, honest criticism is worth their weight in gold, because it offers a direct learning experience.  Heck, I STILL get lambasted for my spelling. (Not unjustly ether.)  But criticism offers proof on one thing, some one has read your work.  (Of course, getting flamed just sucks big time all the way around.)

Any way, keep in mind that the vary vary vary worst thing you can do, might end up as MST3K fodder.  So no mater what, you pick up your ego, dust it off, and start all over again.

Then it struck me like a ton of bricks.  The worst speller in fan fiction history, and I don't even mention this.  It is nothing short of ironic then, of what I am about to say.  Even hypocritical if you wish.  It is vitally important to spell correctly, and to use proper grammar!  I can't stress that enough.  Believe me, I get flamed on a regular basses by telling me that I spelled this, that, and the other thing wrong.

My first big brake came when I finally got my first Webster's Bad Spellers' Dictionary as a birthday present.  But things really started to change for the better when I started to get a hold of word processors with better and better spell checkers.  I use Micro Soft Word for most of my grudge work, but I usually end up going to that old and rather worn dictionary on a regular bases.

But as bad as my spelling is, this has only lead me to understand how important it is.  Miss spelled words are vary annoying to some.  A few are even driven by an unknown force to pull out a red pen and correct on the spot (such as grammar teachers), promoting them to stop reading.  When taken to the extreme, your work can actually induce headaches.  The better the spelling, the easier the work is to read.

It's okay to post a draft of your work, but not proof reading it only means that you put on display all the annoying typos and a hole whole of mistakes that I guaranteed you've made.

This is a guide line to the process of how you bring your vision to you're readers.  Think of it as a life span of sorts, or at least the life span that you should have.  Every writer has a different way of writing.  Some like to get the core idea down as quickly as possible, then go back over it several times to work it into the shape they one.  Others have to see that their work is as close to being "perfect" as they write, going back and correcting what ever errors crop up as they type.  Regardless, every writer still needs to proof read their work at least once.  Some times you will need to proof read several times, depending on your writing stile.

Here is the typical life span that your fiction should have:

• Conception – Figuring out exactly what you want to do, and how to do it.
• Rough draft – Putting your idea down on paper.
• First Draft – The first edit.  Here you refine your idea and correct conception errors.
• Fine Draft – Review once again to make sure your passage makes sense and works.  Begin correcting spelling and grammar error.
• Final Draft – Your proof reading stage.  Most of your errors should be removed, but you are bound to miss a few words and sentences.  Believe it or not, these are usually the most obvious errors that you think that you "should" have seen the first time.
• Off to the Editor – Every writer should have an editor.  All an editor is, is a critical eye with a knack for making corrections for both spelling and punctuation.  He/she could just be a fellow writer.  If you don't have such a volunteer, then the best thing to do is to set it aside for a few days to a couple weeks.  This will allow a lot of the material to be "unloaded" from your brain and give you a more detached perspective, allowing you to catch the errors that you couldn't see before.
• Final inspection – Once your editor is done with it, take another look at the whole work.  Make sure your editor didn't change anything they shouldn't have, or have made any errors of their own with corrections.

Editors for publishers are professionals who are educated in to what to look for in the way of mistakes.  They not only edit for spelling and grammar, but content as well.  All to make the work more "sellable."  As a result, there are editors out there who will edit for money (usually so many dollars a page).  But you don't need any thing like that.  All you really need is just another pare of eyes.  Just having some one else read your fiction illuminates error acceptance.  Even so, you should always go over there work, just to make sure (as well as to catch any errors they have made.)

If you can't find any one willing to volunteer for this task, take hart.  You still have a way to get pass error acceptance by simply putting your work aside.  Usually for a week or so.  This way you won't have every word stuck in your memory, tricking you to pass over the obvious.

 Now you're ready to release your "rough draft" to your readers.  You should note that all of the editing is manly to fish out spelling, grammar, and other technical errors.  It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with content other than clarity.  You also want to make sure that your editor has first crack at it than your "pre-readers."  Why?  You will know why when you are handed back 20 corrections of the same thing.

Okay, so why would you want to listen to me when it comes to how to write?  What kind of credentials do I have?  None in fact.  I do not teach writing at any university, or have published any successful top selling books on the mater.  Heck, I can't even spell tabogen to save my life. (case in point).  All I am, is a novice writer who is self taught, and got a hold of those "write your own novel" how too books when ever possible.  It seems that I've been writing for my entire life.  The reason why I am sharing all this with you, is because I wished some one would have taught me when I was starting out.  My stuff would have been a lot more readable back then, and thus, I could have shared my word, rather than writing in the closet as it were.

Secondly, I tend to be suspicious of those who "teach" writing for a living.  Professional artists.  Take a look at any form of art.  Every thing from painting to music such as jass and pop. Not a single "professional" in the bunch   Even the worlds greatest inventors were practically throw out of school, before they became famous and renowned. The next Tostoy or Twain will never come from a Univisity.  (Come to think of it, they will be lucky to be discoverd in there life time) In the end, I like to invoke what Robin Willems once said in a movie of his.  "To believe that you can compare one poem with another, to find the better poem, is to miss the point."