Warriors Fanfics: Specialized Writing Guide

BASE - How I Write Warriors Fanfics

March 5, 2022

This section covers how I go about writing Warriors fanfics. Specifically, the process I use to get my ideas from my head to a completed story. It's entirely based on my own writing process and some advice from various sources. Nothing in this section is objectively correct, as there are many ways to go about writing stories. Take it as just another person's writing preference. I follow my methodology quite rigidly and prefer a lengthy process from start to finish. As a Base section, it has little to no examples drawn from canon Warriors.

There are many, many ways to go about writing fiction. Some people are able to churn out novella after novella and never slow down while others take years or more to finish just one story. None of these processes are wrong, technically. I can't speak to the methodologies of others, unfortunately. Nor can I really critique them if they put out content for whatever purpose. I can only say from my perspective.

So here's a start-to-finish guide to how TytoNoctua writes Warriors fanfics.

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WRITING PROCESSES FOR CANON WARRIORS

Warriors is written by Erin Hunter, a pen name for a collective of writers making content for the same franchise, mostly novels. The series started in 2003 with two writers and an editor who came up with the idea and has grown to several series of novels spanning dozens of novels over a decade with spinoffs, a massive fanbase, and merchandise. The writers who make up Erin Hunter have changed over the course of it all, but the original trio, Cherith Baldry, Kate Cary, and Victoria Holmes, saw Kate and Cherith write novels individually and have them checked for consistency by Victoria. This process allowed them to make each book feel somewhat unique and keep up with the scope they wanted to achieve (cited in an archived interview by Kathleen Bolton for the blog 'Writer Unboxed'). The end goals have changed as new writers come on board and old ones step away at times, but Erin Hunter has always been a group of people.

That's the big difference between people writing fanfics and Erin Hunter: most of us are just one person. It would be difficult to compare the writing process of an entire group to just us. To put out a series with the same scope as canon Warriors would be difficult solo. Most fanfics, however, aren't a series. But those spanning multiple books often take longer to write. This is not a problem; the Erins write fiction professionally and fanfic writers usually write for fun, often in their spare time. Myself included.

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MY PROCESS: TOOLS

I find many in the Warriors community write directly in the word processors included with services hosting fanfics, like Wattpad or fanfiction_net. While usable, they offer a fraction of what a proper word processor has, like a limited spellcheck dictionary and, often, no grammar editor. I'd never recommend writing a whole book within the Wattpad or fanfiction or Deviantart editors. It's a quick way to lose progress if there's a service disruption and causes you to miss simple errors like punctuation. But that's just me. As for the tools I use:

Microsoft Word (2016) - My preferred word processor because of its robust grammar dictionary and auto-correct features, like automatically capitalizing the first word of each sentence or adding apostrophes to contractions. I prefer it over Google Docs, its main competitor, even though Docs has a far better online version and has no paywall for features. I use the paid, standalone version for Office 2016 (paid a third party on ebay; not recommended), not Office 365. Both Microsoft Word and Google Docs (and any other word processor I don't know about) is better than what Wattpad or fanfiction_net could offer.