How To Write Marvel Fanfiction

Lost The War On A Technicality

So technical writing and grammar rules are totally everyone's favourite part of writing, right?

Say right assholes, or I'll shoot myself in the foot. 

Anyways, technical writing is a nightmare. It always sucks to see a great concept or idea fall apart because the person writing it doesn't know how to make the words go.

Being a good storyteller does not make you a good writer. 

Learning how to get gud at technical writing is just... hard. It's a process, okay? Your first story is going to be shit. That's just how writing works. Would you expect to paint a masterpiece with your first try holding a paintbrush? No, fuck off with that nonsense. 

Learning how to write just takes practice. Believe it or not, you gotta do the thing to learn how to do the thing better. Who would've fucking thunk. And learning your voice as a writer is a whole other nightmare. So many of y'all just try and copy what's already out there, and it shows. Just write however feels natural to you, and you will naturally hone your style of writing. Do writing exercises, write a little bit every day. Don't write for the sake of posting it, write for the sake of getting better at it. You can do it, I believe in you.

That said, I can give you advice on smaller grammatical things to help make your writing look and feel more professional.

Well, as professional as writing on WattPad can get. I'm sorry WattPad, I don't care what "supported creators" bullshit you try to pedal, you're never going to be a serious writing platform. Grow up. 

Anyway.

Here are some tips on different small grammar things I see people fuck up around these parts, and how to fix them. This'll be the only chapter I routinely update, whenever I think of more stuff because honestly, I'm just as bad at making the words go as the rest of you.

Dialogue Punctuation

Oh boy, does this get fucked up a lot. Basically, the rule here is this.

If your dialogue is finished by a speaking verb (ie, "said" or a dreaded synonym of "said") then you follow the dialogue with a COMMA. If your dialogue is finished with an action, you follow the dialogue with a PERIOD. For example,

"This is dialogue," she said.

vs

"This is dialogue." She tilted her head to the side. 

Also note that because the first example ends with a comma and 'she' is not a proper noun, it is not its' own sentence, therefore it is not capitalised. It is one entire sentence, compared two the second one which is two separate sentences. 

Likewise, this rule can also apply to actions within a longer piece of dialogue. If the action happens as a sort of pause between two sets of dialogue, use a period. If the action is simply describing what is being done during the dialogue, use a period. However, if the action INTERRUPTS the dialogue, use dashes between the description. Once again, for example.

"This is dialogue," she pointed as she spoke, "and this is more dialogue."

vs

"This is dialogue." She pointed and turned to face him. "And this is some more dialogue."

vs

"This is dialogue-" she slammed her hands down on the desk, interrupting herself- "and this is more dialogue."

I know, I know, my examples are just riveting. 

Following these rules sounds hard, but it usually flows pretty easily once you get used to it, and makes things look a lot neater. If you're not sure which to use of the latter, it's usually safest to just follow the rule of using a period when following dialogue with action and leave it at that. 

Stuttering

Y'all, I get it. Your OC is just a soft and shy uwu bean who stutters and can't help it! She's just so shy and quirky!

Look, I'm kidding. Honestly, a properly written shy OC with anxiety towards talking to people is fine, you do you.

But for the love of fuck, write stutters properly.

Unless the stutter is a result of a traumatic brain injury or a natural speech impediment that's physical and not psychogenic, the stuttering you're writing is not right. At all.

Typical Stuttering I See In WattPad Books: I-I'm s-s-s-so s-sorry! I d-didn't mean t-t-to!

Read that out loud and tell me if it fucking sounds like anything a human being would say.

Repeating hard constants is a form of stuttering. However, as I said, it's usually from brain injuries, not anxiety or shyness. Meaning that this isn't how your OC should stutter if they have an anxiety-induced stutter. 

What an anxiety stutter WOULD sound like: Uh, I'm-I'm... so sorry! I didn't- I, um, I didn't mean to!

People don't repeat constants, they repeat words or parts of words. They add fillers like "um" and have awkward pauses. An anxiety stutter is basically your brain scrambling to put the right words together and sometimes you say the wrong thing and have to spend an awkward second thinking of the right thing. There is repetition, but it's more spread out and awkward. It's a bit hard to read because that's the point. It'd be hard to understand and it feels clunky. 

Basically, read the stuttered dialogue out loud, and if it doesn't sound natural, you're doing it wrong. 

Epithets

I had to reread some chapters to make sure I hadn't yelled about this before because I honestly yell about epithets a lot when I'm giving writing advice.

An epithet is "an adjective or descriptive phrase expressing a quality characteristic of the person or thing mentioned." To put that into normal people explainable terms, an epithet is basically when you refer to a character by one of their characteristics instead of their name or pronoun.

For example, calling Steve "the blond man" or calling Tony "the genius." It's what a lot of amateur writers do when they feel like they're using the characters name too much. And I see it a shit ton in fanfiction, holy fuck. 

Epithets are bad. Stop using them.

Look, I get it. Saying a character's name a lot in one chapter feels suuuuuper repetitive. And you may be writing a scene where pronouns can get confusing. I know that struggle all too well, I write gay stuff. Dialogue is a nightmare.

But that doesn't mean epithets are the answer. They're just... bad.

Basically, they're clunky and don't flow right, at all.

Just use the character's name or pronoun. Stop overthinking it. Unless you're purposely trying to call out a specific characteristic, don't refer to them by it. It's really weird. Stop it.