The Ultimate Guide to Harry Potter Fanfiction

The Future: Next Gen

Requested by EmilieFolke and star--wars.

It's finally time. After four long years, I'm finally taking on my greatest fear: myself.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, I have a very special place in my heart for the next gen. My next gen, specifically. I have been writing the Star of Gryffindor series for four years now, to the point where I literally can't remember what's canon and what I made up. This is great for when I'm writing, because I am super invested in my world, characters, and story, and strive to create something good.

However, it's not so good when I try to tell you how to write a good next gen fic. Because I really like mine. A lot. And have a hard time reading other next gen fics because it's hard to transport myself from my AU to canon to another fic, instead of just from canon to a fic. I am so deeply invested in my story that it's hard to step back and see this genre as a whole.

I hate to disappoint, though, so I'm going to try, just for you guys.

Let me start with a list of cliches that I know I committed in my story, just so we're all on the same page and I can avoid hypocrisy.

1. Orphaned OC main character who lives with muggles who hate her.
For some reason, next gen fics feature a surprising amount of Harry Potter carbon copies. I know that this isn't just a next gen problem, but it seems incredibly prevalent in these stories. If the stories don't simply focus on Rose, Albus, and Scorpius, the main character is an orphan who lives with muggles who hate her.

I mean, come on, I made Astra live in a closet. What was I thinking?

2. Literally the MC is just Harry Potter 2.0.
She's a Seeker her first year. She's a Gryffindor. She lives with an awful family. She's at the center of the villain's plot for a reason that's entirely unexplained. She's impulsive and sassy and doesn't seem to care much for rules. She's got two plucky best friends, one who's very smart and one who will help her get adjusted to the wizarding world.

I'd like to think Astra has grown into more than this as the series has continued, but this is pretty accurate for the first book or two. Try to avoid this stuff...

3. [Spoilers] the Triwizard Tournament is reinstated and the underage OC protagonist gets put in as a fourth champion.
This is my most glaringly obvious problem, and I'm not sure if it's a cliche within this genre or within this fandom as a whole, but oh boy do I get comments on this. Most people will overlook everything else I'll mention here, but everyone comments on this one. It might be because I was self-aware enough to admit it was cliche at the time, and people felt comfortable enough with that to agree, but I get comments several times a month about how cringy this is.

However, I also get comments at the end of the fourth book that I pulled it off all right. The main things people say are that I created my own challenges. I spent a lot of time creating tasks that seemed about equal to the originals, testing the same skills. I followed a pattern I thought I saw in the original tournament, and out my own spin on it all.

Another thing that I did well was make entirely different subplots and character developments. Part of that was easy, considering the world I'd created, where Wren Predatel, daughter of international terrorists, had come back to Hogwarts and was trying to have a normal school year, leading me down the trail of everyone suspecting her, of her dealing with trauma, etc. Having a character who knew the Beauxbatons students (Colette) also opened up doors.

But I still had to work to come up with original subplots. Marcus could have veered dangerously into Cho Chang territory, and there was a time when I thought about killing off Faith Lindsey, the other Hogwarts champion, in a similar fashion as Cedric Diggory. I couldn't just make everyone react the same way they had to Harry.