*spazzes*

[reenka]

*has attack of random angst*

waaaahhhhhh. there are probably two things that get me to want to tear out my hair and wail at the slightest intimation of them, while any other jibe is fine with me: someone thinking i'm not sane in some way, and someone saying i don't make sense in writing (*coughs* maybe that's connected). if an intelligent-seeming person just doesn't get what i'm saying, obviously i just can't express myself in normal english. which doesn't make -sense-, because why does anyone tell me i am eloquent if it's so... so... hit-and-miss, and sometimes i make sense and sometimes i don't? how does -that- work? what does that mean? i make equal amounts of sense to -myself- and...

and this guy on armchair_slash (the mailing list) just -offhandedly- says my prose was "fairly broken" and he wasn't sure he understood (in a post i wrote in reply to his) and i'm like, oh god. my prose is broken(?!?!?!) and. what does he mean, broken? is this "broken"? and if it's broken, why is it so broken it's not just that it's annoying or frustrating to read, but near-incomprehensible to someone who -should- be able to deduce meaning even if it's obscured by phrasing? so um. is it broken? how often is my prose broken? do people just not tell me 'cause they're polite?

i feel like yes, i do over-complexify my insane run-on sentences (i don't mean to), just... i can see how the meaning could get lost in some sort of flood of extraneous words. someone told me that they don't comment because my word-use is intimidating. people -have- often said i'm confusing. but being confusing is one thing. having my prose be -broken- is a value judgement that says i have some sort of -issue- with expressing myself on some basic level, not that what i'm expressing is just wackt.
    i just want someone to tell me the truth, or something. but the truth may very well be contradictory, of course. someone on lj (a rather logical thinker, i think) once said i made no sense whatsoever and implied i had issues articulating myself at all, and then when i reiterated more carefully, said i apparently -can- be articulate if i wanted to (well, he also seemed to like me more at that point. people are weird.) but it's not when i want to, because usually i don't try to control it one way or the other, so. gah.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Reading his post, I stopped cold at that line and thought, "Hmm...why the need to pause for a personal put-down here?" What I would say about your style of writing in that post is that it's just allowing for a stream of consciousness. I write like that on lj a lot too, using words like, "It's like..." or "I don't know..." You just, to me, seemed to be presenting your process along with you conclusions.

But if a person is more into facts, like archetypes like "hero" and "wonder boy" are stuck in the narrow confines of the behavior they show in the books and the way their author might respond if somebody asked her a question about their future, they might be put off by such a different style. I maybe flatter myself to think that I'm pretty canon-focused when it comes to my characterizations (I don't write fanfic but I do like to argue my interpretations with canon, at least) and I give the characters a lot more room than that poster seems to want to give them.

The fact that your post did let the reader in on the thought process, sometimes arguing with itself as you considered different sides, might have been jarring to someone who wanted everything laid out so cleanly, even to the point of assigning motivations to people who disagreed (slash writers who passionately support their pairing are trying to insert themselves into the HP phenomenon or whatever). Plus you really were arguing from the exact opposite side: he was specifically coming out against the idea of the reader having too much control over meaning while you were coming out and saying the reader was a partner in the process. That whole position might seem "broken" to some people.:-)

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

heeeee~:)
i do so love it when things get explained to me, though i do feel better being told i have nothing to worry about too, of course >:D<
heeee. you like detail on a level i can identify with, hehehe.

yes, that is probably what it is-- that i tend to contradict myself and get off a straight line and blunder around not trying to sound -too- defensible most of the time, as long as i've -arrived- somewhere at the end. and i guess some people get woozy from that, or something, and plus don't they tell you not to do that in english papers, or something? because well, i know i don't write essays you could give to an english professor without fear, mostly because of the clutter, but it's weird when they become -incomprehensible- because of said clutter. it's like, to get to the point where you can -only- understand english-essay type arguments is... disturbing.

heehee. and i totally do agree with him-- sort of-- i see how he could arrive at his conclusions anyway, because yes, hp is a "closed text" but it's also just a text, and the whole -idea- of a text -having- to be "open" or "closed" kind of bothers me. i think -all- texts can be seen as open or closed depending on the reader. sort of like... say... i dunno, the bible was probably intended in a very particular way. at least one thing is for sure-- the biblical god was supposed to be seen as Good. and yet there are a number of readings where the judeo-christian god is seen as malevolent or controlling or even destructive. so. i mean, no matter -what- the writer or the text is supposedly saying, the reader is -still- in control of what they perceive. so the open/closed text theory may make sense for criticism but i dunno if it totally jibes with reader experience. and he seems to have totally stewed in those lit-major juices so much that there's no -other- way of understanding literature than the official one (not as a -fan-, anyway), so i suppose he has a problem there~:)

heeeee. do so appreciate you explaining it to me >:D
i think this whole stream-of-consciousness thing has its proponents and detractors as a style of writing, and probably the loose style of comprehension it implies is rather antithetical to the a+b=c variety. even so, he sounded like a ta or something, which is probably what set me off.
one wonders just why -he- enjoys/reads fanfic & h/d & `love under will' in particular >