One-way text

[igenlode]

I just came across the most elegantly insightful aphorism (in the middle of a discussion of synecdoche† in fan-fiction, e.g. referring to people by profession or eye colour rather than name): fanfic is writing whose primary function is to be written rather than to be read.
† Edit: I'm not sure that is in fact the right term, but it was the one being used...

It is regarded as a means above all of self-expression rather than of communication, created to satisfy the need of the author, who "writes to get their own personal enjoyment out of it, with little thought given to what reading it feels like" -- a chorus of squee and flailing is nice to receive, obviously, but basically it is an outlet for the writer's feelings rather than an attempt to create prose that will draw an audience. (Who might not, for example, want to plough through several paragraphs of authorial analysis about the background of a minor character as an interruption to a dialogue passage, or conversely might be cringing every time they read badly-formatted dialogue or exchanges between "the red-haired marksman" and "the tall brunet"[sic] ...)

Comments

[watervole]

Used to drive me mad. 'The burly rebel' etc.

Came across a bad one while reviewing a pro book not long ago.

'The Cornishman'. At least every third time the character was mentioned, and it was NEVER relevant to the scene in question.

[igenlode]

Oh, I think everyone (save perhaps those who simply don't read outside the fan-fiction ghetto) agrees that the misuse of epithets is a bad thing. The element that struck me with shattering clarity was the idea that the creation of fanfic is, at heart, more significant than the consumption of it; yes, there are (presumably) people who read large quantities of fan-fiction and never attempt to write any themselves, even though the entrance barrier is very low, but it is the act of writing itself that demonstrates fandom in the writer, rather than the success (whether artistic or in terms of popularity) or otherwise of the result.

People write fanfic that literally nobody reads, but they still hopefully upload it -- in the days before the Internet people wrote fanfic and kept it in a box under the bed to make sure that nobody could embarrass them by reading it. Admittedly most people do get put off after a few months of uploading stories that never get any form of reaction, but a lot of them persist even after realising that they are never going to be one of the lucky ones whose writing gets traction for one reason or another -- the next E.L.James or Cassandra Clare.

And conversely you have the "don't like, don't read" phenomenon: 'this is my self-expression and any criticism of it is a personal criticism of me'. The feeling is that the important thing is not whether (for example) the resulting prose makes the reader cry, but whether the writer cried while producing it.

Came across a bad one while reviewing a pro book not long ago. 'The Cornishman'. At least every third time the character was mentioned, and it was NEVER relevant to the scene in question.

I've started to see a number of cringe-making stylistic quirks in published fiction these days that I'd assumed were hallmarks of bad amateur writing, and I do wonder if it has simply become a generational marker -- if the generation which grew up on this type of 'mistake' in its reading material of preference has now adopted/internalised it as normal usage, as part of an ongoing linguistic shift :-O

(But as was also pointed out in the original discussion, writers of the past routinely had a completely male or female cast of characters, with stories set in a girls' school, on board a Royal Navy vessel or in the deepest Antarctic, without either author or reader experiencing this as creating any problem with pronoun usage whatsoever. So the perceived requirement to indulge in epithets to distinguish the speaker in a piece of slash fic really is an issue of inexperience and/or basic incompetence!)