🔥 fanfic?
The single best way to try and improve your own fic writing prose wise is to spend a significant period of time reading everything except fanfiction. A lot of fanfic is written, obviously, by people who read a lot of fic themselves. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but frankly, it leads to a kind of... self-cannibalizing prose style you can start to spot pretty quickly. I can read a fic sometimes and guess before I go to their profile what popular dudeslash fandoms they loved in 2015, you know? And because it's a style with very limited stylistic inputs, so to speak, over the years the selection of what I'd call 'AO3 house styles' (and there are several!) have gotten more and more calcified. If everything you read sounds like One Thing, your own writing will get locked into very narrow habits. They probably won't serve you well in the long run because of that narrowness.
If you're cool with that, no issue, it's all for fun. But if your goal is to actively improve your writing, you have to spend like a month to six months reading Literally Everything Else so your brain remembers all the other ways to construct sentences and stories- and I really think it is helpful to do this while taking a full break from fanfic reading, speaking from personal exerience. This is not often well received advice because it is taken as 'fanfic is stupid and bad for you, read Real Books' and therefore reacted to defensively. But really it's the same advice any writer in any form or genre needs. (Many literary fiction authors would benefit from being told to read widely outside their own niches, lol.)
