Six Quick And Easy Hacks To 🆙 The Quality Of Your Fanfiction!

six quick and easy hacks to 🆙 the quality of your fanfiction!

as promised, here it is! i’m not here to tell you how to plot out your story, or how to write your characters’ personalities. the tips i’m sharing are more on formatting and structure, secret (not really) cheat codes to instantaneously make your already written work even better! 

my qualifications? being a tumblr hag for over five years (my even more embarrassing pre k-pop writeblr included!) so i’ve unlocked quite a bit of secrets and discovered some eurekas throughout my time here HAHAHAH. anyway, let’s start!

#1 VARIETY IN PARAGRAPH LENGTHS, SENTENCE LENGTHS, AND SENTENCE STARTERS.

nothing turns me off more than seeing paragraph blocks after paragraph blocks when looking for some new fics to read, especially when you’re reading from a cramped up device such as your phone.

when i write a lengthy paragraph, i try to follow it up with a one-liner, or a mid-sized one. but it’s something i consciously keep track of— when i noticed that, “oh, this gdoc is getting a little too wordy, a little too chunky,” i make sure that my next paragraph is significantly shorter than the current one because it keeps the entire page interesting. one to two sentences of lines of paragraphs after another and another doesn’t look pretty. chunks of paragraphs after paragraphs is boring.

make your pages visually dynamic by ensuring variety.

like this, for example.

→ fic: home for the bitchless.

seeing a large chunk of text and a singular line immediately after also sort of forces your reader to stick around and read an otherwise intimidating lengthy paragraph because— oh! what could have possibly led to that singular like of dialogue or thought! #subtlemanipulation you get me? 😔🤙

this rule of mine applies to sentences and phrases within the paragraph as well!

→ fic: love vomit.

and as a bonus, you can use paragraph breaks and cuts to your advantage! manipulating the way a sentence or paragraph ends in a certain way makes your works more rhythmic! and, when you play it around the right way, abrupt cuts and breaks also add the right mood and drama to your work!

→ drabble: the boy who cried wolf.

part three of tip number one (one…we’re still at number one…) is on sentence and paragraph starters. i keep it as a rule of thumb that if i start a paragraph with “you,” or with someones name, i don’t use it again in the next one to avoid monotony. it’s a very miniscule thing really, and i doubt that people notice this HAHAHA but this is something i religiously swear by because repetitions like this are visually boring.

→ wip: sunwater.

of course, this can’t be avoided all the time, and repeating the sentence starter “You” or any other pronoun, word, or phrase can be intentionally utilized to strongly drive a point. just don’t overdo it!

→ drabble: patience, patience.

→ blurb: monsters don’t hide under the bed.

→ fic: the psychology of strawberries.

there are other good and strategic uses for repetitions as well! we’ll get to that later.

lastly, variety in sentence and paragraph starters doesn’t simply mean changing up the first word. things can still get really boring even if you use “you” or a character’s name interchangeably if your sentence structure remains the same.

this, for example, is monotonous.

the structure (and length) of all three sentences are the same. A does this. B does this. A does this. and even if you switch things up but still use the same sentence structure, it still falls flat. case in point, below, a structure i often see in a lot of fics i stumble across.

those are flat. those are boring. they don’t…you know…make you feel something, even when you follow the rule of not using the same starter twice. let me try improving it by adding more variety in the sentences (+ adding a tip that i’ll be discussing right after!)

the word “He” here is used twice to create a rhythm and draw emphasis, but the rest of the excerpt maintains a sense of variety to make the narrative more interesting and compelling to read.

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#2 PICK A POV AND STICK WITH IT.

before i start a scene, a drabble, or blurb, the first question i ask myself is, “whose point of view do i want it to be in?”

one, it’s a lot neater, more organized, than omniscient point of views in my opinion (unless you’re like a super fucking skilled writer of course HAHAHHA). two, it allows for a bit of mystery, suspense, and engagement because you don’t have access to what other people are thinking about, and three— in line with the first tip— when you know whose brain you’re in when writing, it allows for more dynamic narrations, gives you an excuse to be messy because our internal thoughts are messy as well, and makes the writing a hell of a lot easier when you’re focused on monologuing one person alone!

when writing shorter fics, drabbles, or blurbs, i swear by this rule, no excuses HAHAHAH but when writing longer fics, sometimes i switch around the point of views per scene, just to make a more well rounded story.

sometimes, the point of view doesn’t even have to be any of the main character’s! writing from an external POV is also really fun and adds another layer of interest. see example below, a Jeonghan breakup fic written exclusively from the perspective of the outsiders. very fun idea! 

breakup scene written in Seungcheol’s POV.

another squabble written in Seungkwan’s POV.

→ wip: the breakup soup.

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#3 REPETITIONS AND THEMES = COHESIVENESS.

this section contains tricks on how to wrap up your fics into one cohesive little present with a pretty ribbon on top! 

first is the use of repetition. use a cool funky line at the beginning of your story, and reuse/rehash/revise it at the end for a neat finish, especially when you have trouble figuring out a way to end your story (lifesaving hack! trust me!) 

i use this mostly in my shorter works—

→ drabble: you’re my bucket list.

→ blurb: louder.

—but it works just as well with longer fics, especially when the repetition is all throughout, and not just at the start and finish.

→ fic: mogi.

sometimes, it doesn’t even have to be a repeated phrase or line! it can be a little gimmick and it’d still work to make your fic cohesive! for example, in the fic below, i use the giving of strawberry candy/strawberry kisses to tie all the different scenes together because this was initially a set of separate drabble ideas wrapped into one long fic.

→ fic: the psychology of strawberries.

and for this one (another ricky fic….yes…..) i use the whole cat metaphor to do the same. 

→ drabble: yours to keep.

the next tip to make your work cohesive is to grab a singular theme, object, whatever, and take advantage of it for your narration HAHAHAHHA this can be better explained by looking at the examples below.

theme: citrus.

→ drabble: citrus in the morning.

theme: storm.

→ blurb: blizzard.

the above examples are my shorter works, but it can work for longer fics as well! just check out this 36k word monster HAHAHAHHA.

theme: seasons.

→ fic: love vomit.

these are very simple ways to make your fic more put together! even if it’s just a simply blurb about a confession, adding a theme to aid the imagery bumps your fic quality to a +++++

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#4 THROW AWAY THE Y/N’S!

now this one is quite honestly just a personal nitpick HAHAHHAHA but seeing the word Y/N when i’m reading something really pulls me out of my immersion. (and i only stopped using Y/N’s in my fics at the start of my 2023 comeback….so if you see my older works still using it…hahahha please don’t prosecute me).

anyway, you can do this either by embedding it in the narration—

→ fic: star studded baggage.

—or by using nicknames and titles instead!

→ wip: the breakup soup.

→ fic: can’t handle this.

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#5 GET INTO THE (UN)NECESSARY SPECIFICS.

instead of just saying “Your professor called you,” grab a random last name and say “Prof Yoon asked to see you in his office.” instead of saying you went to the cafe, the mall, the store, grab an actual place or make one up because no one in the world says “they’re going to the cafe to grab a frappe,” (unless the store’s name is actually The Cafe). people say they’re going to Dunkin Donuts or Coffeebreak or wherever.

sure it’s not plot relevant, sure it’s not integral, but little things like this make your narrative and dialogue a lot more realistic and less awkward. it makes it seem like your characters are actually living inside a world of their own.

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#6 GRAMMAR AND FORMATTING.

these are given HAHA but when i talk about grammar, i mean making sure that the commas and periods are consistently inside the quotation marks when writing dialogue. i mean minimizing the use of italics because overusing it can ruin the reading experience of a good piece (i was guilty of this too!) and i mean making sure that the use of tenses are consistent all throughout (unless if it’s a creative and plot choice), because all these things really matter if you want your fic, drabble, or blurb to be of overall high quality.

and that’s basically it! hope these tips help somehow...hope i’m not revealing my secrets for naught and someone can actually put them to good use HHAHAHHA what’s most important obviously is that you’re having fun with what you’re writing…etc. etc. insert inspirational you can do it speech here.

anyway, happy new year! and happy reading and writing<33