What Makes A Good-Looking AFF Story: Hints and Tips

Description

Hints and tips that you can use to make your story look and sound good, proffessional and interesting. Something that can get you readers without them just glancing at your story and thinking 'ick' and backspacing the hell out of there.

I've come across a lot of people that won't even read a fanfiction from this website anymore, they just switched to LiveJournal. Personally I'd use LiveJournal too but I just cannot figure it out at all, it's way too confusing.

So this is just some tips on how to layout your story and what to do if you want readers and what not to do.

See that? That's a description. It's not a huge dense paragraph of ramblings. It explains what this is for. Describes why I am doing this.

Tip: Writing a story? Summurise the story in two to five sentences WITHOUT giving away what's going to happen at the end. Perhaps end with a few questions (but no more that three because it kills interest otherwise!)

Some people like to do pictures of the characters/idols with the name, age and a sentence about that. That's cool. Just don't make a confusing never-ending list of everyone who is going to appear in your fanfiction, okay? Make the pictures small, roughly the same size as each other and still add a few sentences for a description of the story.

BIG NO-NO:

Don't use a huge variety of colours, fonts or sizes.

Also NEVER and I mean NEVER use Comic Sans MS. *evil font - hissss*

Sure this looks sort-of nice. But this is primary/elementary font, people!

This font is what 40-year-old technoidiots use to make bad graphically designed cake-sale posters.

NOT amazing AU fanfictions.

Personally, for a description I'd say stay with black and use ONE font at a maximum of 16 (size-wise).

I've spoken to people that have never really analysed anything at school, like layouts or work or posters or movies or anything, yet at my school we are expected to analyse and review everything. I'm not saying that any of my stories are perfect or that they have billions of readers but I am an analyical person and I've studied enough about layouts and visuals for 5 years to know what is good and what is just no-go.

Plus English Literature and Media is one of my best subjects so please don't think of this as patronising, I know a lot of you know most of what I'm typing!

I just want to help!

Foreword

Oh look a foreword!

Do you guys know what a foreword really is?

It's something someone else has said about what you have written. A stamp of approval.

For example:

"This is bloody brilliant! It kicks all the other fanfictions right in face! BWAHAHA! You should totally read this agsfsagk" - my slightly derranged friend.

But you know what? Honestly I don't think it should be a Foreword at all. Personally I like to use this space for a Preface instead.

A preface is basically a very small extract of what you have written, perhaps slightly edited.

(It's always good to have the first chapter on your computer before you make this whole thing on AFF)

For example, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer:

Yes yes, I know you're groaning. Honestly though, Twilight isn't a bad book at all. It's the movies that grabbed it and chucked them both out the window. Have you got a Twilight book with you? In your house? Go grab it! Or grab any book, and search! Some books have prefaces, some don't.

Twilight's Preface is the one where she's like:

'I'd never given much thought to how I would die' - (blah blah blah)

BUT then it ends with

'The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered foreward to kill me.'

Good example of a cliffhanger there. Why is he smiling 'in a friendly' if he's going to kill her? Why is she going to be killed? Who is this hunter?

And so starts the whole screaming crying Twilight fan phase.

That's a good preface.

Now off I go to write some trying-to-be-helpful chapters.