writing meme
Jan. 31st, 2014 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitI am, believe it or not, trying to be Cheerful and Positive, fannishly and in other aspects of life. *laughs* Yeah, not one of my natural talents, but it's worth a try occasionally. So, in the spirit of cheerful positivity, a meme.
Ask me any of these questions:
1. Of the fic you’ve written, of which are you most proud?
2. Favorite tense
3. Favorite POV
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
5. What inspires you to write?
6. Thoughts on critique
7. Create a character on the spot... NOW!
8. Is there a character you love writing for the most? The least? Why?
9. A passage from a WIP
10. What are your strengths in writing?
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)
ETA: Because this is crossposted, some of my responses are on DW and some are on LJ.
Ask me any of these questions:
2. Favorite tense
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
10. What are your strengths in writing?
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)
ETA: Because this is crossposted, some of my responses are on DW and some are on LJ.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 07:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 08:19 pm (UTC)Only once, in almost eleven years of writing fanfic, have I had a beta reader give me no useful advice at all. Of course I don't always follow all of a beta reader's advice, but getting another perspective, a reader's perspective, is always good. But it's hard for me to hand my story to someone else so that they can look for the flaws and then tell me about them! I never do it without feeling nervous and defensive, even with betas who are my friends and whose judgment I absolutely trust.
What I would like, if I ever dared to ask for it, would be for someone to tell me globally how my writing could be better. My own writing has largely plateau-ed, I think, and I could benefit from something that's not just critique of a particular story, but a general "here are the weaknesses, here are the things you're scared of writing and avoid, here are the ideas and tropes and expressions you overuse, here are challenges you could set yourself to do better." (N.B. I'm not asking for such a critique now, from anyone. I need to be ready to handle it.)
Moving along to another possible sense of "critique," I'm of two minds about concrit on posted stories. I used to be very much in the "concrit is always good and no one should object to it!" camp, but I've come to accept and understand the fannish conventional that unsolicited concrit is a no-no. For one thing, posted stories are finished and almost no one is going to go back and revise on the basis of concrit, unless it's fixing a typo or something. For another, unsolicited public criticism quite understandably gets people's backs up. And for a third, I know that the way I feel when I get unsolicited concrit definitely does not meet the standard of "you should be grateful for it!" that I used to espouse. On the other hand, I have sometimes desperately wanted to say, "this is great but needs a Brit-pick" or "I really loved this right up until X, which changed the mood completely" etc. Because these authors' betas probably didn't say that to them but should have. I can backbutton out of a terrible story, but what makes my brain explode are the stories that are almost good.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-01 03:17 am (UTC)I'm not nearly so experienced in fic-writing, but I do sometimes feel the need for the same sort of general critique. I think I know how it would go in my case, though: stop writing in that precious self-stroking manner and pay some attention to how people actually talk! (So I'm not sure quite why I don't listen to me, except that I'm too busy stroking myself.)
I was reading a discussion today which touched occasionally on matters of unsolicited concrit, and while I think myself open to it, the example that one commenter gave of a crit they'd offered that they thought was quite reasonable but had got them into a bit of bother made me blanch and reach for the sal volatile.
I noticed your review of Death by Silver btw: I recently read and enjoyed it but thought it insufficiently Britpicked; quite minor matters but enough to grate.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 01:22 am (UTC)thought it insufficiently Britpicked
Yes. I meant to mention that in my review but then I forgot. I actually wonder, because from what I know of one of the authors she's not the sort to let things like that slide, if they were editorially discouraged from correct British usage. The book is published in the US only, so far as I know, and for example to a US-ian who doesn't know better, the British "got" in place of US "gotten" sounds ungrammatical. It would be a shame if the publisher thought US readers were too ignorant to understand usage differences, but it wouldn't surprise me. Or if the publishers/editors themselves were too ignorant.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 03:53 am (UTC)I think it went a bit beyond the occasional 'gotten' and 'sidewalk', though--to me some of the school flashbacks rang wrong; I'd have to go back to the book in detail to say exactly why, so it clearly wasn't egregious--it was just that those were the bits of the book that really interested me (the mystery not so much). I remember on a couple of occasions having that compensatory Well, it's an AU, maybe everything works a bit differently here reflex that lets you keep on enjoying something that's just made what you truly know to be a misstep.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 01:29 pm (UTC)I had some moments of unease with the school story too. Like you, I find it more compelling than the mystery, but sometimes something felt a bit off. The "senior man/new man" terminology didn't seem quite right, and class strangely didn't seem to be an issue at all. But everything I know about British public schools comes from The Charioteer, Another Country, and Hugh Walpole's Jeremy at Crale, so I'm hardly an expert!
In my experience, those details of experience are much harder for an American to get right than the language. All the more reason for a Britpick, but pro writers never seem to bother.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 02:22 pm (UTC)It does vary from school to school, too; I think 'new man' might be a term used at some public schools, but 'senior man' rang wrong, I agree. Though why it should, in an AU with magic, I'm not quite sure! I've read quite a bit of public school memoir (Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Auden) and fiction, but I'd be incredibly hesitant writing in a public school setting simply because there are so many shibboleths and the great variance of them. You've just reminded me that I want to re-read The Senior Commoner: do you know it? I think you might enjoy it.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 08:26 pm (UTC)I re-read my own fic a lot, sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes to learn from old mistakes, and sometimes just because there isn't much fic for that fandom or that pairing. But Midwinter is one of the ones I re-read sometimes just for pleasure, and for the rather delightful feeling of "oh, yeah, I wrote that and it's good!"
no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 09:00 pm (UTC)BTW about crit: your betas are a lot more helpful than the paid editors of my books and articles, I *usually* don't get anything useful from them, and more often than sometimes they take something that was a correct (if uninspired, and perhaps unclear) English sentence and make it incorrect.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 01:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 09:11 pm (UTC)But it's not entirely predictable, either. When I started watching due South, people who knew me told me I'd love Fraser. And I can see how Fraser is very much my type, but my favorite character in the fandom was Ray Kowalski, the temperamental, aggressive, less-educated, sports-and-pizza loving American. Almost everything I wrote in the fandom was from his POV. Ray does have a few characteristics of my type, it's true, but he's not really as close a match as Fraser. But I loved his use of language, and also he made sense to me as a person in a way Fraser didn't, always.
Characters I don't like to write, or find harder to write, are young people (20s and under), people who seem basically happy or "normal," people who are hip and cool and confident. (Though even here there are exceptions. Oz, from Buffy, was young and hip and cool, but such an oddball that I enjoyed writing him, although I found it harder to get into his POV than into Giles's.) I almost never write POV women characters, for personal reasons that everybody who cares already knows about. And as a white person, I get nervous about writing POV characters of color because I worry that the ideas I'm drawing on are stereotypes; it helps if canon gives me a lot of strong characterization to go on. On the other hand, characters who are too close to my own experience are also hard to write. I've never finished a fic about a trans* character.
Short version: I prefer writing characters who are enough like me that I can extrapolate their feelings and experiences, but enough unlike me that I find them interesting and also they don't have problems that hit too close to home.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-31 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 02:10 am (UTC)Alan Michael Shore, 26 years old in 1947, from Birmingham (England). His father was (is--he's still alive) a shop foreman in a chemical plant. Alan's the second youngest of four and attended grammar school on a scholarship. He joined the RAF in May 1940--there hadn't seemed to be any point during the "phony war"--and hoped to be a pilot. Everyone hoped to be a pilot, but Alan's reflexes just weren't fast enough. He washed out after nearly wrecking a plane on his first solo and was then trained as a navigator. He went on 20-odd operational flights and was made a Pilot Officer, having started out a sergeant, before being wounded by German fighter fire over France in 1941. Luckily his plane was on its way back so he got medical treatment before he could bleed to death. He was grounded after that, mostly because he didn't push hard not to be; bombing German cities may have been necessary for the war effort but his conscience was never entirely at ease with it. After that he worked in radar and technical things I'd have to research, spent a miserable year in the Pacific, and finished the war a Flight Lieutenant. He wasn't demobilized until mid-1946, which was just as well because he soon found there was no civilian job for him. His technical skills weren't easily transferrable, his class origins showed in his accent so he didn't have a hope of getting a professional job, he didn't want to teach and while his father offered to wangle him a job in the factory, it wasn't what he wanted. In the end he had to accept, though, but he's taking night classes in the hope of qualifying as an engineer.
He's gay, of course (I have no interest in writing straight men) and used to be troubled by it. The one good thing the war did for him was help him accept himself, partly because he met other gay and bisexual men and partly because who he went to bed with didn't seem very important in comparison to the war. He had a couple of affairs during the war as well as a lot of casual sex, and postwar he'd like to meet someone he could really be close to and trust. He doesn't think of himself as romantic, but he'd like to be able to trust someone and talk to him about anything. It's not easy, though. Everything's a lot more constrained and nervous than it was during the war, and living at home doesn't help.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 04:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-03 06:28 am (UTC)You don't do simple or superficial. I love that about your writing.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-01 10:16 am (UTC)ETA: I was too slow for #7. Eeek, hope I can share?
no subject
Date: 2014-02-02 02:12 am (UTC)I'm not sure whether i can get it done……
Date: 2014-02-20 03:37 pm (UTC)and i also want to ask,if it not offensive,you have wrote a lot of fanfictions,so have you ever thought about writing an orginal novel,you know,creating all those characters and plots totally belong to youself?
Finally,thanks for your writing! i really enjoy them！ o(∩_∩)o
Re: I'm not sure whether i can get it done……
Date: 2014-02-20 03:41 pm (UTC)"no one wants "and "it is not offensive"
so sad! i am really sorry!