My two main problems are firstly thinking up a plot-line and secondly not knowing how to write it as an interesting story - both pretty important issues for an aspiring author I'm sure you can agree. I bought a couple of books of scifi story "seeds" for inspiration. I've made a couple of attempts at writing but neither is typical FanFic. Great fun to create though, so I became keener to write some proper stories. My first attempt at a proper story was a small snapshot of an action from the History of Evochron. Not easy!
Then Kikoni posted the first part of his Writing Tips (included in the Guide) and got me enthused again. I Googled "writing tips" for "FanFic" and for "scifi" - there is so much of it that you could spend most of your free time reading it rather than writing!
Some advice and rules appear again and again on site after site. There is scifi specific advice, for example how to create alien characters. There are thousands of pages on the minutiae of punctuation, layout (when to add a blank line etc) and grammar.
So I've extracted the main stuff and the specific stuff and changed it to be more Evoverse specific and set it out in (what I think are) logical and coherent sections.
I compiled this guide to help me with my first faltering steps at writing FanFic. I hope that it will useful to others tempted to give it a try.
Guide to writing Evoverse FanFic
This is intended to be a basic primer - easy to access and at only 25 pages not too expensive to print a hardcopy of.
I hope that this will encourage some of the community to give it a go!
The Guide's contents list:
Who should I be writing for? - this may surprise you!............................................................................ 4
People hate my work - what can I do? .............................................................................................5
I must be getting better - I've got Writers' Block! .................................................................................. 5
Some "Laws" of writing a story ............................................................................................................... 6
OK, so how do I get started? - Steps in planning your story ................................................................... 7
How can I create believable human characters? .................................................................................... 9
How can I create believable alien characters? ..................................................................................... 13
Introducing characters effectively ........................................................................................................ 16
OK, I'm prepped - now how do I actually write it? ............................................................................... 16
Kikoni's Technical Writing Tips .............................................................................................................. 17
How can I write good dialogue? ........................................................................................................... 20
OK, OK, but how do I write great dialogue? ......................................................................................... 20
Yeah, OK, good - I know what great dialogue is now, but how do I write it? ...................................... 21
Arghh - I can't get started! - Beginnings ............................................................................................... 23
Revising/rewriting ................................................................................................................................. 23
OK - I fibbed a bit about missing out the punctuation, layout and grammar! ..................................... 24
Good links ............................................................................................................................................. 25
Exceptional link ..................................................................................................................................... 25
and as a bonus there is some never before revealed info from Vice's vision about the Vonari and their origins and other aliens races rumoured to exist in Evochron
