I typed this up to help out fellow writers (mainly amatures).
To any mod: Could you move this to the fanfiction portion of this forum?

The Basic needs of a story

Okay, so you want to post a story of yours on the internet eh? And would it be for the sake of knowing whether or not people enjoy your works or is it for other reasons such as publishing it on official literature websites? No matter what the reason is, what you really want is a good first impression for your story. First impression within literature terms count; whether it is you’re publishing an article or a story, you still need to have a good first impression.

Q: Where do these first impressions start?

These first impressions start from either the first paragraph or first piece of your story that you post at all. As silly as it sounds, if you do not meet up to the following requirements, people may have the impression that your story is going to be either uninteresting or something you’d expect from a second grader. Now the basic needs of a story include:

-Proper spelling: spell-check your works before you post it!
-Decent grammar: Know where your commas, periods, capitals and exclamation marks go before you start posting your works. I admit I make occasional grammar mistakes as well; most pros do sometimes. However, this is no excuse to not check your grammar.
-Paragraph variation: Don’t make all your paragraphs either too short or too long. Mix them both in your writing.
-Sentence structure: Make sure your sentences make sense. You wouldn’t read a book with too many sentences that don’t make sense, would you? And also, don’t make all your sentences too short or too long.
-Save your works: This is a very good thing to do when you’re working on a serial story. Really, it’s also better to save your works so you can work on them later when you don’t have a lot of time on your hands.

Notice how I said nothing about ideas? I’m pretty sure you did. Ideas mean squat when you’re writing, as my dear friend Kikyophobia would put it. Really, when it comes to a story, ideas should be the least of your priority.

Q: what if you have this really good idea in mind but you don’t want to lose it too quickly and you feel you must post it right away?

The answer to that is simple; use a story board! Story boards are very good if you wish to reserve your ideas. All you really need to do is draw out your ideas on paper and then story them away somewhere so that no one can steal your idea. Then you can come back to the story board when you’re ready to start typing up your story.

Anyways, back on topic. I had just listed the basic needs of a story. Those are needed in all forms of literature.

Fan-fiction and Plagiarism

Ever got to feel what it feels like to have your own hard works stolen by some prick who claims it as their own? Sadly, I know the feeling. I had it happen to me twice actually.

There is a difference between plagiarism and fan-fiction. Fan-fiction involves making something new out of a fandom whereas plagiarism involves theft of someone else’s works and claiming as their own. There’s the huge difference right there!

Plagiarism comes in three different forms:

-Direct copy and paste: The most common form of plagiarism over the net. This is usually easy to indicate (especially if you’ve been reading around).

-Story theft: This is usually when a person takes another person’s story and retypes to make it look like their own. It is typically harder to indicate whether or not a person has done such. However, it is still possible to catch the person red handed with story theft.

-Dialog theft: Basically, it’s when you take dialog from a TV show, movie or book and gives no credit and therefore it is considered theft.

Another sad thing about plagiarism:

sometimes people defend the plagiarists...