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ishuca's post on the virtues of epics over ficlets, i felt compelled to respond, and since she mentioned my little note about wanting snogs in fics on her journal and not on mine, i thought i'd likewise semi-respond here and not there >:D<
thinking epically seems like an interesting concept. i wonder how -i- think. i think i think in weird cross-wired non-linear associative loops and twirls. i'm probably a cross between an epic poem and a novel full of dream sequences.
that's what wound up happening with `one good reason'-- waaaay too many dream sequences. and with the first novel i attempted, i also went off on waaaay too many tangents that had nothing to do with what i was "supposed" to be writing about. this seems to happen to me when i write longer-- the more i think, the more weird possibilities on the fringes of things happen to me. i can never keep to one thread continuously. i remember starting off with a half fairy half ghost minstrel-girl, and ending up with two lesbian werewolves in the Faerylands... and no, i don't have it online anywhere. *smirk*
and not even -i- knew how that made sense....
hmm. i think it's all about how powerful the piece is, to me. it could be a poem or a ficlet or a series of novels, but it's all hanging on the quality of the writing. you can write a poem and have it stay with the reader forever, or 3000 pages that you forget thankfully as soon as you're done. i too, am impressed by epics, but i'm also impressed by poems and ficlets. it's all a different sort of excellence.
i'd love to have more of a good thing, if i love the ficlet, but...
i'm easily engaged, i guess. if my emotions are engaged, i'm there. sure, i don't feel i get to know the characters as much in a ficlet, or a small fic, but with fanfic or shared worlds it doesn't matter as much.
i wasn't really meaning i needed a snog or squishy romanticism to enjoy a piece of writing. that would be silly. but if i'm reading a love story that centers around a relationship between two characters from beginning to end, i feel incomplete if i don't get the description of how they are together in a physically emotional sense. it lets me -feel- them, identify with them, understand what their dynamic is like, much more vividly. it's not that i need it out of some great need for fluff, it's that i really believe physicality is very important in a romance-- it shows a lot, and it develops the relationship being portrayed in ways no other type of description is quite able to do.
i don't know if i have a ready opinion on whether romanticism has to be forgettable because it all blends together in a warm blanket of consolidated memory. it's true i remember painful, dark, disturbing, starkly emotional scenes/stories better. in my head, real romance isn't fluffy, but rather intense and dark and light and beautiful and transformative and something that lives in your heart forever. a good story of any kind is going to be powerful, and considering love is arguably the most intense and powerful human emotion... stories about it should knock your socks off.
there's the main issue of what you're looking for when you read. if it's story development and character development, if it's world-building, then yes, short stories aren't going to do the job well. if you get a short story that focuses on telling a straight story, it's going to leave things out, to settle for vignettes or cliches or pat scenarios used for their easily identifiable elements. as in, "this is -this- sort of fic".
a good short story isn't going to be identifiable as a "sort" of fic, not mainly. the thing with the short story form is that you can use it for a stronger sense of symbolism, of heightening the effect of certain elements, making them more stark, more vivid. something that would be more subtle or dispersed in a long work, is able to be brilliantly delineated.
there is the idea of the fractal nature of our life journey. you can make one moment reflect thousands. you can make one image be worth ten pages, and so on. it's the difference between making your imagination complete the circuit, making you have to decipher and work to interpret something, and having the story unfold before you, showing you what it wants you to see.
i do enjoy both.
i'm a poet as much or more than a "regular" writer, so you must understand where i'm coming from. i think emily dickinson says as much or more than most contemporary writers' entire life work combined, in significantly fewer words. there's shakespeare-- and he wrote plays the length of short stories. there's a lot of novels that are very short, that i worship, that i think beat a number of larger epics hands down. i don't know, `alice in wonderland' and `the pearl' and kafka's `metamorphosis' and so on.
good epics are hard to come by, to my taste. that makes them precious, yes, but i couldn't have them be my favorite type of writing and keep up the quality of reading material. i find most epic writers long-winded, somewhat dry, somewhat obsessive about details i don't find extremely interesting. i adore neil's `sandman' series, but i don't know if that counts. give me an epic written with the immediate, visceral freshness of a short story, with the same bite and symbolism and semi-minimalism. it's pretty disturbing that i can only think of comics that "do it" for me, off-hand. y'know, long-running story lines. i suppose they're epics. episodic epics, heh.
am i a minimalist? not quite. i adore novels, and novels with sequels. i'm omnivorous, really-- everything from haikus to multi-volume fantasy epics, give it to me, now. can't get myself through a higher majority of epics, but then, a lot of morons write epic fantasy these days. damn them, damn them all. heh.
~~
and dammit, does this prove that i find sam/frodo.... squicky??!! gah. draco/cucumber doesn't squick me at all, but the idea of sam sucking on frodo's tongue makes me squirm. in that bad way. and i believe they have a Great Eternal Love, of course. it's just... it's just... i seriously can't imagine sam calling frodo anything but "mr frodo", and... just... you'd have to -seriously- try to keep it in character, to do them justice. their relationship is too deep to just throw in sex casually. if anyone has any lotr recs, send 'em my way, but be aware that i wouldn't go for casual, apparently. sigh. i -want- to see aragorn and legolas... oh, do i... but even there, i really want it to be... delicately handled. i'd want intense emotional bonding. i don't know if they'd kiss. i seriously don't. this is important. they are like brothers, man. you can't just -mess- with that. sniff. heh. i've gotten gooey in my old age. ok, so i've always been gooey. oh well.
ishuca's post on the virtues of epics over ficlets, i felt compelled to respond, and since she mentioned my little note about wanting snogs in fics on her journal and not on mine, i thought i'd likewise semi-respond here and not there >:D<thinking epically seems like an interesting concept. i wonder how -i- think. i think i think in weird cross-wired non-linear associative loops and twirls. i'm probably a cross between an epic poem and a novel full of dream sequences.
that's what wound up happening with `one good reason'-- waaaay too many dream sequences. and with the first novel i attempted, i also went off on waaaay too many tangents that had nothing to do with what i was "supposed" to be writing about. this seems to happen to me when i write longer-- the more i think, the more weird possibilities on the fringes of things happen to me. i can never keep to one thread continuously. i remember starting off with a half fairy half ghost minstrel-girl, and ending up with two lesbian werewolves in the Faerylands... and no, i don't have it online anywhere. *smirk*
and not even -i- knew how that made sense....
hmm. i think it's all about how powerful the piece is, to me. it could be a poem or a ficlet or a series of novels, but it's all hanging on the quality of the writing. you can write a poem and have it stay with the reader forever, or 3000 pages that you forget thankfully as soon as you're done. i too, am impressed by epics, but i'm also impressed by poems and ficlets. it's all a different sort of excellence.
i'd love to have more of a good thing, if i love the ficlet, but...
i'm easily engaged, i guess. if my emotions are engaged, i'm there. sure, i don't feel i get to know the characters as much in a ficlet, or a small fic, but with fanfic or shared worlds it doesn't matter as much.
i wasn't really meaning i needed a snog or squishy romanticism to enjoy a piece of writing. that would be silly. but if i'm reading a love story that centers around a relationship between two characters from beginning to end, i feel incomplete if i don't get the description of how they are together in a physically emotional sense. it lets me -feel- them, identify with them, understand what their dynamic is like, much more vividly. it's not that i need it out of some great need for fluff, it's that i really believe physicality is very important in a romance-- it shows a lot, and it develops the relationship being portrayed in ways no other type of description is quite able to do.
i don't know if i have a ready opinion on whether romanticism has to be forgettable because it all blends together in a warm blanket of consolidated memory. it's true i remember painful, dark, disturbing, starkly emotional scenes/stories better. in my head, real romance isn't fluffy, but rather intense and dark and light and beautiful and transformative and something that lives in your heart forever. a good story of any kind is going to be powerful, and considering love is arguably the most intense and powerful human emotion... stories about it should knock your socks off.
there's the main issue of what you're looking for when you read. if it's story development and character development, if it's world-building, then yes, short stories aren't going to do the job well. if you get a short story that focuses on telling a straight story, it's going to leave things out, to settle for vignettes or cliches or pat scenarios used for their easily identifiable elements. as in, "this is -this- sort of fic".
a good short story isn't going to be identifiable as a "sort" of fic, not mainly. the thing with the short story form is that you can use it for a stronger sense of symbolism, of heightening the effect of certain elements, making them more stark, more vivid. something that would be more subtle or dispersed in a long work, is able to be brilliantly delineated.
there is the idea of the fractal nature of our life journey. you can make one moment reflect thousands. you can make one image be worth ten pages, and so on. it's the difference between making your imagination complete the circuit, making you have to decipher and work to interpret something, and having the story unfold before you, showing you what it wants you to see.
i do enjoy both.
i'm a poet as much or more than a "regular" writer, so you must understand where i'm coming from. i think emily dickinson says as much or more than most contemporary writers' entire life work combined, in significantly fewer words. there's shakespeare-- and he wrote plays the length of short stories. there's a lot of novels that are very short, that i worship, that i think beat a number of larger epics hands down. i don't know, `alice in wonderland' and `the pearl' and kafka's `metamorphosis' and so on.
good epics are hard to come by, to my taste. that makes them precious, yes, but i couldn't have them be my favorite type of writing and keep up the quality of reading material. i find most epic writers long-winded, somewhat dry, somewhat obsessive about details i don't find extremely interesting. i adore neil's `sandman' series, but i don't know if that counts. give me an epic written with the immediate, visceral freshness of a short story, with the same bite and symbolism and semi-minimalism. it's pretty disturbing that i can only think of comics that "do it" for me, off-hand. y'know, long-running story lines. i suppose they're epics. episodic epics, heh.
am i a minimalist? not quite. i adore novels, and novels with sequels. i'm omnivorous, really-- everything from haikus to multi-volume fantasy epics, give it to me, now. can't get myself through a higher majority of epics, but then, a lot of morons write epic fantasy these days. damn them, damn them all. heh.
~~
and dammit, does this prove that i find sam/frodo.... squicky??!! gah. draco/cucumber doesn't squick me at all, but the idea of sam sucking on frodo's tongue makes me squirm. in that bad way. and i believe they have a Great Eternal Love, of course. it's just... it's just... i seriously can't imagine sam calling frodo anything but "mr frodo", and... just... you'd have to -seriously- try to keep it in character, to do them justice. their relationship is too deep to just throw in sex casually. if anyone has any lotr recs, send 'em my way, but be aware that i wouldn't go for casual, apparently. sigh. i -want- to see aragorn and legolas... oh, do i... but even there, i really want it to be... delicately handled. i'd want intense emotional bonding. i don't know if they'd kiss. i seriously don't. this is important. they are like brothers, man. you can't just -mess- with that. sniff. heh. i've gotten gooey in my old age. ok, so i've always been gooey. oh well.
