Is my first fanfic doomed to failure?

Ever heard the phrase that "To create something great, you need to create something good first, and to create something good you need to create something bad first etc" or something to that effect?

This suppose to be encouraging, saying that our failures are just foundation for future success. Thats great and all, but that means I have to fail first. Which doesn't sounds fun. How much do I have to fail? Should I look at my list of projects, and then focus on the one I care least about?

I want to write great Ben 10 Spin-Off that focuses on new all-alien team away from Earth. I have great plans, but should I delay them so I can make garbage first? Even if my writing improves during my first "season", badly written early chapters will turn away potential readers. Unlike TV shows I cant exactly afford a weak start. Should I write backwards? Write fillers first? Anyone can tell how it should go from experience?

edited 27th Feb '15 9:32:41 AM by Sunchet

No.

Just because it might not be Star Wars doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for greatness. Always strive to be the best you can be. Who knows—you might surprise yourself and make something great.

I wish you luck! Dare to Be Badass, my friend!

You could write some one-shot fics as practice. Or some low-stakes stuff like a Round Robin fic.

If you get halfway through your epic and find yourself embarrassed by the earlier chapters, you can always go back and edit them. But I would strongly encourage you to finish the story first. For a lot of authors, switching from writing new material to editing old material (especially if there’s a lot to edit) causes them to lose all momentum. Lots of stories don’t recover from that.

more or less yes.

if you don't want your first fic to be crap, just prepare to delete 200% of what you end up publishing.

because it will probably be crap until you finish the whole thing, read it, delete the 50% crappiest parts, rewrite it, go over it again, delete another 50% of it, rewrite those parts, decide what you originally thought was good isn't good enough, delete another 75% of your work and practically restart from scratch, and repeat the whole thing again.

I'd say if you aren't prepared to delete at least half of what you write, you probably aren't setting your personal standards high enough.

edited 27th Feb '15 12:16:27 PM by willyolio

Yup, don't get caught in the perfectionist trap. It took me years to get over it and if I'd done it sooner I'd probably be a much better writer by now.

Write, practice, improve, edit, repeat.

...I may have an advantage in the fact I started with R Ps in the RP Fora, and worked through my really abysmal shittiness there.

Yeah, I worked through my crappiness in creative writing exercises in school, in forum-based round robin fics (on forums that either don’t exist anymore, or had their entire archive wiped since I left), and in an original screenplay I wrote and have never shared on the internet.

Weird thing is, I thought that screenplay would be my magnum opus. It was only as I became a better writer that I realized the premise was fundamentally unsalvageable.

Just write it. Don't take the adage so literally. If you REALLY hate the earlier chapters after you get into it, rewrite them and revamp them.

No matter what you write, some part of it will almost certainly be considered crap.

Write it anyway. If you write nothing, you can never improve. And you might decide that, after writing it, you're now ready for something bigger and better than you could have imagined before you started writing.

my first fic was crap, but it was crap that managed to get 77 reviews in 13 chapters. it just has to be better crap than the other crap, and people might still like it. and if people like it—hell, if you had fun writing it, then it's not a failure.

If you're writing crap you don't care about for the sake of getting better at writing, all you're going to accomplish is getting better at writing crap you don't care about. Write what you want to write, and pay attention to how people react to it. It's the only way to really get better at writing.

I would have a hard time motivating myself to write in a fandom that didn't really interest me. What finally pushed me to start writing was realizing "If you want to read it, you'll have to write it yourself." There's essentially no real fandom for a series I'm very invested in emotionally, so crappy or not, I started writing.

As a veteran writer with a large number of stories under my belt, some good, some meh, some terrible, I can say the epic failures are learning experiences. Over time you'll find what you're best at, what you're passable at, and what you just shouldn't attempt.