expository ramblings part the ninth
Over the past week or so I've been reading fics for a new pair in a new fandom. What I tend to do in such situations is probably not what most folks would do. I don't find short little stories and drabbles and feel my way in. *shakes head* No. I do the opposite. I find the longest multi-part story I can get my hands on and dive right in.
I do this because quite often I find the best examplars of any fandom are going to come from those willing to put the time in to tell an actual, honest to goodness story. They'll be the authors with patience, diligence and determination to craft something that will be engrossing and thought provoking, because honestly, you have to be writing something interesting enough to keep your own attention in order to put together anything more than a few thousand words.
The first story I found was good. By no means great. A little too... florid. Now there's nothing wrong with that style, but there is a context where it serves the story and this wasn't anywhere near the right context. It felt... off. The next few stories I read were superb. Truly enjoyable and intriguing reads and I'm still enjoying reading more by those authors, including their shorter form fics. I think you'd appreciate this pairing a little, rightxhere, they can't be written properly without angst. I'm not as big a fan of angst as I am of heartache and lovesickness and dragging it out just a teensy bit - another reason I pick out long pieces to read first - as evinced by my fics, but this pair... they have to hurt a little before getting together, their history requires it. Demands it even.
Now, why do I bring this up in one of my expository ramblings posts? I'll get to that in a somewhat circuitous manner eventually. The most important point I want to stress is the following:
I've never watched a single second of the source material for this fandom.
This is totally unlike me. I have problems finding an interest in fanfiction for some shows I truly love, like Farscape, let alone others which I merely enjoy. I normally never even look twice at anything for a show I've never actually seen. It is an odd combination of genre and characters which has drawn me to this particular pairing in this particular fandom. However this isn't what I'm compelled to write about. It's how my lack of a reference for the fiction alters how I visualise it as I read it.
I'm a very visual reader, the words create a picture in my head and essentially I'm watching a movie going on in my imagination. For this I tend to need some sort of visual cues to go by to construct this imaginary production in my mental theatre. With books, I tend to end up with a something from the covers of the book or the characters end up being somewhat amorphously faceless. I might perhaps stylise them after actors I'm watching a lot of at the time. Unless of course a movie or TV series is made for the books. Emma Watson is Hermione Granger for me. So much so that I'm constanly surprised whenever some fic brings up how she was supposed to have large front teeth for the first three and a half books. It completely slips my mind. TV shows and films of course provide me with ample visual reference and quite often reading fics for them becomes something akin to watching an episode.
However, I've never watched this show. I know what the characters look like - I've seen images of the actors for instance - but when I'm reading the fics theirs are not the faces I see portraying the characters. One character is actually portrayed by two different people depending on what is happening. It seems to be based on the attitude being represented in the text. In particularly strident or excitable moments I can only see Allison Scagliotti delivering the lines. In somber, emotionally tense moments it's an old friend from college, the on again off again girlfriend of my flatmate's rugby club teammate. It's her face I see in the quiet, vulnerable moments of the story right, down to her - completely out of character for the setting - devastatingly Scottish accent, delivered in a mellow huskiness I can still hear whenver I think about her. Neither of them look like the actress. Scagliotti is loud and brash and all in your face red hair with stripes. My friend was a gorgeous brunette with soft eyes and a great smile and I'm pretty sure she knew I was interested in her but that's far enough down that tangent.
I can't seem to help it. I cannot visualise the character as the actress who played her and I'm certain it's because I've never seen the character actually acted out. I have no cues of motion, no mannerisms, nothing to map an emotion I read to an expression I've seen in action.
With a show I've watched, my brain fills in the action I'm seeing in my head with all the little motions and expressions I remember from the show. Dialogue isn't just words. It's as much about actions and expressions as about the words. Body language is such a huge component of face to face communication that it amazes me how often writers leave it out completely. I see walls of dialogue with nothingelse except the speech. Where the characters expound upon every emotion they're feeling when the writer could have conveyed ninty percent of that with the description of a slumped shoulder and a head shake. This is partly what I meant by 'florid' prose earlier. Dialogue which is stilted, not because it doesn't make sense, but because no one talks like that... ever!
Dialogue has to flow. Just because it is written down doesn't mean the author should start using it as a way to show off their vocabulary. Granted... I'm somewhat guilty of this. In my defense I try to only do it when it's funny. However I cannot stress enough how iimportant it is for a character to speak naturally. Using the cadence and flow of speech. I don't read dialogue. I hear it. Knowing the character is 'speaking' seems to activate the speech recognition centers of my brain. When I read dialogue from a character who sounds as if they're reading instead of speaking it completely throws me off. I have actually stopped reading stories where this is the case. I'm even willing to overlook blatantly out of character portrayals as long as their dialogue is spoken believably. A huge part of this is the body language. Which is why my own writing is the way it is.
I'm usually writing shipping stories. Which is often just talking heads. I make no bones about that. It's going to be characters talking to each other. Which makes the mannerisms and facial expressions vital to the story. More so than the words. You can replace entire tracts of dialogue with just having your character reach out and touch their partner on the arm. (Okay, a slight exageration, but only slight.) I intersperse my character's speech with motions and expressions such as these. At the end of the day I do it more to fill in the canvas on screen as the 'episode' plays in my head. This can be done horribly wrong though. Usually caused, coincidentally, for the exact reason it is so important to get right.
I can't count the times when I've been reading a story and I have no idea who is actually supposed to be speaking. There is no indication of the voice, or worse, the speech is juxtaposed with an action by the 'listener' giving the wrong impression entirely. Such mistakes cause huge problems with the reading flow, such as having to go back several sentences to piece together why exactly it isn't making sense for the character you think is speaking to say these words only to find it's the other character speaking. This is caused by the writer not being careful as they write. Being so into the flow of the dialogue in their mind that they forget to establish that picture with their own prose. I do it constantly. I get so involved transcribing what Cam and Sam are saying to each other that I forget that the reader will not have the same visual cues as I do unless I actually provide them. Which is one of the reasons why I re-read my fics over and over and over before I hit that publish button. Then read them over and over and over again and editing them some more.
It is more important to make the action of speaking clear than it is to make the words of the dialogue snappy. There is a place for bare speech paragraphs with no surrounding exposition, usually when the patter has to be very snappy indeed, but more often than not it is far better to err on the side of clarity. The clarity will actually improve the flow in the long run.
Well... that was a lot to write just to explain why I've never actually written one of those dialogue paragraphs that doesn't end in a double quote because the speech carries on directly to the next paragraph.
I do this because quite often I find the best examplars of any fandom are going to come from those willing to put the time in to tell an actual, honest to goodness story. They'll be the authors with patience, diligence and determination to craft something that will be engrossing and thought provoking, because honestly, you have to be writing something interesting enough to keep your own attention in order to put together anything more than a few thousand words.
The first story I found was good. By no means great. A little too... florid. Now there's nothing wrong with that style, but there is a context where it serves the story and this wasn't anywhere near the right context. It felt... off. The next few stories I read were superb. Truly enjoyable and intriguing reads and I'm still enjoying reading more by those authors, including their shorter form fics. I think you'd appreciate this pairing a little, rightxhere, they can't be written properly without angst. I'm not as big a fan of angst as I am of heartache and lovesickness and dragging it out just a teensy bit - another reason I pick out long pieces to read first - as evinced by my fics, but this pair... they have to hurt a little before getting together, their history requires it. Demands it even.
Now, why do I bring this up in one of my expository ramblings posts? I'll get to that in a somewhat circuitous manner eventually. The most important point I want to stress is the following:
I've never watched a single second of the source material for this fandom.
This is totally unlike me. I have problems finding an interest in fanfiction for some shows I truly love, like Farscape, let alone others which I merely enjoy. I normally never even look twice at anything for a show I've never actually seen. It is an odd combination of genre and characters which has drawn me to this particular pairing in this particular fandom. However this isn't what I'm compelled to write about. It's how my lack of a reference for the fiction alters how I visualise it as I read it.
I'm a very visual reader, the words create a picture in my head and essentially I'm watching a movie going on in my imagination. For this I tend to need some sort of visual cues to go by to construct this imaginary production in my mental theatre. With books, I tend to end up with a something from the covers of the book or the characters end up being somewhat amorphously faceless. I might perhaps stylise them after actors I'm watching a lot of at the time. Unless of course a movie or TV series is made for the books. Emma Watson is Hermione Granger for me. So much so that I'm constanly surprised whenever some fic brings up how she was supposed to have large front teeth for the first three and a half books. It completely slips my mind. TV shows and films of course provide me with ample visual reference and quite often reading fics for them becomes something akin to watching an episode.
However, I've never watched this show. I know what the characters look like - I've seen images of the actors for instance - but when I'm reading the fics theirs are not the faces I see portraying the characters. One character is actually portrayed by two different people depending on what is happening. It seems to be based on the attitude being represented in the text. In particularly strident or excitable moments I can only see Allison Scagliotti delivering the lines. In somber, emotionally tense moments it's an old friend from college, the on again off again girlfriend of my flatmate's rugby club teammate. It's her face I see in the quiet, vulnerable moments of the story right, down to her - completely out of character for the setting - devastatingly Scottish accent, delivered in a mellow huskiness I can still hear whenver I think about her. Neither of them look like the actress. Scagliotti is loud and brash and all in your face red hair with stripes. My friend was a gorgeous brunette with soft eyes and a great smile and I'm pretty sure she knew I was interested in her but that's far enough down that tangent.
I can't seem to help it. I cannot visualise the character as the actress who played her and I'm certain it's because I've never seen the character actually acted out. I have no cues of motion, no mannerisms, nothing to map an emotion I read to an expression I've seen in action.
With a show I've watched, my brain fills in the action I'm seeing in my head with all the little motions and expressions I remember from the show. Dialogue isn't just words. It's as much about actions and expressions as about the words. Body language is such a huge component of face to face communication that it amazes me how often writers leave it out completely. I see walls of dialogue with nothingelse except the speech. Where the characters expound upon every emotion they're feeling when the writer could have conveyed ninty percent of that with the description of a slumped shoulder and a head shake. This is partly what I meant by 'florid' prose earlier. Dialogue which is stilted, not because it doesn't make sense, but because no one talks like that... ever!
Dialogue has to flow. Just because it is written down doesn't mean the author should start using it as a way to show off their vocabulary. Granted... I'm somewhat guilty of this. In my defense I try to only do it when it's funny. However I cannot stress enough how iimportant it is for a character to speak naturally. Using the cadence and flow of speech. I don't read dialogue. I hear it. Knowing the character is 'speaking' seems to activate the speech recognition centers of my brain. When I read dialogue from a character who sounds as if they're reading instead of speaking it completely throws me off. I have actually stopped reading stories where this is the case. I'm even willing to overlook blatantly out of character portrayals as long as their dialogue is spoken believably. A huge part of this is the body language. Which is why my own writing is the way it is.
I'm usually writing shipping stories. Which is often just talking heads. I make no bones about that. It's going to be characters talking to each other. Which makes the mannerisms and facial expressions vital to the story. More so than the words. You can replace entire tracts of dialogue with just having your character reach out and touch their partner on the arm. (Okay, a slight exageration, but only slight.) I intersperse my character's speech with motions and expressions such as these. At the end of the day I do it more to fill in the canvas on screen as the 'episode' plays in my head. This can be done horribly wrong though. Usually caused, coincidentally, for the exact reason it is so important to get right.
I can't count the times when I've been reading a story and I have no idea who is actually supposed to be speaking. There is no indication of the voice, or worse, the speech is juxtaposed with an action by the 'listener' giving the wrong impression entirely. Such mistakes cause huge problems with the reading flow, such as having to go back several sentences to piece together why exactly it isn't making sense for the character you think is speaking to say these words only to find it's the other character speaking. This is caused by the writer not being careful as they write. Being so into the flow of the dialogue in their mind that they forget to establish that picture with their own prose. I do it constantly. I get so involved transcribing what Cam and Sam are saying to each other that I forget that the reader will not have the same visual cues as I do unless I actually provide them. Which is one of the reasons why I re-read my fics over and over and over before I hit that publish button. Then read them over and over and over again and editing them some more.
It is more important to make the action of speaking clear than it is to make the words of the dialogue snappy. There is a place for bare speech paragraphs with no surrounding exposition, usually when the patter has to be very snappy indeed, but more often than not it is far better to err on the side of clarity. The clarity will actually improve the flow in the long run.
Well... that was a lot to write just to explain why I've never actually written one of those dialogue paragraphs that doesn't end in a double quote because the speech carries on directly to the next paragraph.