Warriors Fanfics: Specialized Writing Guide

BASE | What to Write About

31 May, 2019

This section covers choosing what to write about, rather than plot ideas. It is here to give you some clarity when you just do not know what to make your story about. As a Base section, it has little to no examples drawn from canon Warriors.

What to write, what to write. There is only one way to answer that, according to successful authors and other writing guides: write what you know. That is absolutely the right answer in most cases. But it is one thing to say "I've been an alcoholic, so I will write a book about addiction" instead of "I've lived in a forest among feral cats for years, so I will write about what they do all day and night." It just does not work the same way. That is not to say writing about addiction is impossible in a Warriors fanfiction. It can work, along with hundreds of other concepts, morals, and occurrences. Some of us are paralyzed by the choices available and have to touch on as many as we can in one story. Others basically rewrite the canon as is. Here, I will try and give purpose to your desired topic for your next fanfiction; why did you choose your plot line?

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TYPICAL WRITING IN WARRIORS

First, you have to figure out what kind of story you want to tell. Specifically, what the plot will be, what themes you want to use, morals (if any), etc. This tends to be the hardest part for fanfiction writers. They have the chance to write something on their favorite fictional universe, but have no idea what to write about. Two things often happen: they write with any and all tropes from the canon stories, or they get bored and move on with another story. The latter seems more common with the Warriors fandom. Which is a shame. Some people would love to see how a story plays out. No way to do that if the last update was eight months ago, right?

You need to pick a topic that you are actually interested in. No point in tying addiction tropes into your fanfic if you have no interest in telling that kind of story. All that seems easier said than done, especially when the internet is involved. A majority (not a lot, a majority) of stories on the internet get abandoned midway through because their authors lost interest. I know that there are more reasons than that for an abandoned work, but that is easily the deadliest thing for fledgling fanfics right next to not writing a first draft [see Live Updates vs First Draft]. Wattpad is no exception. Granted, the average Wattpad user according to their metrics is a fourteen-year-old girl. But we can expect the same from the 35-year-old man who renews his New Year's resolution to go to the gym. Hard to do something you do not like or have no interest in. Is it your fault? Yeah, somewhat. But not entirely.

The main issue I personally see regarding interest in one's own fanfic is sticking way too close to the main series' plot lines and tropes. Normally, there is nothing wrong with that; that is how the origin story of fanfiction starts out, anyway. But Warriors is not Star Trek. Star Trek (the origin fandom of fanfictions) involves exploring the galaxy in the 23rd century and beyond. There is literally a whole galaxy of unused and unseen material to pull into your fanfiction. The same can be said about Star Wars fanfics. In case you do not know Star Trek, there is the more slice-of-life My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This show does not involve constant love, loss, and politics, but it still has a massive well of content to pull from and make one's own (zebras, Hasbro? Step it up next time, Hasbro). That is why their fandom is one of the largest around.

Warriors and its fandom tend to be a bit more rigid than Star Trek, though. There are a few story lines that we tend to stick to. Many of these story lines follow canon rules and tropes closely. And no matter how many deviations we get from these ideas, they are still very close to a small number of plot lines: