Humiliating First Fanfiction / Writing

[Jason Tandro]

Okay friends, let's talk about your embarrassing bits of writing and/or fanfiction. As this can be understandably humiliating, I feel the need to go first.

You see, I recently found my first fanfiction ever... and I felt the need to record a reading...

Guys... It's terrible. Like... really really bad.

Village of the Cactuars

tl;dw

It's a fic written by me in 2003 (I was like 14) about the cactuars which relies heavily on satire that doesn't work, irony that's misdirected, misspellings and grammatical errors galore and a cheap plot that would never have worked as written...

It's terrible.

Okay, I've done my part. Now share yours!

 

[Octo]

I don't think that was that bad, I mean, it wasn't good. But I've seen worse from adult fic writers.

Obviously it would work better as a play. With cactuar costumes.

Fortunately, it no longer exists THANK CHRIST but I think my first 'fanfic' was RPF Marysue smut involving Dave Grohl. Pre internet - wrote on some ripped out pages of my maths excercise book. And later burned. But it was probably one of the worst things ever written.

So don't feel bad

 

[Splintered]

we don't speak of it.

My first fanfiction I wrote before I knew what fanfiction was, it was around.... 99, 98? It was a Final Fantasy VII fanfiction and I wrote it in my school's composition notebook, I didn't make it far but I had planned it all in my head. Cloud and his friends were taking out the small pockets of Shinra, Cloud was emo over Aerith, and I was going to give Barret a love interest. I think I was going to temporarily revive Aerith and Sephiroth still existed in the lifestream.

It was awesome and by awesome I mean terrible. I didn't know you needed paragraphs and it was just one long block of text.

The first one I published was when I was fourteen, on fanfiction.net. It was in script format and it was "comedy" or as comedy looks to a 14 year old, about the ronin warriors doing the script to Sailor Moon. UUuuggghhhhh

 

[Keveh Kins]

Ah I kinda wish I'd kept all the old crap I'd written.

It'd make me feel better about the new crap I've written

I think I lost most of it after our first computer died a death.

Pretty sure my first fanfic was an FFVII fic set in a secondary school (high school for the folks across the way) that had absolutely nothing happening in it at all. Well, stuff happened, but it wasn't leading to anywhere. Sephiroth was a cool guy. He had a brother named Shadow who was inexplicably mute. They formed a band. Cloud's mom ran a cafe. Cloud himself alternated from paragraph to paragraph from being a total goof to a dumbass 14 year old's idea of wise and introspective.

Cid was a metalwork teacher...because mechanics and stuff.

I think it ended with Sephiroth dying in a bus crash. His non-speaking brother got over it by the next line.

I thought I was fuckin' Shakespeare

 

[Ami]

My very first one when I was 10 in school. We had an original writing exercise and I must've written about 5 pages before having to end it on a cliffhanger. A witch was going round changing villagers into animals and a bunch of kids witness it, going to the worried king. It ended there.

The content of it was horrible, but I'll always remember it fondly because it was the first real thing I ever wrote and got me to love the craft.

 

[Teioh]

Mine was a co-written FF orgy with no plot that I wrote in secondary school with my best friend. We used to write bits and pass it to one another in class. One time our science teacher caught us and made us stay behind after the lesson where he gave us the, "what would your parents say if they knew you wrote stuff like this?" I told my mom and she laughed so that's the answer to that. It really was a crap piece of work though lol

Edit: to say that my friend altered it a bit, changed the names and so on and handed it in as part of her English homework and was given an A for it. I still can't get over the fact that poorly written yaoi got an A.

 

[Jason Tandro]

Edit: to say that my friend altered it a bit, changed the names and so on and handed it in as part of her English homework and was given an A for it. I still can't get over the fact that poorly written yaoi got an A.

Are you kidding me? E.L. James turned her erotic fanfiction into a multi-million dollar series.

I don't get it man. Her and Stephanie Meyer can get published and so many incredibly (to be immodest, including yours truly) can't get published. Though even amongst fanfiction circles I get outshined daily (read: anybody I've interviewed for "The Library" and then some)

 

[Splintered]

Are you kidding me? E.L. James turned her erotic fanfiction into a multi-million dollar series.

I don't get it man. Her and Stephanie Meyer can get published and so many incredibly (to be immodest, including yours truly) can't get published. Though even amongst fanfiction circles I get outshined daily (read: anybody I've interviewed for "The Library" and then some)

From what I heard, the young adult writing circle is incredibly cliquish, you have to make friends. That's how Cassandra Claire and the Mortal Instruments got in from what I heard, she made a pretty famous YA writer friend as her fanfiction clique burned around her.

E.L. James is self published I thought though.

 

[Clement Rage]

Essentially everything I wrote for the first five years or so.

 

[Joe]

Every awful piece of fiction I've ever written is somewhere on the internet. There's even awful examples on this very forum that I've written. I haven't the stomach to dig it up so more power to you guys who can 0_0

 

[Hisako]

I don't really write straight-up fanfiction, but my first extended attempts at writing online was a FFVII RP from Adventchildren.net which was, in hindsight, pretty mediocre with its writing

 

[Blade]

Years ago I wrote an epic spanning crossover fic centered on Final Fantasy Tactics entitled "The Zodiac War".

It's 'mostly' finished someplace but I had way too much fun with the fonts when I wrote it, so yeah I don't think it exists anywhere except my old webpage.

 

[Almighty Vincent]

I began to write a FF7 sequel that made absolutely no to little sense.

 

[trash panda]

I wrote *one* FF fanfic when I was at ACF that was about Ultimecia in consideration of the R=U theory. I have no idea where it's at.

 

[RedFFWolf]

So, I only ever wrote one when I was around 14-15, and basically it was a combination of Koushun Takami's "Battle Royale" and a few of the Final Fantasy games. Now, I had some ideas for the middle and end, but really I was just writing as I was going along - that, and I couldn't really write in general - only at the end of my secondary school education and during college did I obtain a massive dose of "cop on" when it came to writing.

Here are a few hilarious lines to make y'all feel better about yourselves:

‘Okay. Apologies for the disturbance of your personal self.’ And he bowed.

Weapons were held once again but this time, with power. Power...not needed since two years ago.

The prologue's opening paragraph: It’s been a whole year. Seems like everything has decided to settle down. From all that was once fought, time, seemed to shake its course and regain normality. From what was once beauty, might just have been ashes. And what is dark may now vanish. Evil, was all that was fought. Good, is what fought it. And the whole world…shattered. But normality is beginning to settle in. Heroes, from across lands, have earned their share of the innocent civilians desired rest.


Naturally, I stopped (got about 10,000 words on it though)
I mean, looking back, some parts (obviously not listed) were not so bad, but thankfully I took to writing it again last year - this time with some actual care and consideration, as well as basic things like "flow", "structure" and keeping the characters as they ought to be and presenting it from a realistic viewpoint etc.. (Heh, first part now finished, about 150,000 words too - good to not give up when you have an idea you're passionate about) - If I ever make a thread for this some day, let us ignore this post as best as we can

 

[Kionae]

My first fan fiction can still be found on my fanfiction.net profile. It started out as pure stupidity with an absolutely horrible title (that I can never change, because apparently a lot of people still remember it...) about Reno faking sick and tricking Elena into cleaning his apartment, and somehow morphed into a fucking 10-part series of generally connected individual stories (as opposed to your standard chaptered story where one part leads directly into the next).

And then 14 years later, I re-edited/re-wrote the entire damn thing, and started updating it again. It's now at 17 chapters and counting (there are actually two more chapters finished... I just haven't done the final edits yet).

The original:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/184591/1/Taking-Care-of-Reno

The updated version:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11294105/1/Taking-Care-of-Reno-Remastered

 

[OneThousandCuts]

The first fan fiction for which I had any kind of gall to post online was written sometime in 2006. I was 22. Like a lot of others have said about theirs, it was kind of Mary-Suish, verging on a self-insert, and nice and angsty. The only good thing it had going on was that it was maybe a little more emotionally mature than your average teenager's piece. I don't care to talk about the plot. It's too embarrassing.

After that, an online buddy and I exchanged FFX/ X-2 stuff, and some of that made it online for a little while as well. It was good exercise, and she helped break me out of my too-formal-for-fiction writing style. I was close to finishing college at the time, so I was up to my ears in APA format, sterile verbage, and passive voice.

 

[Flare]

Oh dear God, my first fanfiction... After watching FFVII Ac, my first intro into VII's universe, I was completely hooked on it, and wrote a fanfic story of the events of the movie, but altered in many places because, of course, me, my sis, and my cousin were magically transported to the world by the help of Kadaj's gang.
I mean seriously, it's so badly written it's hilarious to me. I don't really read it anymore, because it's that bad...

I mean, here's the first line (with the names of my sis and cousin omitted to the first letter): "[FONT=&quot]I was walking in the creek with R and L, and since we just walked upstream, we were coming downstream, of course.[FONT=&quot]"[/FONT]
Like, omg, no shit? I think I was.... 13-14? Not quite sure, but pretty young.
Ironically though[FONT=&quot], that [FONT=&quot]really jumpstarted my love for writing stories, and I actually finished a slightly revised version[FONT=&quot] (made it 'better' after a week or so of working on the first one) of that first[/FONT] one too, which [FONT=&quot]is 85,500 words[FONT=&quot].

[FONT=&quot]Nowadays I write fanfics here and there, mostly personal ones for myself, but [FONT=&quot]I do have one for[FONT=&quot] the KH series that I rea[FONT=&quot]lly enjoy. Also, after writing that first lame story with my sis and cousin, I [FONT=&quot]ended up writing a ton [FONT=&quot]o[FONT=&quot]f more stories for [FONT=&quot]the three of us, and eventually just my cousin and me as my sis lost some interest in FF. I enjoyed writing [FONT=&quot]a story for me and my cousin a lot[FONT=&quot]; again, we were in VII's world, but I had a much better storyline and we were both there but [FONT=&quot]separated[/FONT], so [FONT=&quot]I was writing 2 stories at the same time.

[FONT=&quot]It was a ton of [FONT=&quot]fun, I'd love to[FONT=&quot] [FONT=&quot]do it again someday. [/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT][/FONT]
[/FONT]

 

[RedFFWolf]

My first fan fiction can still be found on my fanfiction.net profile. It started out as pure stupidity with an absolutely horrible title (that I can never change, because apparently a lot of people still remember it...) about Reno faking sick and tricking Elena into cleaning his apartment, and somehow morphed into a fucking 10-part series of generally connected individual stories (as opposed to your standard chaptered story where one part leads directly into the next).

And then 14 years later, I re-edited/re-wrote the entire damn thing, and started updating it again. It's now at 17 chapters and counting (there are actually two more chapters finished... I just haven't done the final edits yet).

The original:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/184591/1/Taking-Care-of-Reno

The updated version:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11294105/1/Taking-Care-of-Reno-Remastered

You may not have personally liked it, but a lot of people did - from what I see of your reviews, you've made many a person laugh. Nothing humiliating in that sense (haha, that's not to say it doesn't fit in with the thread theme; it's to say it has actually done well, so kudos) - but I understand the feeling of those few aspects you just wanna shake away but will continue to haunt!

I was close to finishing college at the time, so I was up to my ears in APA format, sterile verbage, and passive voice.

22 was also when I took up rewriting my first partially completed (never released) FanFiction piece - and college, too, needed beating out of my head before I could write the way I wanted to---severe beatings!

I mean, here's the first line (with the names of my sis and cousin omitted to the first letter): "[FONT=&quot]I was walking in the creek with R and L, and since we just walked upstream, we were coming downstream, of course.[FONT=&quot]"[/FONT]
Like, omg, no shit? I think I was.... 13-14? Not quite sure, but pretty young.

That was just the kind of way I would have wrote things back then, and such a thing would have continued till I was about 15, maybe even 16
I still keep my terrible first piece - that way, every time I doubt my current writing, I look to the old piece and realise "you know what, I'm not that bad, after all"

 

[Kionae]

Nothing humiliating in that sense (haha, that's not to say it doesn't fit in with the thread theme; it's to say it has actually done well, so kudos) - but I understand the feeling of those few aspects you just wanna shake away but will continue to haunt!

That was kind of the reason behind the rewrite. I liked the idea of the original, but my writing back in college was less than stellar, and when I went back and reread it a few months ago, it was just painful.

So I redid the whole thing from the beginning. I'm actually very pleased with it, now.

 

[RedFFWolf]

That was kind of the reason behind the rewrite. I liked the idea of the original, but my writing back in college was less than stellar, and when I went back and reread it a few months ago, it was just painful.

Exactly like my piece - except, I never even finished it (stopped at 10,000 words or so, back when I was about 16)

So I redid the whole thing from the beginning. I'm actually very pleased with it, now.

Awesome
And like myself, I rewrote mine. I hope to begin launching it in the next week or two! So, yeah, I know exactly the feeling.

And we'll always be able to look back on our first bits and think how far we've come, saying thank God for that first humiliating FanFic piece!

 

[Jason Tandro]

Kionae: Oh if you want an embarrassing piece I wrote that still exists...

Highwind M.D. - ... I thought it was funny. When I was 18.

Final Fantasy Abridged - I thought it was funny... again... when I was 18.

 

[OneThousandCuts]

22 was also when I took up rewriting my first partially completed (never released) FanFiction piece - and college, too, needed beating out of my head before I could write the way I wanted to---severe beatings!

And they'll continue until morale improves!

Truth be told, I'm still hyper-critical of my own fics, to the point where it often stifles my creativity. Rather than diving into the world and characters' heads like I should, I become overly-concerned with the consequences of getting it 'wrong' by any definition, whether that means by some small piece of canon that's up for interpretation, or by someone else's opinion on a specific character.

I take it so far that I've been guilty of concocting alternative views in my head, and imagining what the flames from that alternative view might look like, and how it would feel to be on the receiving end of them. I imagine the humiliation; that feeling of being "in trouble" because I apparently didn't try hard enough....Even though I've never been flamed for my fan fiction. Ever.

(Uh...this is one of those situations where I should probably mention that social anxiety is my Achille's heel. Where it comes to worrying about the opinions of others, I'm a walking mass of complexes. )

However, on the rare occasion I'm able to take off the "Oh god, what will they think of me???!!" glasses off, I turn into a writing beast, the ideas flowing freely enough that I'm able to crank out 5k words in one night.

Sooo...if anyone has any advice on how to overcome or at least better cope with this little "enduring humiliation" problem of mine, I'm all ears!!

 

[Kionae]

Kionae: Oh if you want an embarrassing piece I wrote that still exists...

Highwind M.D. - ... I thought it was funny. When I was 18.

Final Fantasy Abridged - I thought it was funny... again... when I was 18.

I almost hate to admit it, but I LOL'd.

Truth be told, I'm still hyper-critical of my own fics, to the point where it often stifles my creativity. Rather than diving into the world and characters' heads like I should, I become overly-concerned with the consequences of getting it 'wrong' by any definition, whether that means by some small piece of canon that's up for interpretation, or by someone else's opinion on a specific character.

I used to be that way, too. I held back on a lot of the stuff I wanted to write because I was worried about being judged. At some point, I developed a general attitude of fuck-you-I'll-write-whatever-the-hell-I-feel-like-writing.

There's a huge difference between my current stuff and my older stuff, content-wise. I actually think I may be overcompensating a bit at this point, and shoving in a little too much of what I held back on before.

 

[Channy]

Spoiler: Doesn't anyone else remember the days of fanfiction when you would just write dialogue and little description? No? Just me? *slinks away*

Channy: Like this!

Kionae: No one ever did that.

Flare: Maybe if you had no talent.

Channy does a little dance.

OneThousandCuts: Definitely no talent.