Huh. I was just thinking about the first fiction story I tried to write for a grade school assignment. It was set on a terraformed Neptune, and involved a young boy on his hoverbike being nearly killed by hunter-seeker drones that ambushed him from out of the tall, purple grass.
Okay, so my terraforming knowledge left something to be desired (although I seem to remember it being in the *distant* future), but even my first scribblings were better than 95% of fanfics I've ever read.
There is a definite trend here, yeah. There is an often glaring difference between authors who put a lot of work into writing and those who had an idea for something and jotted it down.
I suppose I can't really blame people who write fanfiction and really do just toss it together when they have a moment without a lot of thought. It's not like a professionally published book or anything. But this is the main reason that I don't read fanfiction anymore. Wading through the junk is too daunting to be worth it. Maybe it's just the sort of person I am, but many years ago when I first started trying to write serious fanfiction, I spent
time researching how to write. I wish more people would do the same.
I've found a rare few fanfics in my day that were just excellent and captivated my attention, but they're so rare and hard to find I don't even bother anymore. You know... I wish there was an archive somewhere of fanfiction that was deemed to be of very high quality by the community. Sort of like fanfiction.net but with a crap filter, I suppose.
Sort of makes my position in the community complicated. I write fanfiction occasionally (okay, haven't in years due to lack of time and realization that none of it really mattered), but never read it. Does that make me some sort of hypocrite?
(And I just realized that I'm perpetuating a derail!)