Personally, I think these rules are total bunk.

1) The first and foremost purpose of writing fanfiction is 
to please yourself.  *You* are your primary audience.

Really?  If so, don't bother releasing your work to anyone else.  Yes, 
your writing should please yourself first and foremost, but if you can't 
take time to try and make it pleasing to others, then don't bother 
releasing it to others.

2) If you intend to post your fanfiction, then some
attention to grammar and spelling is required, but
that's *all.*  Your style is your style, and whether
or not you accept or decline critique on the way
you present your story does not reflect on your
qualities as a writer.

Oh, fewmets.  Spelling and grammer is NOT, with a VERY occasional 
exception, the way you present your story.  What it IS, is a reflection 
on how much you care about your work.  

If you can't be bothered to take the time and effort to make sure a 
story is written in decent English, why the hell should anybody beleive 
you've taken the time and effort to make sure the story is decent, 
period?  Nothing is so big a turn-off as supposed "writers" who don't 
take the time to make sure their writing is made with even school-grade 
English.

3) Fanfiction is nothing more than original fiction
placed within the setting of an existing fictional
work.  If you're looking to remain true to the canon,
then follow the rules all you want.  If you don't
give a damn about what's canon or not, then shape
your characters whichever way you want to.

Then don't call it a fanfic, and don't use the characters SOMEBODY ELSE 
made.  You are BORROWING them, and like anything else you borrow, you 
have an obligation to the owner.  You want original characters?  MAKE 
original characters.  You want to use Ranma (or Sailor Moon, or DBZ, or 
Slayers, or whatever) characters?  USE those characters.

Don't make up your own character and give him/her the face and name of a 
character someone else created.  That is disrespectful to the creator, 
and just shows that you don't have the talent or the guts to do real 
original characters.

4) With these extremes outlined, you're probably saying 
"All right.  This guy thinks you can put just about 
anything up for sail and the average Joe will digest 
it."  Well, no.  Actually, I'm not.  There are 
considerations you must make when you right a story 
IF one of your driving motivations is to reach a 
sufficiently large audience.  First, you must define 

Which, if it is released on the Net, one assumes it is.  If you don't 
care about an audience, don't release it.  There's too much horrible 
fanfic on the net already.

clearly what audience you want to reach.  Too many 
times I've read pseudo-literary essays that prescribe
general rules to catch the attention of the general 
reader.  That's pure bullshit.  Tell that to the guy 

No, they're general rules.  The vast majority of successful writers have 
followed them; yes, you can supplant the rules if you're gutsy and 
talented enough, but that is the exception, not the rule.

If you prefer, call that kind of thing a "general guideline".

working in the IBM plant in Kingston hanging on to 
Tom Clancy's every word. Tell that to the lit prof 
who forces you to read and understand every word of 
Tolstoy's divergent narrative prose on calculus 
concepts. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of 
audiences out there with varying tastes.  Some like 
"simple" stories that don't delve to deeply into 
character development and intrigue.  Others like 
sprawling epics with dense prose, massive casts, 
and enormous settings.  Others go for the whole 

Yes; however, there is a distinct measure of quality that supersedes 
tastes.  When something is bad-and most fanfic, like most writing, is 
bad-it is BAD, and not just a matter of taste.  I've read plenty of 
fanfic (and books, for that matter) with good ideas that simply were 
carried out in a horrible manner.

character interaction thing.  I personally like a 
mixture of all these elements, although I have 
enjoyed stories that have one or two of these 
elements, or maybe none at all.

Exactly.  

Mr. McAvoy brought up some good points.  He's
a reader as well as a writer, and he has taken the 
time to inform other writers that there's an
audience out there that shares his tastes.  There's
also an audience out there that likes something
completely different.  I don't give a damn about
the character interactions of NXE (or even UF).
Those are secondary to their hilarious antics, 
IMHO.  Maybe that makes me a shallow reader, but
hell--I know what I like.

<shrug>  Precisely.  Some like plot oriented stories, some don't.  Some 
like deep characters; some don't care.  That's why there's Sanctuary and 
still Urusei Yatsura.

However, this doesn't mean you can ignore quality; because the SUBJECT 
of a story is not the same as the story's quality.  Basic things like 
reasonably good usage of language, continuity (unless the story is of a 
sort that discourages that, and nearly all prose is NOT), sensical 
plotlines, and (if writing a fanfic) respect for the original 
characters, are not matters of taste but matters of quality.  Ignore 
them, and no matter what else you may do, your story is likely to be 
extremely poor writing.


Blade
********
World's #1 Fanboy of Ukyou Kuonji, Pantyhose Tarou, Kiima, Toguro Ani, 
Alys Brangwin, Ibuki Yagami, Vega, Mian Toris, Sessho-maru, Brad 
Kilsten, and that psycho soldier with the glasses in Windaria. ;p

"All I wanted to do was kill a few people, maybe a little torture on the 
side!  Was that too much to ask?"-Toguro Ani


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