How not to write a fanfiction

Things I hate to read- Harry Potter

Before you pop your clogs and rage and rant at me for not liking Harry Potter, I'll give you the context of the statement.

This is more of a series or something, or maybe a warning against other writers on what not to do.

I don't hate reading Harry Potter. This is focusing on the kinds of things I hate to spot in a Harry Potter fanfiction. Might as well get right to it.

Exhibit A: when they use zero grammar

'dumbledore walked into the hall and said hello to the students and said to work hard and stuff and eat your vegetables and hary walked to class w/ his friends rom and hermeyeni.

hary hated the class bc it was boring af but the teacher was ight bc she gave griffindor hella points and that.'

I sincerely apologise for any retinas that happened to catch fire during that extract.

Okay, how hard is it to turn on auto capitalisation in settings? Or use commas? Take a breath, for god's sake.

Also, since Harry Potter is set in Britain, try and do things the British way. Don't use alternate words or phrases that aren't attributed to the UK. Yes, this is mainly aimed at American writers because they're the most common mistakes I see.

I'm not saying the same thing doesn't happen with Percy Jackson. There are plenty of people who use British slang or language in a solely American literature series. Oh, that reminds me, I cannot wait to get onto character stereotypes.

If you're genuinely struggling to do any better than the 'extract' above, I advise you to say what you're writing out loud, and if it feels too long, add a comma where it makes sense. Capital letters go at the start of every sentence, as well as names and places.

Another thing- if you've finished a chapter, proofread it- make sure there aren't any typos you missed.

Put that all together, you get something like this:

'Dumbledore strode into the hall, his long grey robe trailing behind him. All eyes immediately turned to the man, whose eyes twinkled merrily as he prepared to give his weekly announcement.'

Now I think we can all agree that a lack of grammar and punctuation is frankly eye rape, but how about its close cousin... the paragraph.

Sometimes the paragraph can have excellent grammar and punctuation. Sometimes it has neither. Most of the time, it's a cybernetic mesh that requires 100% of your brain power to even begin to translate it. But what they all have in common is this:

'voldemort walked into the place and put his wand out and said a spell and harry died then walked to hogwarts and they laughed because harry was dead then he wasnt dead and he killed voldemort and they won because voldemort was dead from his spell so that means he won so the good guys won and they celebrated because voldemort died so harry and ginny lived happily ever after and that is the end so goodbye'

That was about as smooth and coherent as my sleep schedule.

All I'm going to do is split that apart. Nothing else.

'voldemort walked into the place and put his wand out and said a spell and harry died then walked to hogwarts and they laughed because harry was dead

then he wasnt dead and he killed voldemort and they won because voldemort was dead from his spell so that means he won

so the good guys won and they celebrated because voldemort died so harry and ginny lived happily ever after and that is the end so goodbye'

See? Shooting straight up from a 0.1 to a 0.3!

Moving on, I find lots of fics just like that every day. I just don't know how someone can look at that and think 'yeah I did really well there' no, you created COVID virtually.

This isn't an attack on any specific range of authors, this is just a way to help people understand the DON'Ts of being a writer and also so I can channel my frustration on the matter.

So that's it for Harry Potter for now, who knows, maybe I'll come up with something later on.

Please don't do this.