Discussion Fan Fic Pet Peeves?

Oh, I did that a week or two ago and had to find away to correct it.

 

It sounds ike we need a support group - when we are stuck or stymied, we put in a call for "help me solve this mess."

 

I like that idea, Valairy.

I had one story I abandoned because it just kept accumulating plots and subplots that it was pretty much mentally and physically impossible for me to finish writing it without going, "And then the universe imploded and everyone died."

There have been a couple of incidents where I started posting a story before deciding that it was something I wanted to write and ended up abandoning it a several chapters in. That was back when I was very excitable and wanted to share everything asap. I've learned from those experiences and either start posting when I have a significant buffer or when I've finished the story. I also now do complete story outlines, instead of adjusting and making up the outline as I went along. I find that gives me a tangible goal to reach for, instead of reaching into the infinite pit of doom that is my imagination and trying to grab stray story endings.

Still, I can't fault authors for leaving a fan fic incomplete because I've done that enough times myself. Also, a story can still be a great read even if it's incomplete, IMO.

 

I have more or less figured out how most of my fics are going to end..I really don't like outlines myself..Sometimes I do it for individual chapters but that's sometimes..to me an outline is really a guideline...sometimes I write something that I wasn't expecting so my entire outline is pretty much..null and void

 

I never have a clue as to how my story will end. Even if I had an ending in mind I usually end up somewhere else.

 

I know the beginning and the end of my fics. Point A and Point Z. I also know some of the Points between but sometimes I don't know how to get to them or or what I originally wanted won't work as well as I thought or something.

 

I'm the same way. Generally, I know how the story will end almost as soon as I know the premise. But getting from beginning to end is often a long and arduous process. Sometimes I think it would be nice if I could write the first few chapters and the last few chapters, and have someone else handle the middle.

 

I try to make sure that I have a solid ending planned out before I even start on the story. More of my stories were finished that way, because I had somewhere to go. Otherwise, they just meander.

 

I always have some sort of ending. But I tend to run out of juice because I have problems getting from Point A to Point B.

 

I have a slight peeve, since we're getting off topic.lol... Okay, its more of a personal dislike, too much description that doesn't seem to move the story. I sit there going..I get it, move on, why are we examining this space with such detail.

 

*awkwardly raises hand*

Guilty of that. It's odd, when I was worse at writing I could pump out 2,500 words of mostly dialogue. Now I do that with descriptions with much less dialogue

 

It's not only fan fiction the thing is. It's writing in general. Jean M. Auel springs to mind...Dean Koontz also give me useless description.

But I think you need to get an even bit of dialogue and description. I was a mostly dialogue person and then I would like..what about their surroundings (slaps forehead) So, I've gotten better at writing in general.

 

Don't get me wrong, description has its place, but not when you're boring the reader to death. Imagine this. read your writing outloud, like someone is in the room, if you feel that your potential audience would be tired by this time by just listening to it...yeah. you've got a problem

This is all from experience by the way...I brought a fiction piece to my intellectual property class and chose the start of it...it was all description and I felt suddenly very stupid in front of the class.

 

I'm guilty of massive blocks of internal monologue and exposition. Description I use rather sparingly, and only when it is absolutely needed.

 

I like inner monologues sometimes they're helpful.

 

One thing I have a hard time doing is describing the characters emotions. Sometimes I will just say that they are mad. Bryg works with me on that. She asks why they are mad then helps me put that in. I am not fully in touch with my emotions and have a hard time describing them.

 

I recently finished a story over on ffn that's been going since Christmas 2011. I swear I was almost crying, I just had to end it because I'm preoccupied with a million other unfinished stories and that darn RL...

 

Congratulations on finishing the story! That feels so good to get something done, especially when its been going on for so long. I've got one like that myself that I'm circling towards an ending for.

And the best way I've found with expressing character feelings is to describe what they're doing because of them, like slamming things when they're mad, or energetically doing things when they're happy.

 

I have been criticized of not including enough description, actually. Particularly about characters.

I used to write too much description in general when I was younger, but then I started to grow out of it and realized I needed to improve how I described things in my stories. At the same time I was transitioning away from over-descriptiveness, I took a class on writing which I'd hoped would help. Unfortunately the teacher seemed to believe that "the more adjectives the better". Even if I crammed six adjectives into one sentence (which I tried once just to see what her reaction would be) she still thought it was excellent.

So basically I had to figure it out for myself. Describing places is pretty easy, objects aren't too hard, but describing characters is especially hard for me... I mean, you've probably seen about a million fanfics in which the character just happens to find some shiny surface, and indulges in describing themselves. I hate that, but it's hard to find an occasion to describe the character that won't feel equally contrived. And I don't want to over-describe a character, but other people seem to care more about how a character looks than I do... even my own notes rarely say much more than "girl, brown hair, jeans". Whether she has green eyes or brown or wears exactly three hair clips is not exactly important to the story.

 

Character description is an utter pain when writing in the first person, too. I'm over a dozen posts into a diary story and haven't described the main character at all, apart from her noting that she is shorter than others in her family. Their own appearance just isn't something most people go into great detail about unless there's a reason, and it hasn't been relevant to anything yet. The thing is, a lot of people do want to know what characters look like and I get that. I tend to picture scenes visually myself and like to have a reference for what I'm imagining.

 

The way I feel about it is if the charactter is reccuring or important than I think a good description is not pointless

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I think in fanfiction readers like a happy medium. I don't like reading pure dialog, but at the same time I don't expect the person to go into huge detail about what the characters are wearing or what the room looks like unless it is part of the plot.

You can say, "He walked into the room lined with desks and computers" I don't need to know the type of wood the desk is made of or the brand of the computer unless that is a plot point.

I read fanfiction like I do cliff notes. I want to know what is going on without having to trudge through 300 pages of descriptive verse. Hambly is an author that describes way too much. I found myself skipping entire paragraphs and just looking for dialog at that point.


EDIT: Talking about reviews and views and lurkers--I am wondering if we would get a lot of lurkers to delurk if we had a Welcome New Readers/Writers thread pinned to the top just like we see in the main TFN menu. I know it is very difficult to get the nerve up to post. Maybe it would be less intimidating if there is a place for new people to introduce themselves. Maybe there could be a few questions in the first post that they could answer like: Are you a reader or writer or both? What era do you prefer? Who are your favorite characters/relationships in the movies or EU? You know something easy.

So if a person says they are a Jaina/Kyp 'shipper then all the other shippers can welcome them into the fold and direct them to stories they might like to read (and the J/J 'shippers like me can bite their tongues and be nice ). There are so many new people on these boards I would like to hear from them. I know stories where there are two hundred or more views per post but only two people commenting on the story. Wouldn't it be nice to find out who is reading the stories.

I know we have social threads in fanfic like Canderous and Cade's Crazy Cantina, but it is rare for a newbie to come into a social thread where people you don't know are having some in depth discussions about their cats and/or medical conditions...especially when everybody seems to know each other very well. I know I feel weird dropping into a social thread I haven't been to before and I have been around for almost nine years.

 

I think this is a great idea!

 

Major pet peeve: Plagerism.

 

I went over there and saw the cases. 133 confirmed out of 190 stories. Why doesn't FFN simply assume all of the stories posted by this author are stolen and delete the account and block the IP number.