Many writers jump into this fandom with a simple goal. Sit down at a computer, and type out an amazing, epic masterwork that spans all the greatest genres of fiction. A truly awesome tale that has a daring adventure, a dastardly and dark plot, a heart wrenching sad scene, a spicy romance, or even an amazing crossover to their favorite thing outside of MLP.

Unfortunately, many of these new writers soon find out that they have bitten off more than they can chew. Their action scenes are dull and often times seem to have no real rhyme or reason. Their dastardly villain and his dark plot turn into a mustache twirling wacko with a death wish. The sadness is laughable, and the romance is often too rushed or doesn't make any sense. And don't get me started on bad crossovers.

The simple reason these fail from the get-go is the fact that an inexperienced writer thought he could sit down and make the next Lord of the Rings trilogy just because he got a B- on his last English paper.

But seriously, listen to me when I say this, your epic masterpiece failed because you did not have any practice and you jumped head first into some of the most demanding and difficult genres to write in. In other words, the kid who has never gone swimming just decided to dive into the deep end, with his experience being a half hour of watching Michael Phelps swim professionally in the Olympics.

Adventure, Dark, Romance, Sad, and Crossover. They are the big boys, the Major League of fanfiction writing. When done right, they are easily the most successful, and often make the feature box. But when done wrong, they pull in the biggest piles of shit and dislike clicks since The Tail of pRince Martin Willis. (If you ever have the misfortune of finding that, give it a downvote, I think that author is going for the record or something. Why the hell else would he keep writing?)

They require complexity, depth, originality, passion, dedication, and most importantly, skill. You need practice and skills at writing to tackle just about every genre in this fandom, but some require less than others, and are more 'inexperienced' friendly than these tempting giants of literature.

Some may argue otherwise, but I will give you my personal opinion on what the scale of genre difficulty is and some of my reasons for it. They will be easiest to hardest, so hang tight and bear with me here.

1. Slice of Life.
Astoundingly easy to write, and rarely seen as a defining genre for a story. They can be incredibly quick stories that require almost no drama or story arc, though I have never seen one make the feature box. But that's not our goal, our goal is simply to get you out of the red here! Just write about something that might normally happen to a pony and publish that bitch! A good SoL is a story about your OC and how they go about life. (don't make them an assassin or a general or some bullshit like that.)

2. Random
They can make no sense at all and still be fine. Good for the writer who has no clue as to what he is doing. Exploit the loopholes in the show's logic and go for it. But I warn you, if things literally happen for no reason at all, that's a paddlin', I mean downvote. Make it random, but also make it entertaining.

3. Alternate Universe
I don't even know why I have this on here. All you have to do for an alternate universe fic is to take something and wonder how it could have gone differently. Badda bing badda boom, story.

4. Comedy
Tell me a joke, and it better be a damn funny one. Comedy stories are easy because they require little to no logical thought process. The only thing you have to do for your comedy story to succeed is to make your reader laugh, maybe even just chuckle quietly to themselves.

5. Tragedy
This is a big leap in difficulty here. Because here, we actually have to start writing in a way that evokes emotion out of the reader. And emotion means more than 'OMFGSQUIRREL! TIHS STORIE IS SO BAWS AND EPIC! EPIC EPIC EPIC!' You can get to the 'epic' stuff when you have the knowledge to pull it off. But a tragedy by definition means that the main character ends the storyline badly, aka by dying or by having something drastically change for the worse.

6. Human
Just don't. You hear me? Just stay away from here unless you have something new to add to the pile. If you want to add something to the Human genre, please for the love of Odin's beard make it unique and original.

7. Adventure
Ooh, we're getting into the tough ones now. Adventure stories can be as simple as two fillies going on an adventure while playing to something as huge as a full blown war that could consume entire worlds. And it is this tier that immediately draws every new writer's frantic keystrokes. I remember my first adventure fic, it damn near killed me. Coughed up blood twice over the course of it from the stress of making it work. But adventures require a certain flair for drama and a touch of prose when describing some action scenes. You have to be able to make the reader feel the action. If your blood isn't pumping after reading your action story, ya ain't doin' it right, boy.

8. Dark
You might think that just by making your setting into something creepy or spooky makes your story dark, but it doesn't. It just makes it cliched. When writing Dark stories, you have to be able to tap into people's fears, and drive the needle of insanity into their weak points. When writing Dark stories, you want to play with your reader's emotions like a marionette. A good Dark story will make your reader want to go on, but at the same time dread the next chapter and what it might hold. It requires skill, and sometimes just a touch of madness to succeed here.

9. Romance
Love is one of the simplest things in the world, right? People who you think should be together are together and they have an undying love for each other. Well then, I'll take a ticket to your fiction world, first class. Ship me with Emma Watson, damn that girl got sexy. What I'm trying to say is that love is actually not very simple at all. In fact, it is a twisted and sometimes insane thing that drive some people to frustrated extremes. When writing Romance stories, you have to know the elements of a good relationship, why good relationships work, and you even have to understand why people are attracted to one another. Don't ship Twilight with some random wandering badass that came into town, because they are nothing alike! Each character must have their reasons for being a part of your ship.

10. Crossover
You might comment on this one here. Go ahead, call me wrong, call me a weirdo that smokes too much dope. But crossovers can be one of the most difficult things to do! I'm not talking about ponification, that deserves a lecture of its own. I'm talking about mixing two completely different chemicals and getting a proper reaction. When mixing two separate story universes, you have to be able to properly integrate them into one another and make them complement one another! You have to know both subjects down to the bone. Take someone like, I don't know, Death from Darksiders and throw him into Equestria. You can't just have him completely accept the magic of friendship and love! He's fucking DEATH! He kills people as an afterthought! And not only do you have to capture his skill with the scythe, you have to get his attitude and his mannerisms just right or people will have a shit fit! Crossover fics are hard because you have to please the reader from both fronts by getting everything just right or they tear you a new asshole!

11. Sad
Sometimes the most difficult to do, in my opinion. Simply because most people have not experienced the traumas that life has to offer that inspire sad stories. To truly know why people cry, what makes us shed a tear is to ask why we live at all. To write a successful sad fic, you must be able to show the stark contrast of life and all its trials. You have to be an artist with your words, and strike a chord in the heartstrings of your audience. It's like listening to Satie's Gymnopeides right after watching the opening scenes from Up and the final scenes from Old Yeller. And if you are a lady, add your time of the month to that. That is what you are aiming to do when making a sad fic, you want to play a song with someone's emotions and make them bawl like a child. If you didn't cry after reading it, go back and do it again until your computer desk is encrusted with the salt of your tears.

And that is my opinionated list of difficulties. You yourself may have a much different list depending on your talents and your skills as a writer. I'm not going to mention clopfics or slaughterporn stories that seem to be oh so common recently. And what the fuck is with the recent spikes in incest and pedophilia stories? Seriously people, this is why the haters actually have ammunition!

414668I'm pretty much down with this list, with one exception: comedy. The comedy you describe here seems to be only the random, quirky, fratboy, Seth Macfarlane/Suda51/Spongebob type of thing. Which is fine up to a point (the point being about 4 years ago, when Family Guy was still watchable), but it's only one facet of the intricate and complex jewel of comedy. If you take a look back through the years, comedy has historically been considered just about the hardest genre to do well. Especially in fiction, because you lack a visual medium through which to ensure the audience get the joke. P.G. Wodehouse, Terry Pratchett and Oscar Wilde are all fine examples of authors whose comedy ranges from being essentially broad to having a subtle, spartan, flowing complexity, but is never anything less that intelligent and hilarious.

Granted, such genius may be beyond the bounds of what we on our humble fanfic website can achieve, but that's no reason to set our goals low. Another thing I'd like to touch on is melding two different types of comedy. This is hard to describe directly, so I shall use an example. Small Gods, by the aforementioned Terry Pratchett, has several layers of humour which take (I found) several read-throughs to grasp entirely, which means the re-read value is astonishingly high. On the most superficial level, it employs physical comedy such as is employed by Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges and latterly Jackass. On another level, there are a lot of hysterically funny dialogue-driven scenes, which rely on the characters themselves, rather than their actions or environment to elicit humour. Also, there is a subtle yet anarchic subtext to it, parodising the way religions evolve and the gods we create for ourselves. There is tons more stuff I could point to, but suffice to say it is one of the best works of comedy I've ever come across.

In any case, the point is that there's no reason to restrict yourself to a single type of humour just because the modern media is saturated with it. Break the glass ceiling! Harken back to and evoke the good old days, when humour also made you think! Stop being randumb and start satirising!

Okay, small rant over. Good lecture, and something I think a lot of people needed to hear

414828

Totally agree about comedy. Good comedy is hard. Good comedy involves sitting down and bashing your brain against the keyboard until there are jokes in every paragraph. Good comedy involves refining your jokes, and chucking out ones that aren't good enough for ones that are better.

I have no respect for comedy which actually means 'My slice of life/romance story has a lone moment of comic relief.'

414889 Lol, I concur with the slice of life part, That's not comedy, that's juxtaposition. And the former part of your comment is a pretty damn succint summary of how the stereotype 'laughing on the outside, crying on the inside' came about. It's because good comedy takes such ferocious attention to detail and concentration to do well, that it can just suck the life right out of you. Plus, if you understand the mechanics of the joke to such an extent that you can write it, I imagine that sort of kills the humour. Go figure .

You have any tips on writing comedy youself? I'm trying to write one, and it is hard as balls .

Oh, and when I referred to verbal comedy in my previous comment, the term I was floundering for was 'repartee'. Brain fart

414927

Take a look at Pipsqueak's Day Off, my one attempt at comedy thus far, then see if I'm worth blagging advice from. In fact, if you see any jokes you like in there, point them out and I'll try remember exactly how I came up with them. That might be instructive.

414935 Good heavens, such formidable length! I shall start working on it directly. Judging by the description though, I should fetch a tissue in order to mop up any bodily fluids that may happen to leak in the process.

Ok, I'll stop pushing innuendo, it's getting painful. I'll get back to you asap and let you know what I think.

414828 Alas, the true virtues of the comedy have gone the way of the old poets. Remembered by they who wish to seek something more than slapstick and mindless shtick.

Thy absence shall be the cause of the deepest remorse from many who must march perilously alongside the driveling masses into a bleak and dull future. You shall be missed, comedy. Truly, we did not know thee well enough.

416646 And yet, arising from the long-discarded ashes of the corpse, a wisp of smoke arises. Coursing it's way through the years, it wends it's way into the nostrils of the erudite and the bored, sparking and ricocheting it's way from synapse to brain stem. Triggering a bone-deep urge for something more, something higher, the minds of the all-too-few people it touches are rent asunder. Torn to pieces from the bottom up, then being remade under strange new rules and concepts alien to the modern zeitgeist, these few minds are the only hope for breaking the cloying and suffocating mold of genericism and laugh-by-committee. All we can do is bask in their glow for their few shining moments in the spotlight, and hope that such opulence inspires others to greatness. Plus, y'know, try to write something new ourselves every once in a while :P

This is actually bringing up an intriguing dichotomy. The reason mainstream things become mainstream is because they are good. Allow me to qualify that against cases like Bieber and Direction: good in the sense I mean is to be appreciated and enjoyed by the majority of people. It is no measure of originality, diversity, or even technical quality. It just means that lots of people like it. Given that I (and seemingly a lot of other people) don't, is that a reflection on them or us? Does it mean that people in general are stupid and want only familiar, generic nonthreatening media? Or does it mean that I'm just a bit weird for not liking mainstream media? Undoubtedly this question boils down to different strokes for different folks, but in modern times is the balance shifting? Are more people succumbing to the programming of modern media and just liking what they are being told to like? I personally prefer to think that it's a combination of people only buying things they know they will like, and the media's obligation to adhere to what we like and concentrate it into purer and purer forms for us. This cycle only ends when a legitimately groundbreaking discovery is made, such as the invention of the moving picture, the internet, or the advent of rock music in the 1950's. Even then, the only one which (arguably) hasn't been watered down into a 'mainstream' form is the internet, purely because it isn't bound thus far by the restraints and shackles that bind media. Because it's run by the people, by us, it will hopefully forever be as diverse, horrifying and entertaining as it is today. Here's the the interwebs, and everything it represents! *clink*.

AU and Crossovers almost always go hoof in hoof. Very rarely would I see a decent justification for having only one. I think crossovers are actually very easy if you know both universes well enough.

For example: Dr. Bruce Banner goes to Equestria, wants to study ponies and meets up with Fluttershy and they two befriend each other. Both are introverts, emotionally repressed and maybe just need a new face to talk to and a friend. If Bruce hulks out and starts to destroy Ponyville. Fluttershy can start to calm him down and Hulk can have a "Betty?" moment and shift back into Bruce Banner.

Slice of lifes can be hard since you have to separate it from the rest. Kind of like Human but without the stigma of self-insertion. Granted Human can also be part of the AU/Crossover genre and those are more accepted.

Comedy and Random are the stories you write for yourself in my opinion. Not really for other people. If it makes you laugh and smile you can make a good one. Whether or not you make the audience laugh.

Adventures are kinda like Slices of Life, you have to break away from the pack to get really good at it.

Dark depends on the kind of dark you're going for. Transgressive and Grimdark fics like Cupcakes, the Experiments of Twilight Sparkle, Psychoshy, Rainbow Factory are easy since you just have to kill people in gruesome ways. Decent, thoughtful stuff like Friendship is Tragic is VERY difficult to do since you have to walk the line between cartoonishly irredeemable and a genuinely flawed person who embraces their flaws. Plus most of these also become tragedies.

Adventure is a gradual difficulty. The more epic your adventure is, the more difficult it is to write. The simpler your adventure is, the easier it is.

Tragedy is hard as you have to know what the difference is between it and sad. (which is hard even for me and my sad poem, "All Washed Up")

Romance is hard if you are trying to avoid a clopfic.

Humans are a mixed bag, usually they are tagged due to an AU/crossover fic and therefore needed for some fics. However if you're doing a human regular. Its nearly impossible to not self-insert.

Necrobumping to say that knighty should use this in his FAQ instead of the damn Poultron stuff there. Oh wait, they're the same guy...

I would say this list sums up most of the difficulty in writing each genre, though I do find it odd that Slice of Life and Romance are complete opposites for me. I suppose it may be due to reading so many corny romance stories (Both good and bad.) that it is literally ingrained within my soul to a degree.

Slice of Life on the other hand, I don't even dare touch. I cannot for the life of me write a simple day in a character's every day life. It turns into a complete abomination every time I try otherwise.

414668 Could you do another lecture about the new genres please?

Personally, I find the genres you said were easy to be hard, and the ones you said were hard to be easy.