Blogger: lilylatte-

I know I know, a lot of you are completely against fanfiction for whatever reason, but honestly, it's not that bad!

... most of the time.

See, I don't have a special story of how I got into writing. I didn't magically realize that writing was what I wanted to do.

I was always into reading. You can say it's hereditary, I suppose, because both my parents are avid readers too, albeit of different genres.

My father prefers to read self-help and nonfiction books while my mother is partial to romance and I like fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller.

Then, I don't remember how I stumbled into fanfiction. I read some of it. I liked it. I decided to try it out for myself. I gradually realized that this was what I was meant for if that's not too dramatic.

As of today, I've been doing this for around a year and I currently have an original novel in the works.

See, if it's not too much, I'd like to say that I have writing talent. This, however, does not mean that the first chapter I wrote was worthy of being a bestseller. It was horrible, it was cringe, and it was not something most of you would like to read.

When I first started writing fanfiction, I posted it here on Wattpad. It did not get negative feedback like you might be expecting... just nobody read it.

I, of all people, could barely read it after a couple of weeks without cringing. Even today, after being up for nearly a year, it has 1.3k reads and 35 votes. I still update it and anybody can see how much I've improved between the span of the first and twentieth chapter. People will click on your story. Most people who do not like it just leave or give you advice on how to get better. Some might hate it, but it's your right as the author of the story to ignore them and/or delete their comments.

This, however, does not mean that you disregard all feedback. There is constructive criticism that you must accept and try to implement in your writing if you feel it's sound advice. When you write- or do anything for that matter- you must set your ego aside and accept advice from those that are better than you and/or have more experience. In the end, it makes you better. They're not the ones benefiting from you accepting their advice.

It was my third fic that finally started to get more attention, with 34.7k reads and around 855 votes. I'm currently rewriting that but can you see the improvement? I am a person that is constantly improving and evolving and I will never be satisfied with my previous works but I will always strive to make myself better and I think that is an important quality to have.

(I feel bad about all this boasting)

Sometimes, I felt pressured. I was not feeling like writing but it has almost been a month since I'd updated and I felt horrible for all my readers. You will most certainly experience it (or maybe you already have) at least once. I'm still not immune to it and I don't think I'll ever be.

See, I want you to take your time writing a chapter but I don't want you to abandon your book for a month just because you're feeling lazy. You need to develop a balance so that you don't post a rushed and half-baked chapter just because of the pressure but you don't let the book be pushed to a corner of your mind because you'd rather watch Netflix.

I do tend to do that. I've been cutting it down lately but I realized at some point that the problem is that I'm just out of ideas.

So if you've conquered the previous problem, let's move on to this one.

Being out of ideas. It's the nightmare of every writer. Now I won't tell you that it'll be easy to come back from this, I'm still struggling, but I've gotten a pretty good idea about how it works.

First, I need you to take a break. Go out with your friends, read a couple of new books that aren't fanfiction, watch movies with your bestie, and so on, it'll definitely help. Then when I get back to writing again, creativity renewed, I like to go on Pinterest and surf it for prompts to write my chapter. And songs. If you're feeling particularly out of ideas I'd say listen to music and base the mood of that chapter on the song you're listening to.

One last thing, YOU ARE VALID. Just because you write fanfiction instead of original novels does not mean you're any less skilled or capable. And who knows, maybe someday you will write a killer novel and it will have started with one fanfiction.