How to find fics on your own?

Yeah, looking through the Sturgeon's Law pile in "Just In" can be entertaining for a short while, but sometimes I just want something to read.

How do you guys find stories on your own?

edited 6th Sep '14 7:56:21 AM by BaffleBlend

Well, there are many options, one that has a moderately good chance of working is the Fanfiction Recomendation pages in This Very Wiki (at least I can guarantee my own recomendations).

Another strategy is filtering but that's costly, so another strategy is to look at good writer's favorites. Good writers tend to read good fics, so it's a good strategy to take a look at their favorites.

I usually recommend filter tiering by interest and length and then attempting to use ~judgement~ based on the intro.

There are some really good communities out there that showcase really good fics, but those can be rather difficult to find.

See what fanfics have a works page on this very wiki, and see if yu can find one that suits your tastes.

Usually I just go to the FF.net page and pick out something that doesn't look bad. If the summary has terrible grammar is badly written or flat-out refuses to tell you anything about the story, I know to skip it. If I've found an author I like, sometimes I'll go to their page and see what else they've done.

edited 6th Sep '14 4:20:54 PM by Mort08

Oh yeah, and if I'm in the mood for a lengthy fic with good quality I usually go to the filters and choose stories ranging from most reviews or favourites. That tends to yield promising results (and it is, in fact, how I found some of my favourite fics).

You can also sort your fandom by favorites or follows, and that will usually net you lots of good stories.

On F Fnet, I go to the filter settings:

Change genre to "without romance". This usually clips the selection by about a 1/3, maybe 2/3s.

Select "English".

Turn the Rating from K-T to "anything".

And if I'm feeling fancy, I might sort it by updated fics first, or published fics first. It sucks how some fics get pushed down by somebody/a group of others uploading 400-700 word lemons, or a new fic getting bogged down because, suddenly, 10 people wanted to put an author's note on their story as a new chapter.

I grab most of them from here nowadays, but when I had more time I used to filter more by word length than anything else. It requires a decent bit of self filtering through the 90%, but if an author puts 20000+ words into a fic, they're less likely to abandon it.

Also,make sure to check the author's page, try to get an idea of how often they update and how many fics they write. If it's their first, I try to give them benefit of the doubt unless they stop improving.

I just go to Fanfiction.net or Ao3 and look in the fandoms I am interested in. I tend to have specific tastes, so I use the filters if I am looking for something that fits them. (I like darkfic, I like stuff that's dramatic and tragic most of the time, so I put the filters on for that. Sometimes, I'm looking for focus on a specific character). Most of the time, I pass up Romance.

I sometimes look in on the Fanfiction Recommendations here. I've found a few good Hunger Games things I've read via here. I don't do this too much just because most of you all seem to like long, multichaptered epics in your fan fiction. My tastes are different. I don't often have the patience to read beyond one-shots. If I read anything multi-chapter, I usually need to be on it within the first few chapters in order to follow it chapter-by-chapter. (I tend to save my "long reading" attention for published books). Most of what gets recommended anywhere tends to be the long stuff that I'm *not* looking for, so I have to look at the summary to see if it's a quick-read.

Some of my fandoms are easier to find good fics and authors in than others. I've been interested in Kid Icarus recently and the creative-writing fandom for that is fairly small, so I've found "the good authors" - a mental list of authors whose works I consistently like. Other fandoms of mine, such as The Legend Of Zelda are harder to find stellar work for because they are huge and decades-long. Then, there are some fandoms that go into that I don't expect to find superlative fics for - I read stuff in the Super Smash Brothers fandom. Rarely do I find anything impressive. Fortunately, I have a healthy love for So Bad, It's Good and enjoy munching on cheese. I probably actually munch more "cheese" than "steak" in fandom. Sometimes, I'm more in the mood for it.

So, I just search, filter for what I'm looking for, either through site-filters or just scanning summaries, depending on the site... I look in on recs occasionally and I have a high tolerance for drippy, gooey cheese-sauce.

I find stuff that looks interesting on Fanfiction recs pages, find something I'm really into, check out the author, and then check their favourites, and then if I like the author of one, check their favourites and so on. Which seems to be what most people do. But yes I suppose it helps I like long fics.

I will say that favorites and follows aren't everything. I've found many a good fic that's been overlooked for more popular stories of more dubious quality in the past. In order to find something interesting, I often just dig through my fandom's section until I find something with a premise that interests me or something that looks competently written.

I also like to filter for new stories as well because sometimes a brand new author may be presenting something well-written that's simply buried in the flood of other fics.

Usually I look through whatever's most recent, or use the filters if I'm looking for something specific. If I'm on AO 3, I either filter out fics with an "explicit" rating, or ignore them.

I don't tend to sort things by what's gotten the most attention, because depending on the fandom, that's not always the good stuff.

edited 23rd Sep '14 9:45:46 PM by SapphireBlue

Do a Search with your fave character! Or 30.000 or more words!