Writing is hard. Even as a fanfiction / hobby writer, you still want your story to work. You want it to be a good story, even if nobody is ever going to read it.
Maybe you write for a small fandom, maybe you write for yourself, but you still want your story to be good.
I get that. I used to feel that way, too.
But around 15 years, 500k words on my ongoing work (and the lord knows how many before that) and many, many sleepless nights later, I think I can give some advice on what to do if your story feels boring, flat or downright cringe (which, btw, is okay if that's what you wanted it to be).
1. Not giving my character an internal conflict
Characters, original or not, need a reason to carry on (my wayward son- wait no-). Everytime you start a new story, you need to be clear on what your character wants, how they want to get it and why they can't get it. You need to know what they think about the world, about the people around them, and how that is wrong or not based in reality. For example, my Supernatural OC, Emily, has a fundamental misbelief that Dean hates her. This misbelief is there because she's thirteen, she's angry, and she doesn't understand whatever Dean does - even the things are mean, or wrong - she does to keep her safe. Abbie Emmons talks a lot about this, and I recommend her Youtube Channel for a lot of content on this topic, but you can start small by just figuring out what your character thinks and how that is preventing them to reach their goal.
2. When everything is tension, nothing is tension anymore
Do not pack your story with drama after drama after drama. Allow for resolution, allow for time for the characters to develop before they get into another conflict or fight. My story has a lot of fighting between characters, but that doesn't mean the entire book needs to be made of fight after fight. What happens between two people after they fight? They usually take distances, or they make up, they try again. And if in reality the same fight might present itself more than once, I try to avoid that in my stories: it might be realistic, but it's also boring, both for the reader of for you to write. Try to find a good balance between conflict and resolution, add some filler that actually carries out some character development, some side plots, something that might look useless now, but will be important in a later conflict. The detail your character notices in chapter 5 might be useless for them in chapter 10.
Another important thing in writing conflict is that conflict needs motive: nobody fights over nothing. With this I don't mean your characters need to fight in a very explicit way: if two characters have tension because of a deeper, more private thing they don't want to share with the other person, they might fight for stupid things. This is fine and is actually encouraged, but please make sure we understand it somehow. You can use internal thoughts, body language, successive or precedent behavior, it can (and should imo) be subtle, but it should be understandable for careful readers.
3. Not build a character sheet
I know how this sounds: I know my characters, I don't need a character sheet.
I am sorry to break it to you babe (gn), but you do need a character sheet. Even if you do know how your character looks like, sounds like and acts, a good character sheet will make sure you keep all these things consistent in the entire story, so your OC's eyes don't turn green halfway through a chapter because it sounded better that way. (Unless your character can change eye color, but that's up to you to make them a Changeling).
Beyond the consistency use, a Character Sheet is useful to get to know your character better and ask yourself questions you didn't think of. What is their favourite food? What was their relationship with their grandma? These details may seem irrelevant, but thinking about them and sneaking them into your story, your dialogue... it makes the story a lot more real and a lot more interesting, and it makes your characters feel more like people and less like lines on a AO3 tab.
This is where I come in. As I said, I am a hobby writer, I've been writing ever since I was 12, and I decided I liked it way too much to make it my job. So, instead of writing stories for a living, I started writing code.
A lot of code.
And with that code, I created a tool that lets you create a character sheet. Now, before you start thinking "oh for f*ck's sake, another person trying to get my email!", listen up. My tool is free to use, doesn't require login, doesn't save your data, and doesn't use AI (because f*ck AI lmao). All you do is open the tool, fill it in, and download it in the form you prefer. It can be a Word document, a PDF, or it can be a Notion-compatible file. That's it! The only thing I track is who finds it on Google! We love privacy around here, don't worry bestie.
I don't make any money from you using it, I just build it for other writers to enjoy.
If it sounds nice, you can try it here.
4. Not knowing where the story is going
There was a time I just wrote. I wrote chapter after chapter, without an end, without a goal. My characters weren't getting closer to their goal, they were not growing, they were just circling around each other (and the plot) like hungry sharks.
At one point I had to sit down and do the unpleasant work. I had to plot the story to figure out what I wanted it to go. Do characters A and B ever find common ground or do they keep fighting until one of them dies? In case of fanfiction, where do I follow canon and where do I randomly add 100k of Breaking Bad crossover with a devastating slow burn that ends in tragedy? (Not saying that I did... But...)
I drew a diagram of how close characters were narrative arc by narrative arc, I added plot points I wanted to happen, and I decided how it was going to end. By deciding the ending, I was able to figure out how we get there. Who needs which type of character development, who needs to die and who needs to come back to life (it is Supernatural after all). I cut some characters out, I rethought some storylines, I rewrote fights that didn't make sense.
5. Not looking for cliches
We all fall for cliches when writing, but we rarely like them when reading.
In my case, my MC was turning in kind of a Mary Sue. Everyone loved her (but Dean), every man fell for her, and she was good at everything she tried. She was the chosen one, but most importantly, she didn't realize how good she was and she wasn't like other girls.
I had to go back and fix that, because when I realized I couldn't unsee it and it was unbearable to think about. That was not what I wanted to write. This is how character sheets are useful. I went through all the abilities my MC had and decided which ones she was good at and which ones she kinda sucked at. Shooting? Good. Cooking? Bad. Flirting and one night stands? Awesome. Romance? What the f*ck is that? Get that thing away from me.
I also went through all the relationships she had with various side characters and decided which ones made sense for her to be positive, which one(s) could be a romance, and which ones didn't need to happen. Most importantly, I decided who hated her, why they did, and who doesn't. Don't make it obvious, get creative with it. For example, in my story, Emily has powers given by demon blood. This demon blood make her weirdly likable by some demons, like Crowley, who will try to hide it but actually see her as some sort of demon kid. This is invisible as first, but comes in useful and gets more clear as the story progresses. At the same time, a lot of angels don't like her. Dean doesn't like her (but doesn't he, really?), John doesn't like her. And yes, two characters fall in love with her despite her flaws (yes, it's two, it's 500k+ words, that sh*t happens more than once lmao), but that happens after she opens up and shows them who she really is behind the asshole-hunter-must-be-cold mask.
Other cliches you might be falling into are love at first sight, not like other girls, and very common and over used tropes.
6. Not format my dialogue correctly
This is more than an aesthetic thing than a technical one. As a self taught writer, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to format my dialogue, where I needed uppercase and where I needed a comma. Until I figured out there's rules.
A lot of rules.
A lot of rules I will not remember to enforce every time and that I cannot easily scan for in 500k+ words. So, like for the character sheet, I got to work in creating something useful for me.
My dialogue editing tool let's you paste you chapter and highlights your formatting mistakes, your adverbs and tells you if your text is too complicated or to dialogue-dense. And no, there is no AI involved. It's all based on patterns and linguistics (which I had the pleasure of studying in university for two different languages for eight long years). You can try it here and of course you don't need a login and it doesn't track your data in any way.
You don't have to use it, of course, but it's a cool thing that I actually do use pretty often when I edit my chapters, so...
That is all from me today! I hope I gave you some useful advice, and if I did and you read into the Supernatural fandom, feel free to check out my AO3 profile!
Thank you for reading, and keep writing for you 💕