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Chris did a thing.

It's too bad the kind of people who write bad fanfic probably won't ever bother to read it.

RIP, it'll just kinda sit there now, being lonely and retarded while everyone passes it over.

I read it, I swear! Thanks for the advice. It all seems like stuff that should be pretty obvious, but I suppose fanfiction is generally made by younger writers so it makes sense to go remedial. I'm sure a lot of new authors will find it very helpful (assuming they read the articles) ^_^ I also appreciate the suggestion of alternate universes, it's not something I usually think of when drumming up ideas.

Tip #3 is good, I know AU fic got really popular at some point when it used to be considered heresy.

I've only been tempted to write a couple fanfics and I guess that's what they would fall under. Although I used to have settings I thought about a lot without ever being tempted to write any of it down, because changing it up drastically was always part of the process and one simply didn't do that back at the time I was still intentionally reading fanfic, the fans were very protective of The Canon.

Although looking back it's not that I deliberately did the alternate universe thing so much as threw out anything that was dumb or didn't interest me, sometimes jettisoning central characters entirely and then liberally made shit up to fill in the blanks where I felt it was missing. Or sometimes I just wasn't sure what happened with a series and continued it myself (it wasn't always simple to just pirate shows or comics you suddenly didn't have access to anymore or even look up details on them back then). And sometimes I mashed a few different settings together for no particular reason, idk I was a bored kid. I think the Buffy universe was the greatest victim of this.

Hey, way to go!