Depends on the fanfiction. There’s a lot of good ones out there, but also there is way, way more low tier/low effort stuff written by grade schoolers, so sometimes it feels like you’re wading through a sea of oyster mucus to find a pearl.
There was some era where teachers were telling students that the main thing was to get their stuff down on paper and they could work on format later. Which lead to a truly horrendous period where all the newbie writers were releasing stories full of mis-spellings, no punctuation or paragraphs, constantly shifting verbs and POVs, lack of plot, horrible characterization, etc etc etc. Think of every single writing crime you know of, and these stories were full of them.
And you’d very gently write them and suggest maybe punctuation would make it easier to read, or one sentence shouldn’t take up two pages, or actually naming the character who was doing or saying something instead of just expecting the reader to pull it telepathically outv of the ether. And they’d get all defensive, “Well it’s MY story and everyone else has liked it and doing all that stuff just slows me down and the important thing is just to get the thing down”. You’d suggest maybe they could use a beta reader, but no that was too much work as well.
I had to give up on entire (small) fandoms because the writers simply. Could. Not. Write. I’m really glad that era seems to be over.
Depends on the fanfiction. There’s a lot of good ones out there, but also there is way, way more low tier/low effort stuff written by grade schoolers, so sometimes it feels like you’re wading through a sea of oyster mucus to find a pearl.
There was some era where teachers were telling students that the main thing was to get their stuff down on paper and they could work on format later. Which lead to a truly horrendous period where all the newbie writers were releasing stories full of mis-spellings, no punctuation or paragraphs, constantly shifting verbs and POVs, lack of plot, horrible characterization, etc etc etc. Think of every single writing crime you know of, and these stories were full of them.
And you’d very gently write them and suggest maybe punctuation would make it easier to read, or one sentence shouldn’t take up two pages, or actually naming the character who was doing or saying something instead of just expecting the reader to pull it telepathically outv of the ether. And they’d get all defensive, “Well it’s MY story and everyone else has liked it and doing all that stuff just slows me down and the important thing is just to get the thing down”. You’d suggest maybe they could use a beta reader, but no that was too much work as well.
I had to give up on entire (small) fandoms because the writers simply. Could. Not. Write. I’m really glad that era seems to be over.