The guide to writing reader-insert fanfiction

Point of View, Asterisks and Appearances

[The Author's PoV]

The Author shakes their head. Backtrack.

Chapter 2

The Author

Much better, the Author muses. More professional.

Today, the Author's advice is this:

Don't change the PoV.

"What?" you ask. "Why not?"

"Because", the Author responds, "the Reader's supposed to look at the world through the Reader-insert's eyes. As sweet as it is to see what the love interest thinks, you don't know what your LI thinks unless you can tell by their behaviour or they speak to you about what they feel and think. Meta knowledge breaks the immersion of a Reader-insert story. The Immersion."

The Author takes a light hold of your upper arms and looks levelly into your eye. "If you want the Reader to know something, let them know it through the Reader-insert character's window into the story."

The Author releases you and takes a step back, turning on their heel and pointing a finger up. "And anyway, even when you're changing the PoV, there are more elegant ways to go about it than the phrase 'Character's PoV' surrouded by brackets or asterisks and tildes. I believe in pro-published works the common practice is to include the PoV character's name or perhaps a kenning in the title section, as I did in the beginning of this chapter. Because it's common practice, the Reader quickly catches on. That's more general writing advice, but a decent seque into my second topic of the day."

The Author draws a deep breath and forges on. "Namely, scene changes and time skips. Similarly to how there's no need to denote PoV changes with a phrase, there's no need to denote scene changes or passage of time with phrases.

"The common practice is to use three asterisks, often centered, for both time skips and other types of scene changes. On sites that allow for it, a horizontal rule (HTML: <hr>, BBCode: [hr]), which represents a thematic break, can be used instead."

***

Ten minutes later, the Author is still going on about 'common practice' and the importance of taking cues from pro-published works (that aren't 50SoG) in order give the impression of professionalism. Writing a goodfic is at least one quarter a matter of appearances.

You think that you get it already, geez.

A snippet this short after a time skip or scene change looks bad, but the Author figures they don't have much else to add. As they say, do as the Author says, not as the Author does.