DOs and DON'Ts of a Fallout fanfiction

But I like them!

I really didn't have any ideas for another chapter of this book until yesterday bam! I found myself in a situation that was very distressing, Fallout-fanfiction-wise.

In short, I was writing Chapter 11 of my Fo4 novelization. Or rather, I was putting all the pieces together since a great deal of it had already been written. And unless you've been living under a rock or something, you know what kind of person I am when it comes to Fallout factions. So I was sitting there, looking at my favorite chapter of mine (which, completely off the record, turned out great) and wondering why the hell is it over 12 000 words long.

A situation like this is rather obvious for a writer: cut! So I read it carefully, looking for fragments I could throw out. Then I reread it. And again. And I couldn't find anything that would be unimportant enough for me to get rid of.

I just liked every single word of what I'd written. And I didn't want to lose it.

But Maria, I told myself, how the fuck is it 12K, then? It's mostly just dialogue!

Well, the answer hit me pretty soon. It was the first chapter with Brotherhood of Steel and I wanted it to be perfect. That's why I wrote all those dashing descriptions (just look up that chapter and see how I described Danse or Maxson), all that perfect dialogue and everything. It mattered to me more than the other parts of the story.

And that's when I had to tell myself stop. Because I began to get seriously emotionally invested. And as a writer, you can't really do that. Sure, it's great to write under the influence of strong feelings, but it's not a good thing if you try better at some parts of the story than the others. The only reason why this chapter was so good was because it was the Brotherhood of Steel and I like them.

Then, I asked myself, why aren't the other chapters good? Don't I like Nick Valentine?

I do. Of course I do.

But the thing that I realized now is that those ten previous chapters were worse for one simple reason: I was very excited about the eleventh. So I wrote them very quickly just to rush it all to the eleventh. And that was Bad with a capital B, because those ten chapters paid the price of me wanting to get to the eleventh as soon as I could.

So the moral of this story is... Well, actually there are two.

One, rushing is Bad. You don't want to end up with a poorly-written chapter just because the next one is going to be amazing because guess what. The readers are going to see the poorly-written one first. And if they stop reading altogether, they will never get to the good one.

Two, try to keep a safe balance between all the things in your fanfic. If you're got three characters, make sure all three get equal amount of spotlight. Doesn't have to be at the same time. But if one character gets more attention just because you like them, it's quite obvious. I've seen it in fanfiction all too many times.

Either way, yeah. That's mostly it. I'll try to update this book more often from now on (if I have the ideas). If there's anything you'd like me to address, just write a comment under this chapter.

Have a good one!