30 days of fanfic meme, questions 16-17
Jul. 20th, 2011 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?
I find summaries a necessary evil. Writing them is a hassle, because most of my fic is short and none of it is plotty. It's hard to summarize a piece that's about emotional tone or a character's bit of insight, so my summarizes tend to be . . . unhelpful if one wants a description of what actually happens in the story, although I think they're usually true-ish to the story's point. Take, for example, The Official 'Willow's Ex-Boyfriends' Club, Membership 2 (one of my favorite titles, by the way, to anticipate the next question). What happens, "plot"-wise, in this AU story is that Xander, who briefly dated Willow after she and Oz split up in S3, learns that she's now dating a woman, asks Oz to come over so he (Xander) can talk/panic about it, and the two of them end up kissing and making out. My summary is "How to break all the laws of guydom," because the story's really about Xander's admiration for Oz's unconventionality and how Xander starts learning to free himself.
My favorite summary is the one I wrote for my long Drumknott/Vetinari story Midwinter: "Stabbing, imprisonment, several awkward conversations, a diplomatic crisis, the art of rhetoric, and many cups of tea." It's a perfectly accurate jumble-sale list of what the story contains, and I like the jocular tone, and it has no relationship at all to what the story actually does (which is, primarily, talk about loneliness and mortality).
It's a miracle anyone reads my fic, really.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Bane! Bane, I tell you! My life would be much easier if I were willing to steal all my titles from poems and the occasional pop song. I intensely dislike titles that are too on-point (e.g. "True Love" or "Loneliness and Mortality" or whatever) and I'm no better at thinking up quirky, intriguing titles than I am at summaries. If I don't steal a title from another source, it's often an oblique reference to a bit in the story that is in some way thematically important, e.g. "Midwinter," where one of Drumknott's key moments of insight happens as he's thinking about how Vetinari copes with the cold weather.
Some of my own favorite titles (I make no guarantee about the quality of the stories they're attached to!) are: The Last English Explorers Go Home (Top Gear fandom); The Somewhat Happy Birthday (Blake's 7); An Incident Along a Poorly Guarded Border (due South); Cosmology for Beginners (Doctor Who); In the House of Dust (epic of Gilgamesh); and This Is a Thought Experiment (CSI).
I find summaries a necessary evil. Writing them is a hassle, because most of my fic is short and none of it is plotty. It's hard to summarize a piece that's about emotional tone or a character's bit of insight, so my summarizes tend to be . . . unhelpful if one wants a description of what actually happens in the story, although I think they're usually true-ish to the story's point. Take, for example, The Official 'Willow's Ex-Boyfriends' Club, Membership 2 (one of my favorite titles, by the way, to anticipate the next question). What happens, "plot"-wise, in this AU story is that Xander, who briefly dated Willow after she and Oz split up in S3, learns that she's now dating a woman, asks Oz to come over so he (Xander) can talk/panic about it, and the two of them end up kissing and making out. My summary is "How to break all the laws of guydom," because the story's really about Xander's admiration for Oz's unconventionality and how Xander starts learning to free himself.
My favorite summary is the one I wrote for my long Drumknott/Vetinari story Midwinter: "Stabbing, imprisonment, several awkward conversations, a diplomatic crisis, the art of rhetoric, and many cups of tea." It's a perfectly accurate jumble-sale list of what the story contains, and I like the jocular tone, and it has no relationship at all to what the story actually does (which is, primarily, talk about loneliness and mortality).
It's a miracle anyone reads my fic, really.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Bane! Bane, I tell you! My life would be much easier if I were willing to steal all my titles from poems and the occasional pop song. I intensely dislike titles that are too on-point (e.g. "True Love" or "Loneliness and Mortality" or whatever) and I'm no better at thinking up quirky, intriguing titles than I am at summaries. If I don't steal a title from another source, it's often an oblique reference to a bit in the story that is in some way thematically important, e.g. "Midwinter," where one of Drumknott's key moments of insight happens as he's thinking about how Vetinari copes with the cold weather.
Some of my own favorite titles (I make no guarantee about the quality of the stories they're attached to!) are: The Last English Explorers Go Home (Top Gear fandom); The Somewhat Happy Birthday (Blake's 7); An Incident Along a Poorly Guarded Border (due South); Cosmology for Beginners (Doctor Who); In the House of Dust (epic of Gilgamesh); and This Is a Thought Experiment (CSI).
