Writing rules

[vilakins]

Everyone's doing this, so I'll have my rather pedestrian go at it. I'm just not very self-analytical, I suppose, because I have no idea what my personal writing rules are. And you know, doing a commentary on one of my stories is something you'd have to pay me to do. A lot

Comments

[entropy_house]

Pronounced can be useful if someone is being very pompous, or is a speech teacher. :^)

Otherwise, I think of someone standing in a courtroom as sentence is pronounced.

[vilakins]

I can't think of any reason I'd use it to say who's speaking though.

[entropy_house]

In orotund tones, the magistrate pronounced, "Thirty days without internet!" while the chastised blogger wept.

[vilakins]

Yep, but that's a specific use: courtroom. Eh, I was scarred by that verb at a tender age.

And that's cruel and unusual punishment!

[kalinda001]

I like this. I'll try it out.
If you really don't like 'said', you can always use 'beats', which have the character doing something. In fact they're a good way to break up dialogue and give readers some visual clues.

Is there an better way of depicting inner dialogue when mixed with verbal dialogue and internal feelings etc.? I haven't really found a way I liked or worked better.

[vilakins]

"Go for it!" Vilakins twirled round on her chair, pleased that people are actually reading her post. "And they make a talky scene less static."

Inner dialogue I put into italics--if it's direct thought and not reported. If it's indirect, I leave it plain. E.g.What on earth was Avon doing with that thing? Vila approached, filled with curiosity and caution. "What's going on here?"

What on earth is Avon doing with that thing? Vila approached, filled with curiosity and caution. "What's going on here?"
Is that the sort of thing you meant?

[kalinda001]

Yes, that's exactly it. Thanks. I'll try the first one.

In terms of the second. That is what I am currently doing with internal dialogue. I do find it annoying that the spell/grammer checker always tries to capitalize anything after a question mark when it is meant to be inner dialogue.

[vilakins]

Um... but it should still have capitals in all the right places!

[azdak]

These are all very helpful guidelines - it's fascinating to see what people come up with when they muse on the writing process.

They should only be used if you're writing from the POV of someone who doesn't know the characters

I don't think anyone, ever, thinks of other people that way. Even if I notice that the headmaster of my daughter's school is blond, I wouldn't think of him as "the blond headmaster". It just, I don't know, it conflates two categories of thinking about someone in a way that doesn't happen in real life. I might think of him as "That idiotic Brad Pitt wannabe" or "my disconcertingly handsome opponent" but it would definitely be thinking of him in personal terms, not as his job description + hair colour. Hmmm, I'm not sure if I've explained that very well. I'm a bit obsessed with how characters see other characters, so my stories are full of that sort of subjective, "idiotic Brad Pitt wannabe" epithet, and if they don't know each other's names, they'll usually invent some private nickname, like Mr Obnoxious, that

[vilakins]

Well, I described the rude old bitch I encountered today as 'the white-haired one with the hump' (and more than one kind it appeared) to a colleague. I imagine that troopers watching Vila and Avon cracking a safe might do that too. "You get the dark-haired one and I'll go for the other one."

But yeah, 'rebel' and 'pilot' are very unlikely, yet they're used far too often in B7 fanfic. Vila gets called a thief when he's not even thinking about nicking something. :-P

[azdak]

'the white-haired one with the hump'

Exactly! And not as "the white-haired customer" (or whatever she was).

Vila gets called a thief when he's not even thinking about nicking something.

Hm, maybe this is getting closer to the heart of the problem. It's identifying him by one of the social roles he plays, in a context where that particular role isn't salient.

[vilakins]

Yes, and it happens all the time in old B7 fanfic. I don't know whether you've read much of it. I bought up a lot of old zines five years ago when I became a fan, and these epithets are so common, I wondered if they were a convention which was required in order to have one's story accepted. The most common were:
- the little thief (although Vila is about the same size as Avon)
- the [dark-haired] comptech
- the blonde (or curly-haired} pilot
- the burly (or once again curly-haired} rebel
- the slender telepath
ect ect as Molesworth would sa.

I remember someone saying that they read a satirical story in which someone, probably Avon, said he desired 'the burly rebel' and ended up with Gan.

[jhall1]

Thanks. Some useful things to think about there. I wasn't sure at first what you meant by "beats", but I think I've worked it out from the subsequent discussion.

[vilakins]

I read the term in a book on writing a while back. It's basically having a character do something rather than just telling the reader they spoke. Beats don't just attribute speech by implication, they're also very useful for adding pauses and timing, hence the name I assume.

I think the term is used differently in script-writing but I'm not sure about that.

[jhall1]

Thanks for the clarification.

[kindkit]

Heh. I have just used "pronounced" in a ficlet. But it was in a context of the character pompously offering a judgment, so I thought it was appropriate. I hope it didn't cause anyone to throw their computer across the room. *grins*

[vilakins]

A laptop, maybe. Just kidding!

That may be fine, but it wasn't appropriate for a five-year-old girl called Flossie, whose name just made it worse*. The author used an appalling variety of verbs for attribution and that one happened to be the last straw. Flossie wasn't pronouncing; she was just saying something. I don't actually see it much these days--'intoned' and 'supplied' annoy me much more regularly. That one just stuck in my mind.

I suppose I could have talked about names and appearance and how not to hit the reader with a sledgehammer about your characters' characters, but I've never seen anyone do it in fanfic--yay for us! Those damned twins consisted of: Nan and Bert, older, with straight dark hair and boring sensible attitudes; and the young, blonde fluffy-haired and -headed Freddie and Flossie. I objected to the unsubtlety of this, and also to the sets of twins looking so alike despite being different sexes. Yeah, I was a nitpicker at 10. :-P