writing about writing

[flambeau]

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,

Comments

[burntcopper]

betas/editors : a beautiful heaven-sent thing. Because there's nothing more embarrassing than posting and then having a reader point out that you switched tenses mid-sentence. or wrote 'wear' rather than 'where'.

[flambeau]

Yes, oh yes. Or, "You know he already took his pants off two paragraphs ago, right?" oops.

[nopseud]

I'm going to be a little creepy and stalkerish, and say that your talk is one of the very few really memorable guest talks I've ever been to at a con, certainly in terms of remembering the content much later. On a very quick 'pick three', probably you, Chris Boucher, and Damien London.

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

[flambeau]

You remember me! *snf

[nopseud]

I've got so much stuff abandoned because I got stuck somehow, and I'm sure there's a solution and a way to get unstuck that I just can't see.

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

[flambeau]

I really wish I could make that work for me. When I show someone a story in progress, what usually happens is that it dies. It's very annoying. :P

[ratcreature]

Recently I've started tagging for both tense and POV (because a post by seperis made me curious) and multiple POVs seem indeed very uncommon in recent fic, though present tense has almost equal showing with past. Like I haven't been keeping track of this long, less than two months I think, but of 147 stories I tagged for POV only 13 had multiple POVs in them. 89 were in past and 59 in present though a few stories have both and use a different tense for flashbacks or something.

[flambeau]

Stats! ILU. It's nice to have at least limited confirmation that I'm not sitting here making things up. *g* What fandoms are those stories in?

[ratcreature]

SGA and SPN mostly, though some are crossovers and a handful of other fandoms, but in those mostly one or two stories, if that, for SGA and SPN it breaks down like this.
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

[flambeau]

That's a lot more present tense than I would have guessed; I think present tense has become common enough that it's transparent to me in most cases, and so I don't even think about it, or at least I obviously didn't think about it when I was annotating this. Very cool, thank you so much!

[musesfool]

On the POV thing - I've very recently seen a resurgence in dual or multiple POV stories, and I was actually thinking about posting about it, and why I think it works for certain types of stories, but doesn't for a lot of the recent stories I've seen using it, or I should qualify, why it doesn't work for me, which is that in a romance, part of what I really love is the narrator's uncertainty. Obviously, if I am reading a romance (fan or pro) I am 99.44% sure the characters are going to get together, and that A loves B as much as B wishes he did. But B doesn't know that, and reading a story where A's feelings and B's feelings are both on display feels like it totally leaches the tension and suspense out of the romance. I feel like the narrative should tell me A loves B even from B's POV, even when B can't see it. At least, that's what I try to do in my stories, and what the stories I like best achieve

[flambeau]

I'd be really interested in hearing about that! I haven't noticed this resurgence, but then, my reading is v. limited these days. Which fandom/s have you noticed multipe POV stories in?

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...

[musesfool]

Which fandom/s have you noticed multipe POV stories in?

In SPN, mostly. I've noticed it with the big bangs, I think. Maybe because the stories are longer?

[flambeau]

Could be! I'm just getting started on reading big_bang stories, so I'll try to keep an eye on the POV thing.

[flambeau]

I'm glad you got something out of it! It was definitely fun to revisit something I'd done not all that long ago and look at the changes I could see between then and now.