Hello!

I do a lot online, what with four different tumblr blogs, a YouTube channel, a (what I call) proper blog and a variety of social media pages. But it’s without a shadow of a doubt my 5 Seconds of Summer blog that is my most popular and this is because of the creative writing I do on that blog.

I call it creative writing because I hate the word fanfiction, but that’s what it is. So as someone who has written almost 400 works and gained 16,000 followers in around 10 months, I feel I am justified to write this how to guide.

How to write fanfiction

Enjoy!

Step 1: Pick your victim focal character, whether they be fictional, a band member or a YouTuber, you’ll want to pick someone who will tug at the heart strings of your reader.

Step 2: Think of a situation that is in equal parts witty, cute, romantic and painful – you want to evoke a response in the reader and the more emotional responses you get, the more they will hate you (love you).

Step 3: Introduce a character that will cause your focal character confusion and emotional heartache. If writing a fanfiction based on a fictional work, this character may be an enemy of your focal character in the canon but they’re probably in love really. Homosexual, heterosexual – the ball is in your court my friend, you can do anything with them. If writing about band members etc, you may want to make this character nameless or have the story from their perspective, so the reader can engage and pretend it’s them. This causes extra pain emotional response.

Step 4: Your romantic interest (this is how I will refer to the characters in stage 3) needs to have a cute exchange with your focal character – an exchange that makes it questionable whether their relationship is platonic or romantic. This something may make your readers squeal, giggle or cry with the desire to share this exchange with the focal character.

Step 5: Something dramatic needs to happen – either the romantic interest or the focal character makes a mistake and the other one runs away crying in the rain or someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness (if you kill your romantic interest, your reader will want to cuddle the focal character while they’re in pain but killing the focal character might evoke real tears). The conclusion of this dramatic act should be that the characters – whether mutually or not – stop talking.

Step 6: Make your characters miss each other. One may turn to crying themselves to sleep or drinking away their sorrows whilst convinced that the other is doing better without them. They need to get worked up enough to be in a state that they realise they can’t function without their other half and the reader must be screaming at the screen for the idiots to realise they need each other.

Step 7: They meet unexpectedly – the encounter is awkward and tentative but one assumes that the other is fine without them. Then they confess their desire for each other and how they’ve been in love all along and they can’t live without each other.

Step 8: The overcome whatever drama approached them in step 5 – one rectifies their mistakes, they fight through their terminal disease to find some miraculous cure and they live a happy, loving life together.

Step 9: In a second part, they may repeat from Step 5 through to step 8 again.

Step 10: Repeat as necessary to make your readers cry repeatedly.

Step 11: Giggle excitedly as you get floods of messages about the traumatic suffering of your readers.

Step 12: Repeat with new characters or new situation, until your readers either hate you or love you. Probably both. At the same time.

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