How much is too much -- for YOU? Why?

I'm not going to weigh in on the details here, because I could spend hours if I got into the questions of experience, research, execution, etc. and I don't feel like it.

What I will say, though, is that there's a substantial difference between what I can handle reading and what I enjoy or think is well done or even a good thing to try to do well. I think there's a tendency to assume that if someone avoids disturbing content of some kind it's because they can't deal with it. This is fed by a number of things, and there are certainly cases where that is the reason for not reading something, but I like to keep it out there that it's not the only one.

 

One thing that makes me leave a story is badder and badder bad guys piling it on with bigger and bigger booms until they're putting the whole galaxy in mortal peril every weekend. You can get just as much, or more, drama and emotional attachment in a story from a maniacal plumber billing you twice for one leaky pipe job as you can with a darkside crazy destroying whole suns. Except the evil plumber doesn't break the reality barrier and make the whole galaxy look smaller and cheaper. I guess that's why I only sample EU stuff here and there, sometimes.

 

Yeah, needless escalation can be irritating. Not even Flash Gordon did that, and Flash Gordon is the type of cheese that Cheez Wiz aspires to stoop to. You don't want to be worse than Flash. You really don't.


I'm gonna take this discussion back a page, because I read something 11th Guard said: "PWP has its purpose, too..."
Now, I agree that it probably does. Or rather, I would if I knew what it meant.

...Parents Without Partners?
Professional Women Photographers?
Peter Walker and Partners: landscape architects?
Public Works Productions?

That can't be right.
I feel so young and naïve..

 

PWP = plot-what-plot or porn without plot. Depends on the site.

 

porn without plot

*coughLaurelHamiltoncough* And I hate it too; luckily, it's above TF.N rating, so it doesn't happen here

 

I'm fifteen, and generally even if a story is amazingly well written, I skip sex scenes. I'm all for violence, but sex scenes, unless contributing to the plot, I usually skip. I like fade-to-black type things, like what you get in the canon books a lot (there's a wonderful one in Tatooine Ghost,) but generally my brain just gets too silly when reading a sex scene to actually focus on what's going on and instead I wind up giggling about some random thought and forget the whole thing. So, I skip them.

But violence, especially well-written and/or psychological violence? Bring it on. Traitor is my favorite part of NJO.

 

Well, there is a such thing as "emotional" PWP, which, instead of graphic sex, would have characters emotionally bonding but with very little, if any, plot. Pure fluff without substance, like cotton candy. But some cotton candy tastes good. And that is allowable on TFN.

 

Great topic, LL. It's interesting to hear what other people think about this.

I wholeheartedly agree with JadeSolo on all the points in her first post. If it's well-written, there is little I won't read. I have no problem with slash, smut, incest, and more other things that aren't to be mentioned on this board.

But sometimes I read it even if it isn't well-written. In rare cases, the content makes up for the lack of literary quality.

Paradoxically, I don't like to find "certain stuff" in the stories I read on a daily basis, because I don't read them for the romance (or even less the smut). I read for the plot, and in my experience, "certain stuff", or even plain non-graphic romance, distracts from the plot. This includes implied or fade to black scenes. Even kisses can have this effect in a plot-oriented story. My advice is to keep it to a minimum - use the movies as an example. And for the most powerful impact, keep it in the subtext.

In conclusion: when I'm in the mood to read "certain stuff", I go to specific sites that host only 'adult' stories. The rest of the time, I prefer to avoid "certain stuff".

Someone mentioned cut scenes. I have a special trick when it comes to this. Usually when I'm writing a story that involves romance, sooner or later I get the urge to write "certain stuff". So I write it. Then I cut it all out, since "certain stuff" isn't allowed in the places where I publish, and anyway it would interfere with the tone of the story, so I don't sent it out to readers as cut scenes either. But since my "certain stuff" is rather well written if I dare say so myself, I publish it as separate stories on a site specialising in "certain stuff" where nothing is considered too much. Quite frankly, I'm too scared of traumatising people for life to post it elsewhere, because once I decide to write something, I tend to go into it all the way. No censure, no shying from the most sick and disturbing things my mind can come up with. I often scare myself.

 

OMG! I know exactly what you mean! There are so many A/P love storries here (mostly AU and this is probably where AU gets its bad rep), that redeem Anakin right away, even before he burnes in Mustafar (because god forbidd he is ugly) and he lives happily ever after with Padme and all they do all day long is tell eachother how much they are in love and have sex all day long... And it goes on and on, chapter after chapter... I can't stand that, it ruins the entire tragedy of Vader's character. A short story like that is fine and has its place in the TFN and people like it, but some people go overboard and make it into an epic and I just don't understand.

 

You know, Minela, I think you've hit upon a major fanfic problem here that goes deeper than just chapter after chapter of pointless mush.

It's chapter after chapter of, well, anything - angst, violence, blah blah, that doesn't move a story forward.

I'm pretty sure this has to do with the serial nature of a long fic: Readers get a little bite of story and respond positively to that little nibble almost every time, so based upon the feedback authors are tempted to serve up a little more of the same in the next chapter. This is how you end up with, say, an emotional conflict that seems about to be solved, but then deepens in the next chapter, only to have a little bit of resolution right after that, which of course is ruined by the revelation in the latest chapter...

Personally I've stopped reading a number of stories because of that kind of repetitiveness. It kind of desensitizes you to the characters after a while. Any plot device can become "too much".

 

I know what you mean. It is so hard to get away from that. I'm writing a story and I know where it is going to go but in order to get there I need to set it up emotionally and otherwise. It is hard to get away from an issue because you feel you are not finished with it but after a while you find yourself repeting it. Oh how to get away?

 

Readers get a little bite of story and respond positively to that little nibble almost every time, so based upon the feedback authors are tempted to serve up a little more of the same in the next chapter. - raisedby

Interesting view. This actually touches on - oddly enough - the primary reason Movie Posters and Movie Trailers tend to suck.
They're copy tested.

what happens is, they put you in the room, and then they set the image in front of you (or play the clip or whatever), isolated from all other media and distractions, they let you stare at it a bit, take it in, and then they ask you, "So what do you think?"
Well, whenever we hear this, our mind instantly thinks 'test' and we start explaining, "oh, well it made me think this, and a really like that" and so on. But that's not how we're ever going to view the image in real life. In real life, we're going to glance by it as we flip through a magazine, or pass it by on the highway. We're going to be busy eating most of our popcorn and turning off our cell phones, or watching it in bits and pieces as it slowly loads onto our computer. When we're asked "What do you think" we never give an honest answer, because we don't know what an honest answer would be. So we just pick out the positive stuff and act real positive about it, or pick out the negative stuff and act real negative about it.

The best movie posters are the ones that were sent out without warning, untested. "Alien," "Jaws," "Ghost"
(wish I could think of a multiple-word-title example, so it doesn't look like a trend...)

Feedback - especially if the author is leaning on it to search for a direction to his fic - can have the same affect. Firstly, you're only seeing responses from people who like it in the first place. Secondly, they really don't know why...they can only guess at it. So when they're yelling for more Anakin/Padme love scenes, they don't necessarily mean it.


Giving an audience what they want, in most cases, gives them nothing of the sort.

 

I think that's why it's best, as a writer, to know where the story is going. Your readers might have preferred a different direction (or maybe they're bloodthirsty too!) but usually they'll be happy if they sense you've done the story justice and taken it where it "had" to go. A lot of times a story makes it very plain where it has to end, and that ending might not be everyone's preferred ending. But you have to listen to the muse. Or she gets cranky.

 

You guys have raised some excellent points with regard to the "audience directing the story" problem, I think this is probably why one of my big turn offs for a fic is to see an author to ask the readers if he/she should continue the story.

 

Oh...guilty of "audience directing a story." My first really long story was expanded (by some truly excellent chapters, IMHO) by reader feedback, but at the expense of previously written chapters.

I needed to weed out the unnecessary...sigh... and didn't, and I can see it NOW, though not then. Though not audience-directed, I have author-directed problems of this nature in my current story.

Great wake-up call!

 

i can read almost anything, but Slash, mainly Anakin/Obi-Wan, is enough for me.

 

Eleventh_Guard, you noted that there is such a thing as badly executed violence.
I don't really mind the violence, as long as it is an essential plot point and not gone into in gory detail.