darklyndsea

I've noticed a pattern in the characters I like (with a few outliers): I like characters who are smart, sarcastic, and keep others at a distance.  I like characters who don't have all three characteristics; a few I like don't have any of them (or at least they don't in my headspace).  But those are the main three characteristics that make me like characters.

But the thing is, the characters I like are written out of character a lot.  I assume the writers see their behavior as a flaw to be fixed, because at least some of the time everything else about the fic's good.  I can buy a "becoming more warm and fuzzy" plot, but only if it's part of an epic, or because of some trauma.  If the story's not very long, and the character starts out acting nicer than they do in canon, I don't like it.  If I wanted to read characters like that, I'd be searching for fic with different characters.  I like House and McKay and Snape because they're not nice, and they hold all but a few at a distance, not because I want to see them cozy up to Random Character A without being forced into it.

And on a related note, I don't want to see everybody spilling their secrets.  Sure, for some characters it's in character to tell, but there aren't a lot of them.  I'll never buy the Stargate characters (except for the aliens, and even then it depends) telling people without being told to tell them by the higher-ups.  I won't buy Methos telling somebody he's known for five minutes that he's Methos and what that means.  I won't buy anybody doing one of those "this is everything that's ever happened to me" introductions, unless I get the feeling that the character thinks it's necessary (which would be...one-upmanship?  I can't think of any other reason).

Basically, the characters have established patterns of behavior, and we like or hate them because of that behavior.  If you're writing about a character, stick to their usual pattern of behavior or one that can be extrapolated from their usual pattern of behavior.  If you don't like the characters as they are, and absolutely must change them, at least include a warning that they're OOC.

Lately I've been thinking about recs.  I don't actually read a lot of actual lists of recs (mostly because the way people describe recs to convince people to read them is completely useless to me), but Delicious, where I find a large chunk of the fic I read, functions in much the same way.  There are a few people who tag everything they read, but for the most part people only tag fic that they enjoy for whatever reason.  And since you can see the number of people who have tagged a particular URL, it works pretty well if you want to see what a lot of people like- an aggregated rec list, if you will.

( Read more... )

Writing is a weird process.  What works on one writing project will fail horribly on another.  Some pieces have to be plotted out scene by scene, or even paragraph by paragraph, and others only need for you to have a vague idea of the plotline.  Sure, individual writers tend more towards one end of the spectrum than the other, but even then there's variation by piece.  So writers- or at least writers who want to improve their writing and finish their works- have to continually expand their toolbox of ways to work with a story from the first idea to the last revision.  Sometimes pieces beg to be worked out with a mindmap, or on index cards, or via pictograms on a dry-erase board, whether the writer has worked with that method before or not.

...Which is actually completely off-topic from what I was planning to say in this post, although it's something I do want to say..  Take 2.

Writing is a weird process.  To a certain extent you always have to think about backstory- whether that's a completely original backstory or one which is partially created already (unless you're writing Truman Show fanfiction, and you live in the world where the Truman show is actually real, there will always be gaps...now I want some Truman Show fanfiction from that world).  But thinking about backstory can go two ways (or probably more, but two main ways).  The first being it's predictable backstory, at least to you the writer.  You start thinking about the past of the characters and you don't have any times where you're surprised or shocked at it.  The other way it can go is, you're thinking about their backgrounds and some of the details make you stop and wonder how in the world that got to be canon for the verse you're writing in.  It feels right, but it's unexpected.