~~ sore on principle.

[reenka]

I realized that the reason I tend to like an author's whole body of work more than any single fic, often enough, is that particular writers tend to have a set of skills I can depend on... and it's those storytelling skills that really attract me, more than any one story. They're like a signature, something I can depend on. Sort of like brand loyalty, with cars or something: one knows that this model has to have some basic characteristics of the whole line. The way a car is made, then, is more important than the specifics of the actual make, so to speak.

I don't care for flashy fics. I don't want to be tantalized or drawn in by the promise of fanservice or a quick fix, even though I -can- be. What I want is a deeper satisfaction that would encompass those things but also transcend them. I don't want a fic to hit my kinks. I don't want to give it that sort of easy way in. I want to love a fic in spite of the fact that it hits none of my kinks, the fact that it refuses to go where I want it to. I want the fic to take me over and make me go where it wants to go. In the end, I'll thank the writer.

I've written things that could be seen as anti-kink before, I think, but I don't mean it that way, at least not this time. I just mean that I dislike the idea of reading (or writing) as purely mental/emotional masturbation. I hate thinking that the pleasure has to be shallow or easy in order to be effective... mostly because I've spent so much time chasing after fics that can easily be seen as a only a fix. I want to be a reader, not a junkie-- and I want writers to treat me as such. And anyway, after enough masturbation, even the biggest junkie gets sore. I'm sore, I guess.

I think I lash out against kink-driven responses to writing or fanart or whatever because I'm always in danger of being overwhelmed like that. Often enough, I just become a puddle of goo more than a person, being reduced to a quivering, unthinking mass by fiction or art. I'm just sensitive, I guess. But I don't want to always be wasting it, always allowing myself to act like some sort of crack-addicted rat or something.

So here's where my favorite writers come in. They seem to have principles, in terms of how much work they put into their stories; they don't seem to only indulge themselves, or just go through the motions. They're really -there- in the work, being honest within the framework of the fic no matter where that takes them.

In the end, I don't care how IC or OOC your fanfiction is, because I've found that really good fanfic always manages to convince me by doing all the work. What I like is fiction that does the work, basically. There's a sense of no shortcuts. That's what makes a good story to me, fanfic or not.

It may seem hard to believe, since fanfic, by "stealing" a setting & characters, seems to imply major shortcuts by its nature, but good fanfic (and all fic) is as much about reinvention as it is about variations on a theme, it seems to me. The best fanfic has to do both, to work for me anyway.

So I'm curious, I guess, as to what sort of principles you'd look for in writing. It was fun writing these down, anyway (wheeee, lists!)


    [things I look for]

- emotional vitality or intensity; a freshness of view (vs. jadedness).

- a broadness of the narrative imagination, as well as a broadness of portrayed or implied emotional range.

- humor(!), whether narrative or the characters'; also charm & maybe cuteness in generous doses.

- a unique style; a sense of personality to the writing.

- high levels of telling detail (i.e., depth).

- a sense of immediacy to both emotions & surroundings.

- a sense of unpredictability and/or mystery (as separate from any actual suspense).

- a sense of wonder or growing understanding; a sense of things falling into place as the story progresses.

- a preciseness of setting, character & language, united in focus with nothing wasted.

    [things I avoid like the plague]

- a very narrow emotional focus-- the narrative feels limited to depressive or upbeat tones entirely.

- a shallowness of setting-- where the entire world feels like a prop or a plot device.

- plot-devices & forced-feeling situations in general.

- predictable, mechanical-model plot & character development.

- a sense of an obvious authorial agenda of any sort within the writing; any kind of propaganda or writer-insert statements.

- avoidance of unpleasant scenes or subject matter & a concurrent dwelling on those pleasant (to the author) or vice versa-- i.e., 10 pages for a sex-scene, two paragraphs for a serious talk if outside of a PWP.

- any scene that sacrifices characterization, motivation & emotion for gratuitous fantasy (sexual or emotional).

- gratuitous anything, or a sense of emptiness-- a void of meaning is like story rot.

- the writer patronizing or heavy-handedly manipulating the readers into a preset response; similarly, a writer being overly blatant or transparent so that the reader winds up in a position of power.

    I think maybe the process of reading can be seen as a delicate interchange of 'power' between the reader & the writer. As a writer, you can't give too much or too little, and it has to be continuously renewed with every page, possibly even every line. It's like a game of hide-and-seek-- the reader gets to feel like they're tagged, but really, the story's It.
~~

'Course... none of this is written in stone or anything. The thing about reading (as I've mentioned) is that I like it best when it surprises me. So inevitably, there are plenty of exceptions to every rule. Plenty of fics chock-full of plot-devices which I adore, and many more which are supposedly full of airy nothing which never leave my mind. I suppose "personality" is the one rule that I've never seen broken. If you've got personality in your writing, you can get away with murder, heheh.

I suppose all of this could be seen as me saying "don't be boring". Or maybe, "man, I find way too many things boring these days".

Possibly, what it all comes down to is that I myself like the things going on under the surface of the story more than the actual bare-bones content, at least 70% of the time. There's always a message there, hopefully hidden from direct view; I wouldn't call it subtext, exactly, but maybe that's what that is. It's sort of like flavoring-- something that would make the same scene, the same characters, the same ideas, truly different when handled by different authors.

It probably says something about me that I dislike some authors (that is, their writing) more than I ever actually dislike -people-. I think I just really can't stand seeing the world in certain ways, and reading something brings that home to me much more than just talking to a person. I feel so much more vulnerable, reading. It's like I'm opening up my heart, and they get to hand me any sort of poison or treasure they want. So if it's all dark and jagged and ugly, -I- will feel that way-- all foul. And that's okay if I trust the author, maybe, if I feel like there's something worthwhile and redeeming about the telling. If I feel like I've been told the -truth-, somehow, it's okay. So maybe this whole character-integrity thing gets a weensy bit personal with me, I guess :>

Sadly, analyzing all this never grows old. Am I a dyed-in-the-wool English major or what?? :>

Comments

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

For me, it's world-building--the sense that if rooms have doors in them, then behind those doors are other rooms, not just white space, whether we open them or not. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

An aspect of that is layers, palimpsests--a depth of material, not just one stratum of ideas, story, feelings, meaning, but many. This offers the possibility of more than one reading. Most exciting to me is when a book can be read on light and deep levels at once. An example (though a movie not a book) is POTC: romance, wit, broad comedy, slash, commedia dell'arte, profound insight, classical form, postmodern theoretical metatext, and hot sex with inanimate objects. Nabokov has that quality, so do Tolkien, Eco, Sterne, Pynchon, Shakespeare, Austen, Gaddis, Melville, Luther Blissett, Dunnett, Conrad, Forster, Calasso, Sybille Bedford, Hilary Mantel ... most of my favorite authors.

Rowling has it in patches. She isn't in control of it, but in some places she's nailed it (especially in PoA).

What I avoid like the plague? Bad prose--crappy, clumsy handling of words, sentences, punctuation, voice, vocabulary, syntax. I can't bear incompetent technical control of the tools of writing.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Real toads, yes. In fact, that's what inspired me to make the list-- 'cause I was realizing how important that was-- the depth, the telling detail, the layers. I dunno if I referred to all that directly enough, I guess (directness is usually one of my problems), but that's what I meant. Well, that and "voice" or personality, also being very important (of which style & language would probably be a subset of).

I don't know if I consciously notice layers as such-- I think I just automatically pick one or two I like almost immediately and see the work that way. I mean... I like to feel that -roominess- there, but I don't necessarily think about it as I read. I definitely notice a lack or presence sort of dichotomy, though. There's just a sense of -depth- if there's subtext-- like the colors & flavors of everything seem more vivid, more intense, because there are more shades of meaning there. I think of it as "vividness", maybe? The closer it is to reality, the more vivid it is, and reality is by nature multi-layered, isn't it.

I think any work that achieves emotional/physical realism would contain that sense of multifariousness. JKR just... has a lot of threads most of the time-- plot threads, but not emotional threads, which I think is what trips her up.

Heheh I wasn't even mentioning my own obsession with style & language-use 'cause I think I take it for granted :>

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Personally, I'm one of those readers who become enamoured with a single fic, or a single book (or movie or theatre play), rather than with the author (or director) him/herself. It's true that if someone has written a story that I've really liked, I'll probably be more prone to give the same writer a benefit of a doubt the next time he/she writes something, than if it's someone who's written something I've disliked, but in the end, me having liked one story by a certain writer, is never a guarantee for me liking everything -or anything- else he/she has written.

I'm not entirely sure why this is, maybe because I'm a perfectionist, and while it's possible to write a near to perfect story, it's not possible to write only near to perfect stories. It could also be because I'm the kind of reader who like to loose myself in a story, not that I can't look at it objectively, or put into context later, but when I read it, I prefer to forget everything that doesn't immediately have anything to do with the story, like the biography of the author (or if it's a movie, the actors playing the characters), the other stories the author has written, unless, of course, the story I'm reading is connected to them, etc.

Lokking through your lists of what you search for in a story vs what you avoid, it's quite a bit similar to what I would write, though, I think. But maybe that's because the lists are quite general. I think, if I would choose one thing, however, that I look for in a story more than anything else, I would say "something that I haven't seen a million times before". And I don't mean it as harschly as it sounds, the story doesn't have to be unique in every possible way, or anything, but it has to have something that's unique. And I realise you wrote this down on your list, as well, but I think for me, this might explain why I place author ahead of writer, because most writers have something that goes through all there stories, like you said, "a signature". And this can often (not necessarily always, but often) mean that when you've read enough stories by any writer, they cease to be unique.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... uniqueness in regards to a writer's 'signature'... haven't thought of that. I guess... I like a combination of consistent storytelling skill (which is apart from the startlement factor, which involves plot-related elements) and at the same time, a fresh spin which in itself could be a part of the writer's ouvre. I mean, in a lot of ways I'm always going to be a style slut, so if I like how someone writes, that's going to stay constant. I don't normally focus on -plot- so much as... how does the writer -handle- the situation they come up with. How detailed is their world, how vivid is their characterization-- even if it's the same old same old, or whatever.

I dunno if I can pin down what "uniqueness" is, because if you look at it in a certain way, no one and nothing is unique, really. I mean, most people agree that Shakespeare is one hell of a writer, and a consistently stellar one at that, yet... how unique are any of his plots, really? He blatantly stole almost all of them from some source or other ("historical" is just another way of stealing plot), didn't he?

So... I suppose that's what it comes down to. What's "unique"? I think I usually find a writer's "voice" to be as unique as any plot, so I can kind of rediscover the pleasure of that with a lot of their work, if the voice stays stable. I don't really look for perfection, mostly because I don't think it really exists. I mean, sure, I have all-time favorites I consider near-perfect, but... I can't really expect that out of everything or I'd barely read anything, y'know. So I do go for percentages and "more bad than good" and so on.

Anyway, it depends on whether you see a writer's style as qualifying for unique status. It's not about remembering it's "the writer" while immersed, to me, 'cause I'm just naturally always aware of style. It's like a musician always being aware of rhythm even while they're lost in a piece of music they're listening to, y'know? It's like... my perceptual mechanisms are always "on". In fact, that's -why- I love a lot of the fics I do-- because they reward this attentiveness to style and voice.

I'm always pleasantly surprised when I find a plot unique, of course, but it rarely happens. I can't think of a lot of examples of that off-hand. I do hate it when a plot is blatantly stereotypical and rehashed, of course... it's a question of talent, whether the writer can rework an old theme/scenario to make it seem fresh to the reader. Like, I'm pretty pissed off at things that insult my intelligence by being transparent, as I've said. This is where the writer's skills come in, to me. I good writer will transcend plot, so I don't have to worry about it being something I've never seen before, which I'm likely to almost never find.

I mean, usually, that's something that depends on how many times people have addressed some particular topic. After you've read 15 H/D fics, for instance, you've really read them all to some extent, so to be "unique" you'd have to be one of the pioneers-- or, you'd have to be a Good Writer, it seems to me :>

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Someone really liked your Flashfic (http://www.livejournal.com/users/lasultrix/144038.html) - thought I should link you.

God, I haven't commented here in ages. I don't know why. I'm still here and reading, and you're still wonderful and smart. I just seem to have very little energy at the moment.