I used to have a bunch of essays up on my site on various fannish topics, but I took them down when I redesigned, because I just wasn't sure how I felt about them any more. Most of them were written in the late 90s, and I called them rants at one point, but they really weren't; I don't rant well. I've been thinking about making annotated versions,
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Maybe the initial idea about structure was wrong. It's so easy to get stuck into a certain way of thinking about a story once you've started it
I had that recently with a story. I'd decided back when I stared it that it was going to be exactly 12 short scenes, each one with no time breaks in it. And I clung on to the twelve scenes idea long after it was a handicap to the story, and even after I'd broken that, I stuck grimly to the 'no times breaks within each scene' rule. The story didn't work until I came to my senses and gave that up.
Still, by this time you'll have some sense of whether your story is War and Peace, Revisited or a response to a 500-word challenge.Heh. I wish. I fequently have no idea at all until the single scene has turned ( ... )
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That's when I find showing the story to someone else can be incredibly helpful. Often, what they say is actually something I knew myself deep down but I didn't want to acknowledge because it meant a lot of work. Somehow, though, when someone *else* says, 'you do know the reason this AJ/Lance story doesn't work is because there isn't enough Lance in it, right?' it seems to give me the motivation to fix it.
The last thing I did was, um, I don't even know what to call it, it was from the POV of three people more or less simultaneously. *g*
That's cool. I think there was a period where people got very Thou Shalt Not about pov switching, and now it's relaxing. As you said, people are more open to more experimental writing.
Mind you, when mickeym and I wrote Absinthe Makes..., it switched pov in very short sections, sometimes line by line, because we wrote it as comments. We had to decide at the end ( ... )
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SGA: 35 past tense, 25 present tense, 5 POV 1st, 1 POV 2nd, 51 POV 3rd, and 4 with multiple POV characters
SPN: 52 past tense, 36 present tense, 2 POV 1st, 3 POV 2nd, 85 POV 3rd, and 9 with multiple POV characters
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For me, I think I like multiple POVs best when it's a story about people who have very different perspectives on things, so events and other persons are presented differently somehow, whether it's about the romance or the plot. But I also have a strong personal dislike for the "let's misunderstand each other completely" approach to love stories...
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In SPN, mostly. I've noticed it with the big bangs, I think. Maybe because the stories are longer?
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