Jasmine ,'Power Play'
A place for Buffistas to discuss, beta and otherwise deal and dish on their non-fan fiction projects.
Whoa! Brynn, take a deep breath, girl.
Deb: Yeah, it's the school/work/school isolation... Things tend to explode out of me. Sorry. Yeah, I must have slept 40 hours this weekend and I still feel like I just peeled myself from the underside of a tanker.
Erika, I'm going to be honest, because I respect you and like you: You are a fantastic writer. Your brain is clearly very fast and very busy, and I would love to have a day or so to play with it. But, when I read something you wrote, I feel like I'm in the middle of a carnival -- allusions and metaphors and wordplay and sex and shiny shiny ideas get thrown at me so fast that it burns me out, and I end up missing the signal for all the ... other signals that aren't the main one, if that makes sense.
I don't know what the cure is. There may not even be a problem outside my head. from where i'm sitting, I sincerely believe that your writing would be better if it were sparer, if you took your 15 ideas and ruthlessly chopped them down to 8 or 10. For example, in the piece you just posted, you could easily lose some or all of these things: the age difference, spring break, free cone day, exotic fevers, and John's SAT scores. Not don't put those in the story, you understand. Just they don't need to be right there.
Again, I offer this with all respect, and with full knowledge that someone who barely writes at all maybe shouldn't be advising someone like you. But I'm hoping you'll take it for what it's worth.
Heh. Lyra likes it spare; generally, so do I. In fact, erika will tell you that I'm usually the voice saying "no, that's you, not that character, in that little bit over there! No parentheticals in fiction! Lose it lose it!"
There are times, though, when the really fast clap of metaphors is precisely what's needed.
Yeah, I plead guilty to the charge of needing it spare. And I even agree with Deb that sometimes, breakneck metaphors exactly what you need. I just think keeping that pace up for more than a paragraph or two will almost always burn the reader out. (or, at least, it burns me out -- I can't read with anyone else's mind.)
But then, it's proportional, too, and having that pace for the first page of a 20-page story that also slows down later on, might feel very different from seeing that page as a world onto itself.
*loves this thread...* I need to relearn the zen art of multitasking/prioritizing so I can actually keep up with the things wrap me up rather than wring me out.
it's proportional
Yes, this exactly. Normally, I am iron-fisted on the "stop futzing with stuff and tell the story!" In this particular piece - voter fraud pornography, written for a very specific purpose - there was nothing in there to burn me out at all, or to distract me: problem puzzle and crime and sex, with the only real deal being the humanity of these people. And as a mystery writer, and one who likes the buzz of the invisible world? The metaphors here just danced for me, once she gave it closure.
That's funny because it was almost just "He Said/She said" dialogue...no description whatever. But I figured I might Hear about that, despite it being my dialogue fiend's first instinct. Maybe I overcompensated because I wrote Naked People.
Nah. I want the story, the nice balance between dialogue and action, the mood...
t Poking head We had a network crash here, and therefore I owe apologies to both Kristin and deb, because the files with the comments on their stuff were lost, and I have to start all over again. I'm not sure I'll be able to re-do it until at least tomorrow, though. Sorry!
Oh victor, I'm crying.
Err, I'm sorry? I REALLY didn't mean to make you cry.Yeah, but because your reasoning is sound. I can't explain it any more, but you don't need to be sorry, unless you caused all this in the first place.