Fanfiction authors are strange, strange creatures, my friends, strange creatures. Creatures that dwell in the darkness of their dens and bedrooms, eyes ablaze with the radioactive glow of the luminescent screen before them. Creatures that take delight in repeating lines from their favourite movies and doodling the celebrity object of their adolescent lust on their notebooks, surrounded by hearts and quotes. Creatures that are capable of knowing characters inside out, from their shoe sizes to their hidden birthmarks, yet who are unable to avoid ripping their mannerisms to shred in naught but a single line of dialogue. An example plucked from the depths of fanfiction.net:

I think that speaks for itself. Heretofore and forthwith, I am dedicating this section of the site to characterization, and the mistakes that crop up in not one, not two, but thousands upon thousands of pieces on fanfiction.net.

No excuses to be made here, this is your story. People don't open your link because they have a strong urge to admire your font. And, quite obviously, without these two substantial aspects, your "fic" is not a fic. It's probably a badly formatted role playing session over MSN and, allow me to be frank, who really wants to read that?

Their Characters / Canon
This subject is frequently bestowed upon with my wrath hour upon hour upon hour, whilst cruising fanfiction.net. It seems as though when authors are typing in the URL, their minds seem to block out the "fan" part, and focus only on the "fiction". It's the only theory that can possibly be rendered to explain away such pieces as this:

First of all, I'd say that Jack needs to work on aim. And second of all, I'd say this: Elizabeth is the sweet, sheltered daughter of the mayor over a hundred years ago. Sexual knowledge among sweet, sheltered daughters of mayors was not exactly prevalent in those times, so the idea of her being turned on by Jacks own arousal is laughable, unless she's had some sort of previous experience. Unfortunately, the author blows that fish out of the water by this next lovely little line:

I will gladly smite the fool who dares say that he or she can picture Elizabeth saying this in the time of tri-cornered hats and curly wigs. It's pieces like this that make readers want to puff out their chests, stick out their chins, point their fingers and intone: "You! Out of my fandom!" It's untrue to the character of Elizabeth, and in this case, shows the readers that all your really in it for is the sex. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. That is why I am here now to take you on a glorious and spiteful lecture on why characters should be kept the way they are.

First of all: Fictionpress.net is for original pieces, and if you find yourself changing the way the character acts and speaks to something that is different from its original form, you should change the names and move it off fanfiction.net, because no one wants to read it. There are some exceptions to this rule, considering deeper and darker sides can be brought out to certain characters, but as for the rest of them? Please keep them the way they are. In cases like this, the mark of a good writer is not necessarily to create a stunning character that everyone admires for being so original, but to portray a character we all know and love. And, in the end, it's the duplication as opposed to the reinvention that makes it a good story.

There are a few cases out there that are simply too horrific for words. I've put in the one that I find is the most popular:

Hermione is the sweet, do-good, know-all character in Harry Potter, with endearingly bushy hair and crooked teeth. For some reason, most fanfiction authors take this as a go-ahead to do whatever the hell they want to her image and personality. For the last time: Hermione does not need a makeover. If it isn't already apparent from the books, when she states that its too much trouble to straighten her hair every morning, she is a character who is more interested in her studies and learning as opposed to her looks.

In many cases, Hermione is an authors cheap shot at inserting a Mary Sue without having to take the blame of doing so. The general consensus on this seems to be that "If she was already in the book, she's not a Mary Sue." Ahh, I'm afraid not, my friends, I'm afraid not. Over the years, I've seen Goth Hermione, Hot Hermione, Punk Hermione, Skater Hermione, Slut Hermione, and on occasion, Emo Hermione. Here follows one of the more frightening snippets:

If anyone can come up with a good reason for Hermione to start dying her hair and changing her eye colour the "muggle" way, wear ho gear (including the "fuck me" boots), and getting an ironic tattoo featuring the name of a muggle band, I would really like to hear it. I think I deserve some sort of compensation for forcing myself to believe that Hermione now indulges in black leather mini skirts.

AUTHORS! If you care about a character enough to write a piece on him/her, make sure it is indeed the same character. If you find you're having trouble with the way they speak and act, go over the book or the movie again. Devote a few hours to simply researching your character, act him or her out, write a few studies to get the hang of it. If you are that devoted to writing and your fandom-of-choice, it shouldn't be that big of a deal, even with your busier-than-thou schedule.

And, we reach the last part of this subsection; The dark side. To many authors, it is attractive to take a character that is perhaps the comedic relief or a cheerful sort, and give them a dark past, a dark side, dark secrets, and many more wonderful little aspects that would make the most hale and hearty emo boy cringe and wish he were dead. (It's actually not all that hard. If you tell an emo boy that you dropped your ice cream the other day, he'll cringe and wish he were dead.)

To be honest, I find this attractive too. It gives the story a deeper side, and allows you to unleash your own perspective on the character. Take caution to keep your characters in canon the situation calls for it. I've seen brilliant fics done this way, and in some cases, I've never been able to look at a character the same way.

To conclude: Writing fanfiction is like working with a connect-the-dots or paint-by-numbers kit. The foundation is already laid for you, and you have to build on it. So take caution with the characters that are already given to you, because they aren't yours.

Your characters / Mary Sue / Gary Stu
This subject is inevitable, I'm afraid. If you haven't learned of Mary Sue and Gary Stu, you damn well should before it's too late. There are many essays and articles devoted to the two of them in fanfiction, but I'd like to think that mine is unique. Or at least I'm much more better looking than the majority of people who write that kind of stuff.

Original characters are difficult to not insert into fanfiction. After all, think of how monotonous fics would be were it just the characters from the fandom, and no one else. But over the years, the idea of an "original character" has almost turned into a dirty term, simply because of the characters that are introduced. Some people I know are confusing the ideas of Mary and Gary with original characters, and believe that fanfiction authors are hypocritical for hating Mary and Gary, yet inserting their own characters. In this section, I will endeavour to break down the misconceptions concerning all three.

Original characters are exactly what they sound like. Your own characters inserted into the fandom of your choice. This is the fun part of fanfiction, because there is no doubt that your characters will get to meet up with their characters and go on some wild, adventuresome jaunt together and hopefully take some time to interact and develop. However, there is one big thing that separates the well written original character from the infamous Mary and Gary, and that big thing is this: Flaws.

In order to produce a well written piece, your characters should be real and believable. Not necessarily in the sense that they can't have super-powers or be witches and fairies, but in the sense that the way they act and speak should be as true to real people as possible. Even though you may think that a character with a witty comeback 24/7, a killer sense of style, eyes changing twenty different colours, and a face that would make Paris Hilton pluck at her fake nails in insane jealousy is pretty neat, other people will find her difficult to believe. And that is when Mary comes in.

Mary Sue is a common trap that many writers fall into (me included), and is the least fun to read about. She is perfect, in every sense of the word. And I mean perfect. Shall we kick things off with an example?

(This was taken from a review for a casting call on fanfiction.net in the "newsies" section)
Name: Xana Corillania
Nick name: Combat
Looks: Black hair she cut really short to look like a boy cuz she sleeps in the boys lodging house disguised as a boy. really big beautiful purple eyes that change to green when shes angry. really small and short, but skinny and curvy at the sametime. sorta pretty in a quirky type of way. has birthmark shaped like the chinese character for strength on her hip and a scar across her stomach frum a gang fite.
wears: black pants, checkered shirts, suspendrs (red, of course) and a brown newsboy cap. really cool wich boots.
personality: she is one tuff chick so don't mess with her!!!! lol she can take anyone down in a fight cuz her older brother (spot) taught her to fite when she was really young. she has a really shor temper if anyone is treating her or her friendz like shit she'll defend them wif her life. really sympathetic and kind and trusting, gets hyper really easily but doenst loose her koo. she can take a joke but if you make fun of her friendz you had better watch out!!!!
newsie of choice: jack
anything else: she lives in brooklyn cuz spot is her older brother if that doesn't work with your story you can change it lol. she has a slingshot and is the best shooter in all of new york.

This is exactly the sort of character that can be easily defined as a Mary Sue. If you go through the "personality" section, she's got something for everything. She's tough and street smart, but soft and loving at the same time. She can take a joke, but won't stand for any shit. She can get as silly as the rest of us, but manages to "keep her koo'" Whatever that is. It sounds like a small, furry animal. Notice, if you please, that she is curvy and skinny, but manages to look like a boy anyways, as opposed to a girl with short hair. Not to mention, she has the most psychadelic and impossible eyes that have ever been seen on a human being. Notwithstanding that eyes like that are never supposed to be seen on a human being. Ever.

A word to the wise: Give your characters flaws. Make them normal people, and I assure you, your readers will enjoy it. If they have "short tempers" and are forever diving headfirst into things, keep that continuous throughout the story. Have them get into serious trouble because they mouthed off at the wrong character or messed up due to a spontaneous idea that should have been thoroughly thought out first. Make them chubby, gawky, give one of them a nose that's too big for her face, or heavy set shoulders that make her look mannish. Hell, give them grey-brown hair and dull, light coloured eyes as opposed to "big beautiful purple eyes" that are seen on people next to never.

Gary Stu is simply the male version of Mary. Even though many people insist he hardly ever appears in fanfiction, there's blatant evidence in many, many vampire fics that contradict that.

Unwilling to take my word for it? If you've been reading fanfiction for quite a while, perhaps the following description will ring a bell: Chisled jawline, pale and beautiful, flashing green eyes, extremely flawless black hair with shots of purple, a slender, lithe body, and tattoo of something evil and vamp-tastic on his hip? Named something like Daemon or Hart or Jared or Kythe? Perhaps something with a few more "y"s and "e"s than should be allowed in names?

If there is anyone out there that actually knows of a personage like this, who stalks around at night with a switchblade, pack of cigarettes, and revolver of the authors choice, I'd really enjoy meeting them, just to see if they exist. Also, because they sound pretty damn sexy. But just because they sound really damn sexy is no excuse to thoroughly rape their existence in every single fic you have posted.

For some reason, many of these Gary Stus are around the tender ages of 18 and 19. This is the most irritating thing about them. Please keep your male teenagers as male teenagers. Where's the acne? The braces? The overbite? The constant pressure to choose a career path? The awkward conversation openers and bad pick up lines? Honestly. If the world were made up of teenagers that acted as all the Daemons and Kythes do, we'd be even more over populated than we are now, considering teenage girls like myself would be lining up to have their children.

Like Mary Sues, Gary Stus can do no wrong. Their tough, protective nature gives them just enough humanity to be likeable (as if they could be anything but likeable with wonderful vamptastic tattoos), but at the same time, they're bad to the bone, giving them enough edge to be sexxxy. They own societally deemed "hot" weapons, and can fight like pros with them, even if they've never had any training before. Sometimes, if the author feels like getting creative, they can speak French or Italian, which gives them an old fashioned romantic air (however, languages like Russian and Native American are very un-sexy and have not yet been spotted on any Gary Stu I have had the displeasure to read of.)

I would like everyone to keep in mind that there is no sort of official line between Mary and Gary, and an original character. I've seen posts on forums asking exactly how to define the two of them, and there is no possible way. It all depends on how well the character is written, and how believable he or she comes off. As a matter of fact, many of the above facts have been contradicted and used to write a really good fic…but that's because the author put a lot of time and effort into her stories to make them believable. It can be done…it's just dangerous to try. Which gives me the pleasure of stressing the need for beta readers, or at least a second opinion, before you choose to post your fic.

Casting Calls
These things seem to be a popular method of gaining both characters that you didn't have to make up and friendships lately. I must admit that I'm am ardently opposed to casting calls. Allow me to explain for those of us who are less than net-versed.

A casting call usually goes something like this: the author posts a little excerpt in his or her story stating that he/she is opening a casting call, and to send in your characters. Usually, he/she will post a list of male characters that are still free for the taking, or any occupation that may need to be filled by some kind of character. Then, dazzled by the unthinkable concept of making a cameo in someone else's story, authors will send in their characters by the millions like sheep to the slaughter, making use of the universal profile. Name, age, gender, nickname, love interest, birthday, so forth and so on...

This is a despicable practice. If anything else, author's should be the proudest of their characters, whom they supposedly have toiled long hours to bring into the light of day! Creating someone else's personality is like playing God! You, and only you, control what they look like, how they speak, what they think, what their life has been like up to the very point you write your story at. To farm your own characters out to someone who only knows the basics is showing slavish concern for your own little creations.

I admit that I once participated in casting calls. I would send in "Misprint" with high hopes, expecting her to win over her love interest with dazzling wittiness and save the day! However, I always ended up disappointed, because the author of the story never went beyond the basics I sent into them. That's because they can't go beyond the basics, since it's all they have! Basically, every time your character appears, it's just a rewritten version of the profile that was originally sent in, and it doesn't challenge the imagination in anyway. It's like thinking up a story and reading the same story reworded. You already know the ending, the character developement is a bore, and the plot was thought up by yourself last night. Ridiculous.

It's a proverbial double-bladed sword here, ladies and gentlemen. Not only does it belittle your characters, but the author of the story gets stuck with a bad deal too. With a few exceptions, any story I've read with a casting call fails to impress me, simply because you can always tell that the author is dealing with something that's over her head. The CC characters become two dimensional cardboard cut-outs of their former selves, and rarely exist to anything but make appearances. Not only that, but if a huge number of replies are sent into the casting calls and the author tries to include every single one, you end up with something even worse. Name dropping.

To use an example: The original version of Outkasts by Thumbsucker Snitch. Now don't get me wrong, it was a fantastic story. Appealing, exciting, and all around a very good read. Thumbsucker Snitch is a talented writer. However, a good lot of her story clearly betrayed the fact that she had accepted many characters. The club at school, "Outkasts", was chock full with enough female characters to take over Germany. And it was rare that you saw a name more than twice, every other chapter we were being introduced to so and so with this color hair and curls, or so and so with that color hair and wispy bangs. I lost track of characters and thusly, lost interest in the story. Which is a real shame, because it was a good one too. This is exactly the kind of trap that many authors fall into, when they have too many characters to write about in depth, and have to mention them here and there, even though they serve no real purpose to the plot.

Authors. Please. Make up your own characters. I realize that audience participation is fun (it's hella fun, I've tried...), and that you feel you are being gracious in allowing your readers to make little cameos here and there, but casting calls always come to no good. Besides, your story is entirely unique and entirely your own, and you, only you, should shape it's direction. Not your readers.

Logistics
Alright, you've read over the past section, and have decided to formulate a few brand spankin' new characters. Now what? Now you put them together with your fabulous plot, and make them interact in all sorts of lovely different ways. Sounds fun, huh? It sure is. But before you decide to post anything, you should read over this next section and get it firmly lodged in your head as well.

Motives
People do things. This is extremely easy to prove. I'm typing. You're reading. Hugh Hefner is slowly and painfully dying of five types of cancer (well…not really. But it's nice to dream, isn't it?) Here's the catch: The things people do are quite uninteresting. It's why they do things that gets someones attention. Usually. Flipping over cars is the exception, but it usually is.

Here's an example: Helen locks her door. This is boring. We've all locked our doors at some point or the other, and unless there's some intense emotional complexes involved in locking the door, we're not interested.

The motive? Helen locks her door because her best friend is on speed and is banging at the windows, threatening her. Now it gets angsty. And interesting. And we want to find out what happens. Watch as I seamlessly tie this back into the subject:

Motives are the key to a characters role in the plot. The motive is basically why they do things, things like locking doors and flipping over cars. Get ready for another blatant point: You characters must have motives. Always. Whether they're big motives that take the plot in a new direction, or small motives that make amusing accessory scenes. But if you have no motive, nothing gets done, and you might as well be just describing the characters for all we care.

Why is this in the character section, you ask? I'll tell you why. Because my next point is this: The motives must be good. Let's say Xana Corillania leads a happy, carefree, wonderful life. She has many friends, whom she confides and gets along perfectly with. She has a doting, loving boyfriend with whom she shares a dramatic, intense relationship. She's the most creative newspaper seller in the lot of them, and besides that, she has stunning good looks and numerous talents. She is mentally balanced and all around fun. Wait! Hold up! All of a sudden, Xana starts cutting herself. Why, Xana, why? "Um…because it increases the drama in my fic?" LAME, ladies and gentlemen, LAME. Avoid this at all costs.

The motives don't necessarily have to be wise or driven by some force that is good and true, but they must be logical to your character. Xana has no reason to cut herself, so don't make her do so just so you can add in a dramatic argument or two. If you have a ruthless mercenary who is only in it for the money, don't give him a heart of gold just in time to refuse to kill Mary Sue. If you have the premise of sorrow, let sorrow happen.

Character Development
Ooh boy. Now we're getting deep, aren't we? Character development is exactly as it sounds: Developing a character. Not development when you're still in the stage of "What colour eyes does she/he have? What are his/her traits?" but development when you've reached a crucial point in your plot that affects your character in a big way.

In short: Character development is the literary term for watching a character grow. Unless you are one of those people that insist on screaming out every sentence and adding many "Ohmigod!!"'s in between, chances are you are not the same person you were when you were a toddler. People change in an amazingly short amount of time, and if you want to remain true to human nature in your story, your characters will have to change as well.

This doesn't mean that you lay it out in near point form. "Years passed. Stuff happened. Brad found he wasn't as weak any more." That's the simple way out. Character development should happen during your story, when there's some sort of event that affects your character. It could be something as huge as a car crash in a gas station that incinerated all his/her friends, or something as small as someone making a sarcastic remark about her attitude and making her see herself in a different light.

The best example is the diary of Anne Frank (okay, it isn't fiction. But if it were, it would be hella good.) Read the first entry, and the last entry, and compare the two. She goes from a young, naïve flirt to a mature woman throughout the duration of her time in hiding. And not all of a sudden, as though something that someone says makes her "see the light". It's a long, hard process that she writes about in great detail, and so well that we grow along with her. I promise you that is the cheesiest thing I will say for the rest of this critique.

I don't understand why many authors refuse to see this, and keep their characters as static as a broken television set. Surely the process of growth isn't a foreign thing. It must be understood by someone, somewhere, that events cause change.

For example: I have read many, many stories (especially newsie fiction, I'm sorry to say) that has the age old plot gimmick of girl getting angry, running away, getting raped, and being brought back in splinters. This usually leads to a moment of bonding between her and her trademark love interest, and he promises never to hurt her, and just at that moment, she realizes she has found her twu wuv. Then it takes, perhaps, two or three days of healing in his arms, and she's back to her old spunky self. This sickens me, ladies and gentlemen, it absolutely sickens me. Rape is not like a fight with a friend, in which you're angry for a few hours, and then you make up. The emotional (not to mention) physical damage has been enough to last some people for years, let alone a few days.

An example? Sweets Conlon is in an abusive relationship with Jack, her brothers best friend. She tells her brother, who confronts Jack, and a huge fight ensues. Eventually, Spot and Jack go at each other with knives and end up in the hospital. Sweets thinks it's all her fault, but Spot tells her it isn't. Blink, her automatic new boyfriend, consoles her by making out with her on the couch at his apartment. The last couple of lines?

Even if nothing directly happened to her in the knife fight, her brother and ex boyfriend have stabbed each other through the chests a few times. I think that's more than enough to make a person feel slightly different from the way she felt a few months ago. But, of course, Sweets is as stalwart as a rock, I suppose.

Reading that story was a real disappointment, because nothing was emotionally resolved. This is why you must make sure that your characters grow within your story, and react to different situations realistically. They don't have to be forever scarred, but they don't have to be completely untouched. And, let's face it, that's what makes a character interesting.

Now, all I've done here is give you examples of what not to do. But since I'm balanced and good looking, I will now give you some examples of characters that are quite the opposite; very well done.

These are all very well written. The authors have obviously watched the movies, read the books, and have studied the way the character in question moves and acts. You'll notice that what they do seems logical to their original forms, and the way they speak and think is true to themselves.

Alright, I think that's as much as I can pack into this section. Lo, it was finished. And it was good..