Fanfiction Tips and Tricks No. 1: Characters

The best place to start when creating fanfiction is creating your character. You want them to be believable, but also a touch out of reality to allow them to be fully settled in their world. Because, chances are, your character is going to be living, breathing, and co-existing with characters from a fantasy world, be it, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, or Vampire Diaries. And as the image shows above, nobody likes Mary Sue. A Mary Sue, according to Wikipedia, is '...a type of fictional character, usually a young woman, who is portrayed as unrealistically free of weaknesses. A male character with similar traits is coined a Marty Stu or a Gary Stu.'

A lot of fanfic writers use the Mary Sue or the Marty Stu as a wishful self-insertion into the fanfiction, as an ideal of the person that they wish they could be or as a cover-over for glaring flaws in themselves. Mostly, it's the former. But in this article, I'm going to be showing you five tips on how not to make a Mary Sue, but rather how to create an engaging character that audiences will relate to. My example is going to be from one of my very own fanfictions: my very first fully fleshed-out character Adelaide Ruby Lehnsherr-Barnes from my Marvel Cinematic Universe fanfictions.

Tip #1: Your character needs to have a compelling backstory.

My character Adelaide Lehnsherr's backstory is complicated. She's the daughter of one of the most powerful mutants in the X-Men comics/film franchise, Erik Lehnsherr, portrayed by Michael Fassbender and Ian McKellen. During my fanfictions, she grows her powers and her personality, turning from a revenge-bent teenager to a kind, caring, but also flawed character. If you've watched the MCU, you'll know about an evil organisation called HYDRA, and Adelaide spends a significant amount of time there. It changes her, and not exactly for the better, but she comes out the other side stronger.

You see, every character has to have good moments and bad moments for the characters to be believable. For Adelaide, those bad moments were her lowest points, where she felt that she wasn't good enough, or that she was a burden to her team, the Avengers, but those low moments are interspersed with good moments, where she is kind, caring and capable of love, both platonic and romantic.

It depends on what you want to put into your character's backstory, be it trauma from a bad situation (ie. captivity, a series of terrible ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, a natural disaster, a car crash, cancer, etc.) or even something simple as their gender or sexual orientation and their whole identity and backstory is based around coming to terms with who they are. But their backstory has to be believable. Also, the adage is true: write about what you know. If you've had a personal tragedy, an important stepping stone, or your character has the same gender or sexual orientation that you do, then write about it! But, also, stretch your horizons a little. Research what you want to write. I researched a lot about dissociative identity disorder and PTSD for my character Adelaide and that research helped influence my writing for the character and her up-and-down moods between chapters.

Tip #2: Your character has to have a good appearance.

For this section, I'm talking about not having a generic appearance, but also no words like "fat", "sl**ty", etc. And try to avoid very cliched words like "chocolate skin" and "almond-shaped eyes". These descriptions are overdone and poorly used. This is where the adage about writing what you know can come in handy, and where it should be applied. If you're a slim or athletic person attempting to write about a plus-sized person, no matter what language you use to describe the person, it can come across as insensitive and potentially unrelatable to certain readers. By all means, if you feel that you can write a good character who is of a different body shape than you, then go right ahead! Just make sure you're using sensitive and kind language to describe the person.

It's also best, when describing a person, to look up adjectives for that character's description to describe them better in ways that aren't cliche, or, if you're writing about someone different from yourself in a physical sense, describing them in ways that aren't inappropriate or unkind. My character, Adelaide, has brunette hair and blue eyes, and she is quite athletic. Sometimes I buy into cliches like "chestnut coloured hair" and "crystal clear blue eyes" or when speaking of characters like her love interest James Barnes, aka. Bucky/The Winter Soldier, I use the term "steel blue eyes". These terms are okay, all cliche terms are okay. Just use them sparingly to not overload your fanfiction with cliches. It's in danger of sounding like "just another fan fiction".

Tip #3: Your character's relationships have to be believable.

Ah, relationships. They can either make or break a storyline. If you have a great storyline, and a great character, but they have terrible relationships with characters, whether platonic or romantic, it can damage the book as a whole.

These days, you have a whole plethora of relationships to choose from. Platonic, romantic, sexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual, literally just about anything. And again, the rule of writing what you know applies. When has a straight person written about a transexual or a bisexual experience, let alone a gay or lesbian experience ever gone over well? You need not look too far through media these days. The hit HBO show Euphoria, starring Zendaya of Spiderman fame, is about characters who are teenagers of all different types of sexualities, backgrounds, races, and genders. And guess what? It's written by a white, cisgender, straight male.

But that's beside the point. The bottom line is, that you need to have believable relationships between your character and other characters. And you also need to be diverse with your character's friend base. No, I'm not talking about woke culture and the need for different ethnicities. While it is nice to include people of different ethnicities and colours of skin, there is more to your story than that. Different shapes and sizes, different backgrounds, maybe one of your character's friends wears glasses but is great at basketball, or maybe one is a high school quarterback who everyone thinks is a prideful, smartass jock, but is a pretty decent guy. But it's more than surface looks.

If you're looking to include a love interest, they too have to be believable. And it takes more effort than just the cut and dry "enemies to lovers" or a "billionaire falls for ordinary girl" storylines. You can use a trope, but it has to be within the web of a believable relationship. You can use a lot of slow burns, or very little, but have too little slow burn, and the relationship is unsatisfying. Have way too much slow burn and readers become disinterested. Too many tropes within one story and the story can become clogged up due to the inclusion of those tropes and feel too unrealistic.

Also, I feel like we can't talk about love interests without having to mention smut. Smut is a very fine line, that's all I'll say. Write it or don't write it. I don't personally write it, I can't do it to save my life, and I most likely won't. I can do romantic scenes, just not bordering into that territory. But each to their own, I think.

Tip #4: Your character's trials and triumphs have to be realistic and believable.

Don't take this the wrong way if you're writing a fantasy novel. Of course, there can be some crazy magic situations where your character is getting themselves, and their friends, out of the crisis of the week. But come on, guys. But don't write them out of a situation as soon as they're in it. Problems take time to overcome, and that includes problems within the character. If they start their journey prideful and mean to everyone around them, it must take time to see the error of their ways. Maybe your character's pridefulness gets a family member, or a close friend killed in a conflict. Sometimes they see the error, sometimes they don't. But the moral of the story is: that things take time.

And this includes triumphs as well. Triumphs can't be easy to get. They can't just be handed to the characters like Easter chocolate. Triumphs are born out of trials, and for your character to grow, sometimes, they have to go one step forward and two steps back. But, caution! Don't go this way too often or your story ends up taking a backwards slide down the wrong hill. My character, Adelaide Lehnsherr, especially in the earlier books of my fanfiction of the MCU, does sometimes take one step forward and two steps back. Her healing from her years-long trauma through HYDRA is an uphill battle. But eventually, she gets there. She has her low moments, but they're nowhere near like they used to be. It depends on all on where you want your character to go, and that's what we're going to talk about in the final point: your character's ending.

Tip #5: It's all in the ending.

Sometimes, a character's ending can be hard to write. If you're writing a fanfiction series where you will revisit that character, like my MCU series, you feel happy because you know you'll get to bring them back for one, two or three more spins around the sun in brand new adventures. But the hardest thing about fan fiction characters by far is killing them off. It can be difficult, and a lot of times, trying to write sad endings for my characters, often makes me cry. And it'll probably make you cry too. In early drafts of fanfiction for the film Logan (2017), where I tried to kill off my character Adelaide, I found the prospect heartbreaking. I couldn't do it. And I hope I won't have to do it in future fan fiction.

But the ending has to be satisfying, whether tragic or happy. If your character just dies without any explanation or any lead-up whatsoever, it can leave your readers feeling flat. If you give them a happy ending when they might not deserve one, your readers will feel upset. Especially bad characters getting happy endings without redeeming themselves, or when they've done too many bad things for your readers to even think about bidding for a happy ending for them.

A character's ending is a crucial part of the journey. All of their trials, triumphs and relationships must add up to the ending. But the character must grow in some way by the ending. If your intention for your character is for them to, for example, make their way through the fanfiction from being prideful and rude, then they must, by the end of the story, at least have made some significant development to be a better person or at least have made it all the way. If your character is in, say, a good relationship, maybe your characters get married. Or if they're in a toxic relationship, then the climax/ending should at least give us a hint that your character is leaving the relationship for good, or that they are starting with a new relationship years after they have left the toxic one.

But the moral of the story is: don't make your endings flat or unjustified. Make sure there's always room for exposition in your stories so that your endings are satisfying and explained well.

And happy writing!!

Thank you all for supporting my writing so far! Please keep continuing to support in any way you can through tips and reads. As always, you can support my writing on my other platforms such as Patreon and my Linktree.

My Linktree:

https://linktr.ee/taytaythewriter

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https://www.patreon.com/taytaythewriter

As well as my Wattpad to access my free fan fictions, including my Marvel Cinematic Universe ones:

https://www.wattpad.com/user/WinterPhoenix123

Have a happy Easter!!