Clunky dialogue? Part of me wants you to tell me precisely which bits were clunky, so I can fix them. (Hugs the phrase "complex and satisfying" to heart)
"I'm fed up with this," she muttered. "If I'm supposed to avoid stress, it jolly well isn't working. What's wrong with me? Well, apart from being on the verge of my brain exploding..."
Ordinarily I say dialogue > exposition, but scenes where a character is talking to herself like that don't feel organic or natural. When people talk to themselves -- um, I like to eavesdrop on public transport... -- it's usually in snatches, they think more than they verbalise. So that felt unnatural, where a lot of your other writing flows smoothly.
"The New Adventures of Supertemp" was one of the very first post-JE Donnafics, and at the time didn't feel remotely fix-ity, and I still think isn't, in that it doesn't change the ending, it just makes lemonade out of lemons. Anyway, I still love it, though I stopped reading other post-JE fics for precisely the reason that I didn't want to get turned off the stories I already loved.
Many of them are excellent, but most just blend together after a while. Some consistently reuse the same images and clichés, too: for example Jack lecturing the Doctor on the morality of his actions, which is amusing at best.
Jack the king of wiping people's memories against their will lecturing the Doctor about what he did to Donna is ridiculous at best and rage-inducing at worst, and one of the reasons I haven't bothered with Donna fixits for some time. The worst was a story I read where Jack called the Doctor on his actions and then, several scenes later, used retcon on several nameless citizens of Cardiff, done without any indication of irony or awareness from the author. After all, it's only bad when you like the person who gets mind wiped, right?
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But it's a great fic, especially when read on its own, not as part of a long line of similarly-themed stories.
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"I'm fed up with this," she muttered. "If I'm supposed to avoid stress, it jolly well isn't working. What's wrong with me? Well, apart from being on the verge of my brain exploding..."
Ordinarily I say dialogue > exposition, but scenes where a character is talking to herself like that don't feel organic or natural. When people talk to themselves -- um, I like to eavesdrop on public transport... -- it's usually in snatches, they think more than they verbalise. So that felt unnatural, where a lot of your other writing flows smoothly.
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