A universe where Spongebob and Patrick are married, or where Game of Thrones characters are in high school.
Let’s bring our cringey 13-year-old fanfiction imaginations to life!
Tag: Fanfiction
Let’s light up the dumpster-fire and make some auto-generated fanfiction!
Can we edit the trash into treasure?
It’s time to put our editing skills to the ultimate test.
Fanfiction can be a great stepping stone for beginner writers.
The characters and world are already established, so you can fully concentrate on plot, structure and language.
But even then, there’s some things to be careful of before you dive into the fabulous world of fanfiction!
Everyone says that the most important thing about writing is to just get something down on the page.
But sometimes, that’s easier said than done. What if the stuff that comes out of your brain and onto the page is absolute garbage?
Well never fear, friends. Because nothing you write will ever be worse than this auto-generated fanfiction.
They always say that your first draft should be absolute garbage. Then, once you’ve finished the story to the end, you should go back, hack it to pieces, and edit it into the shining gem of a story that was hiding underneath the whole time.
To take that idea to the extreme, we decided to try our hand at editing one of the worst-imaginable first drafts: auto-generated fanfiction.
If you’ve never seen the website The Fanfic Maker, then you should probably change that immediately by checking it out. It’s amazing. All you have to do is put in some parameters and then bam! You have fresh fanfiction written about whatever you want.
One of my favorite exercises is generating a fanfic, and then going through and editing it to try and make it into something actually readable. It can be quite a challenge, and even though it’s a bit silly, you can learn a lot from it.
Case in point: the story of Serenity and the Stolen Eyeball.
For the last stream’s exercise, we did something that we haven’t done in a while: edit auto-generated fanfiction.
To do that, we went to the website Fanfic Maker, put in some parameters, and then auto-generated an entire story. We read the whole thing, and then rewrote the beginning, trying to stay as true to the original intent/spirit as possible.
The original was very… unique. (You can read it here, just prepare yourself mentally first.) But it did have some interesting ideas, and a couple hilarious lines. So we did our best to incorporate them into the rewrite.
Here’s what we came up with:
Last stream, along with special guest Abbey, we did one of my favorite exercises: editing auto-generated fanfiction. We did this last week and it was a lot of fun, so we decided to try it again this week.
We used the auto-generator Fanfic Maker, and just to give you a taste of what we were working with, here’s the beginning of the story we were given: (all spelling/punctuation mistakes left as-is)
I was inspired for our latest stream by the recent YouTube video “How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit.”
It explains how the first Star Wars movie as it was originally edited (which almost no one has ever seen) was an incomprehensible mess. It was only after going back through another round of editing that it turned into the masterpiece it’s seen as today.
You can watch it here:
This idea fascinates me. I love how essentially the film that we all know and love was hiding there, made out of the same raw footage of the original bad cut — it just had to be reorganized.
And the same idea works for writing. We all try so hard to get our first drafts done perfectly that sometimes they never get done at all. It’s easy to forget that they’re not supposed to be perfect: first drafts are just to get something onto the page. The perfection comes later, with editing. That’s when you turn the terrible stuff (like the original Star Wars cut) into better stuff.
So for the exercise during the stream, I wanted to try and turn some trash into treasure. To do this, I used the website Fanfic Maker, which automatically generates a horribly-written story for you. After getting input from the chat for what the story should be about, we got our terrible story and read it together.
It was… painfully bad. Here, you can read the beginning: