A long post on brevity

[lydiabennet]

ADDENDUM: Due to comment spam on LJ, I've had to disable comments on this journal.*Blows dust off journal* Yikes, it's been a long time since I've posted here, hasn't it? I suppose it's only fitting that the first thing I have to say here in four months is about . . . well, brevity. I've been trying to gear up for fanfic again by drabbling

Comments

[romath]

Briefly.. there is another way in which to deal with the challenge of the brief format, which is to deliberately flaunt the rules of good written english, in some sense to turn the piece almost into verse.

[lydiabennet]

Briefly..

Hee. Oh, good, you're playing the brevity game. :D

deliberately flaunt the rules of good written english,

Mmmm, yeah, I do that in drabbles sometimes, occasionally including sentence fragments IF they might plausibly be presented as the thought of the POV character (since people do sometimes think that way). As for poetry, though, eep! Maybe that's something that should be a happy accident rather than an aspiration, at least for me. Writing for sound alone is one of my vices, particularly in drabbles, so I try to be stern with myself and make sure there's a discernible plot or plotlet of some kind lurking amidst the long vowels.

[romath]

I was thinking more of the rhythms of speech applied to prose, rather than necessarily the sounds of speech. You may have noticed that I, more frequently then I should, to my dismay, and possibly due to my profession, will write a series of cascading - or should that be spawn a cluster of cascading - subclauses. Or I will repeat my self, over and over and over, repeating myself to emphasise a thought or scene or colour or spark - without needing as many words. A sumi-e brush painting is my aim, not a work in oils.

[lydiabennet]

You may have noticed that I, more frequently then I should, to my dismay, and possibly due to my profession, will write a series of cascading - or should that be spawn a cluster of cascading - subclauses.

*giggles* You may, perhaps, have noticed -- though of course there is no reason why you should have -- that I, on occasion, adopt a sentence structure more complex, though considerably less amusing and instructive, than one of those dolls which, when opened, will prove to have another, smaller doll inside, one which in turn contains another doll, which contains yet another, and so on: rather like an onion, except, of course, less amenable to being sprinkled on a salad.

:D

Actually I think your prose is a model of grace and clarity, and I don't think you repeat yourself, either. But I do like the comparison to a brush painting. Exactly. The brushstrokes coax the empty space into doing half the work, yes?

[dracofiend]

Oooh, you're back! Yay! Your fic Sweet was so incredible and I've just been dying to read more of your H/D :)

I totally get what you mean about brevity. It's The Suck. Yet so critical. I recently tried out drabbles and, heh, couldn't get a single one of them to 100 words. 100 words! It's insane. But I see it done, and well, all the time. And here--you've done it fantastically well.

I REALLY like "Soft kisses in the kitchen, hard ones on the stairs." It's almost a lyric. I think that first one's my favorite (good-morning kisses in front of everyone? Oh yes.), but the third somehow sinks in more deeply after a few reads.

I'm glad you're back! And you know, there's something to be said for not-brevity too...your descriptions (even if a page long and of a bush) are gorgeous!

[lydiabennet]

I'm glad you liked the drabbles, and thank you for your wonderfully kind words about Sweet!

Yeah, the brevity in drabbles drives me crazy too, which is one reason, I suppose, why I think it's good for me. They shake up your writing and generate ideas, and anything that provides an opportunity to swoon over H/D has to be good, right? :D At least that's how I look at it. But difficult? OMG yes. Sometimes they make me want to tear out my hair!

[lydiabennet]

I'm glad you liked the drabbles! And drabble communities are fun, aren't they? Particularly when the mods are so good about posting interesting challenges on a regular basis, as they are on hd100.

It's not really what I would call fluff, because it has depth... it's just not angsty.

There've been some interesting discussions about fluff recently that have shown how widely people's definitions of the term vary. I don't know -- I think it's useful to have some kind of fandom term available for "fic that is perhaps willfully on the side of happiness" -- which is how I tend to think of fluff in my head. I suppose a fic like this can have depth, if depth means some attempt to be true to the characters and to the basic laws of probability. But whether fluff has depth in the philosophical sense will depend, I guess, on whether you believe that the universe is at odds with happiness in some fundamental way. If the the world basically sucks, then maybe happy endings are inherently shallow. If it doesn't, then maybe they aren't

[xylohypha]

I loved the Tribble, and both Naginis. (A swallow of hot chocolate, and a swig of iced vodka, and a slug of whiskey, respectively.)

As for brevity, I don't think that it's the only writerly virtue worth pursuing--but the discipline of working within the strict confines of a form like the drabble is bound to make a writer more effective in using the tools of her trade. (I'm reminded of the way surgical residents are supposed to learn to tie a good knot within the confines of a matchbox. Thus does fiction form my reality--because I don't really know anything of the sort from my own experience.)

[lydiabennet]

A swallow of hot chocolate, and a swig of iced vodka, and a slug of whiskey, respectively.

Oooh, I like this scale! I wrote whiskey! Yay! Now you make me wonder what it would be like to write absinthe (character death?), or a pina colada (maybe that would be a Veela!Draco fic) or a Shirley Temple (a fade-to-black -- hey, I could do that! :D)

In any case I'm glad you liked the drabbles. And I wish someone would give me some whiskey now, since I just discovered and fixed an editing error in the last drabble that affected the word count. Faugh. You can read something a dozen times and miss something that was right in front of your face.

I'm reminded of the way surgical residents are supposed to learn to tie a good knot within the confines of a matchbox. Neat comparison! Certainly drabble writing feels that way: like you're tripping over yourself constantly, and sometimes you just want to throw up your hands and say "why the f--k am I trying to do this in a f--king matchbox?" But, well, practice makes perfect I guess, or

[silentauror]

Excellent points, and I loved all three drabbles! I really loved the first one, because kissing makes me weak in the knees, but the other two were equally gorgeous. ♥♥♥

[lydiabennet]

Thank you! I'm glad you liked them, and yeah, any excuse for H/D kissing is a good excuse in my opinion -- that's one reason why the Theban Band picture in your icon is my favorite piece of HP fan art ever, and every time you use it I stare at it for a minute or two before my brain goes back on line. :D