on characters and caring

[ladysisyphus]

digitalemur mentioned me in a Tumblr post, and though I responded to things over there (a bit), I have been thinking more about emotional attachments to characters and how they're important to fiction. Add this to how I promised etiennetelling I'd say my piece about narrative voice, and I've got a post ahead of me:

Comments

[digitalemur]

Crap I didn't see your response over there. Because you have a ghost Tumblr, I guess? Curses. I am glad you resummarized over here.

[velithya]

Great essay! I agree, narrative voice is so important! I find it very jarring when a story has me piggy-backed onto someone's POV and then abruptly mid-scene (sometimes mid-sentence!) bucks me off onto someone else's viewpoint.

If you want lots of comments and the adoration of readers, fuck, don't ever give up fanfic for original fic. Are you crazy? Nobody reads that.

ahahaha ha ha brb crying forever this is absolutely 100% true ;_;

[ladysisyphus]

Yeah, sometimes I feel bad about talking people into writing for SSBB. Hey, come contribute to something that will feel like nobody's paying attention! (In fact, our readership is pretty impressive; you just wouldn't know it because damn near nobody ever leaves a damn comment.)

I don't mind shifting POV if it's established pretty early on that that's a thing that can happen. But suddenly having it switch partway is jarring -- or worse, it doesn't switch, it just briefly goes omniscient to drop information someone else in the room is thinking.

[velithya]

I didn't find that so much with my regular SSBB story but definitely in the special issue stories there's maybe a handful of comments if I'm super lucky. (An aside: I've stopped contributing because I do not have time with my new uni schedule to do anything like writing a coherent story, sorry to hear the recent issues have been down on contributors! I'll have free time again at, uh, the end of 2016 ^^;;)

Oh absolutely if it's a feature of the story, or it's between scenes, or the whole narration is omniscient - totally fine. Just not randomly for no reason!

[ladysisyphus]

Yeah, the regular issues have gotten real lean on comments lately, so you know what's happened to the f/f issue -- even though, of course, the stories that run in it continue to be some of the best.

But do I ever understand busy. When you're able to work something up again, though, you know we'll love having you back! And in the interim, if you've got any reading time in there, if you wanted to boost the comment count, I wouldn't say no. Either way, good luck with stuff!

[yumiyoshi]

This post is great and you should feel great \o/

Less flippantly ... thank you, this post lays out a lot of my much messier feelings on fanfic and origfic so clearly! I was making motions and shouting YES THAT IS EXACTLY HOW I FEEL for pretty much the entire post. Quoting what I like would basically be ctrl + a ctrl + c ctrl + v so I will spare you.

Speaking as someone trying to have it both ways (kudos do, on some tiny level, soothe the burn of the third rejection slip in a week), I plan to keep this very close to my heart. And also keyboard.

[ladysisyphus]

Thank you! I was actually feeling kind of iffy about it until I saw that people ... actually seem to like said post? What the heck! Awesome!

Honestly, part of why I don't do the publishing thing is that I don't have the guts for rejections, so I have the greatest respect for people willing to put themselves out there. Maybe someday I will? But you know, when I'm having a hard time getting people to pay attention to my stuff for free, I don't have a lot of confidence that anyone would want to give me money for it. Good luck, though! I hope those slips get more positive soon.

[yumiyoshi]

Hah, no, this post is awesome. Although as ever with writing, it's impossible to predict what readers will want. Unless you're Rumiko Takahashi or something.

I had a whole rambling comment about rejections but I deleted it all and will just say: it's a bummer, and I only do it because I'd write those stories no matter what; might as well see if I can get someone to give me money for them. Tons of awesome things don't or can't get published, so I try not to take it personally.

Also dang I wanna sub to SSBB now *eying schedule* May have to peek into the policies to see what is acceptable - and when the deadline is XD

[ladysisyphus]

Hooray! Come join the party! Pretty much everything you need is in the submission guidelines, though there's the quick answers for the highlights. Here's our list of 2014 themes and deadlines, and though we haven't announced specific dates, 2015's themes are here. Let me know if you've got any questions!

...And for what it's worth, we do have a pretty notable readership. Most of the readers just don't leave comments, which can make it seem like a pretty thankless exercise. But with almost 4000 unique visitors to the s2b2 journal last month (the slowest month thus far of 2014), it ain't a bad way to get read.

[ladysisyphus]

Thanks! I ... actually hate reading writing about writing, most of the time. But that's because in my experience, half the time writers talk about writing they're going MY MYSTICAL CONNECTION TO THE GOSSAMER SOULS OF WORDS THAT FLUTTER LIKE DEWDROPS FROM THE MOUTH OF CREATION and the other half they're going GOTTA WRITE LIKE I GOTTA BREATHE IT'S SO HARDCORE AND I'M SO BADASS FOR DOING IT, and it's like, ugh, no, go away, nobody cares.

But maaaaaaaaaaybe 1% of the time I find writing about writing actually useful, and I hope this is more a contribution to that minority pile than it is yet another self-indulgent unicorn princess treatise. (I'm slightly afraid excerpting my own story bits takes it in that direction, but I soldier on. Because I'm so hardcore. And badass.)

[ext_2802610]

I managed to lock myself out of my livejournal account for lack of password remembering, so twitter will have to do for now. This is an excellent piece that I am going to reread and attempt to take to heart.

It also has excellent timing, as I read a book last night where I never understood why the characters fell in love with each other, why they were so compelling. Between that example fresh in my head and some of the points you made, things clicked into place in my head on some of my own mistakes in writing. Obviously, it's going to take time and practice to learn, but as Adventure Time taught me, "sucking at something is the first step at being kinda good at it."

I also cut my writing teeth, not on fanfiction, but text based roleplaying. I know this accounts for a lot of the quirks in my writing. My partners and I already loved our characters, why did we need to set that up in the text? It also causes me to POV jump, when I don't actually mean to do so :|

[ladysisyphus]

Oh, I'm glad you brought up RP logs, because damn, are those ever places where it's delightfully easy to build beloved characters. And why should that not happen? You love your characters, your friends love your characters, you love your friends' characters, and everyone has a great time!

I tell you true, most of the time I can spot an RP-log-turned-story a mile away. Sometimes it can be done successfully! Sometimes, in fact, it can be done very successfully. More often, not so much.

And yeah, this does all take time and practice. You should go back and read some of my old SSBB stories; I can't so much, but you should. That was straight-up my sucking at something until I got kinda good at it. And the discipline of having to damn write a damn story every damn issue (haven't missed one since ... 2009?) has forced me to learn from my mistakes, because I have no time to be repeating them. I ... do repeat them, of course, because I am a slow learner, but expediency is a great teacher.