Odd dreams and even odder writing victories/woes

[bigmamag]

Dude, awesome yet weird dream. I dreamed of Glee, and I was at their high school for some reason. I don't know but they were all proving something to the football team in this auditorium and they were short a singer, so I stood in and rocked it. Maybe I dug Lauren last night a little too much, lol. And Kurt was there and being fabulous and Karofsky

Comments

[lettered]

I'm not sure that title and summary are the most important part of a fic. They might be the most important part of advertising a fic, which I realize is really important; no matter how good your writing is, if no one looks at it, well, it's pretty disappointing. But no matter how amazing title and summary are I'm not going to read something to the end unless it has more going for it.

I think different people want different things from summaries, which makes it really hard. I like very short summaries that tell me exactly what the fic is about. I dislike dialogue excerpts and would never click on a fic that has a line from a song as a summary.

Personally, I would not recommend the ellipses before and after line for a way to show time passing. It's not that it's ugly so much as it . . . lacks sense, imo. If you wanted, you could do the same thing with a series of jump cuts, but that would probably be just as jarring and sense-lacking.

If you want to do it in the epistolary format, you can definitely show things building, imo. You can also suggest that things have happened that the reader isn't privy to ("when we talked last night, you said" etc). You can show time passing just in the writing ("I know it's been a long time since we've talked"), but since star dates don't mean anything you could conveniently use them to suggest passage of time.

These are just my opinions; I really like talking about writing style, so disregard at will!