h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I see that I am not the olny one who is working on a fan story, admittantly, mine is not on my page.
I can't find a story line that I like.
Any suggestions to help a stuggling young fan fiction writer?

Start small, write quickly, and use your own ideas. To expand on those:

Never attempt to write a book if you haven't really written an essay. Never write an essay if you can't write a few really good, coherent paragraphs. People always make this mistake and end up either repeating huge chunks or adding lots of padding. Start small and work towards a /long-term/ goal of creating a story or novel.

Write quickly: this needn't be just stories or s/f. Write about /anything/, just do it as fast as you can. Write about the side wall of your house, giving yourself 15 minutes to fill ten sheets of A4. Try and make it so you don't conciously think about what you are writing, instead letting your hand do the work. This may sound odd, but the more of these exercises you do, the better your writing will become. After all, a painter always uses a sketch-pad to practise. Writing is no different. Try to write about "something" for at least 20 minutes per day, and then after a week or two of this, take a look at what you've got and edit some of it. You'll almost certainly find that most of it is not very good, but there will be some gems in there, I guarantee it!

Use your own ideas: don't attempt to do a DNA. My page came about for various reasons, one of which was that I was writing a humourous s/f thing, but realised it borrowed too heavilly from HHGTTG, so I cancelled it. I then decided to see how long it would take me to resurrect all the characters from HHGTTG and continue the series; it was simply an experiment that will never have any more pages or be piblished anywhere other than here due to rather obvious legal implications. I only put it on this site at all as I thought it would be of interest to the researchers here.

As far as storylines go, think analogy. If you like DNA's work, for instance, you'll realise that once you strip away the s/f facade, and the 20% or so of bizarre other-worldlyness, you are left with a combination of observational humour and satire. Think of situations that are funny in everyday life, and then put them into a new scenario or, take a normal everyday scenario and utterly change just one element (this is often the case with comedy shows).

Hope this helps,


Craig.