What makes a good fan-fic?
 

Before I start, I know this probably would belong to the fan-fic section but I put it here because it's the best place to have a thread have more replies to have a good discussion.

I've been writing some fan-ficitions for a few months now and I've see their is over 1700 stories on Fanfiction.net now. But from what i've seen, most of them aren't that intresting because they are eather far fetched, overlong or very odd. I have a question for fan-fic writers and readers:

What make an Avatar Fan-fic a good one worth faving or remembering?

I haven't really read many other than Clarke's Hello Earth series (which are debatably not even really fic), but I personally like those that use main characters other than Jake and Neytiri sometimes. I find it refreshing :P

Yeah, don't use Hello Earth as an example of anything fan-ficy. It runs on different rules from Avatar, (a major one being transhuman AI) and you'd have to have a really good justification to get the two to match up, and even if you did, you'll almost certainly break something else. (If only because Mr. Morden and his associates break everything)

IMO, writing fanfic is all about which rules you stick to. Unless it's the point of the fic in some way or another (like AUs or crossovers) you should stick to the source's rules as much as possible. (With the caveat that one of those rules might well be, as it is in the case of Avatar, "Make it up, technobabble/explain later.") So canon characters stay in character, canon [plot] devices work the way they work in canon, and importantly, things established as impossible in canon don't happen. (Violating the last is a major indication of Sue-ness.) The work has its own established tone and sense of "appropriateness", and fanfic should stick to that, unless (as with most writing rules :P) the author knows why the rules are there and knows precisely why they're being broken.

Though AFAIK, the reason the majority of fanfic is crap has nothing to do with the fact that it's fanfic, but because 90% of all writing is crap. It doesn't fail at being fanfic, it fails at telling a story, whether because the characters are wooden, the writing is structured badly, the plot is nonsensical, or whatever. (Or, even more annoyingly, the author can't spell or compose a sentnece/paragraph properly.) In original fiction, 95% of that is never published, and so we don't see it.

IMO, none of the above mean that fanfic can't be different, very long, or even completely bonkers, it just needs to carry over the "style" of the original. Harry Potter And the Methods of Rationality, for instance, starts out as very good fanfic, because it keeps the feel of the series, but shows how it's changed when Rational!Harry tries to mess with it. (I've not read to the end, but it apparently it becomes worse in that sense because it starts focusing on game theory and I-know-you-know-style exchanges, rather than the conventional elements of HP)

(Obviously, YMMV on all of the above.)

if you're asking this then you're probably someone that write's stories for readers. not for yourself. i write my fanfic the way i want to, and if people happen to read it then that's just a bonus :D nuwutumsayin?

Yep. That's the main difference. Even well-written fanfic would often (but not always) still only be a mediocre to poor original book. It's also easier to write with characters, worlds, universe constraints and continuity that has already been established then creating original ones (even if some authors do ignore these in some of the lower-quality fanfic). There are exceptions, of course, to fanfic being low-quality.

Yeah, that's one of the few fanfics I've tried to read, and I gave up on it for that reason (and apparently be becomes an uber-Mary Sue as it goes on too).

With Avatar, there's the example of Between Worlds. It's a nice fanfic, has some very well written scenes... and has absolutely no understanding of the background or technical details of Avatar, to the point that its whole premise is completely invalid (and then it jumps genre, leaving "appropriateness" behind with it), and gets so much wrong that I stopped reading it.