Voice and detail
Feb. 22nd, 2006 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
geovikiYou won't find my name in the post asking for anonymous concrit. I don't think it's inherently wrong for those of you who've tossed your hat in; I hope its helpful. I could describe my own reasons carefully, but ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
scoradh and parthenia14 did such a nice job of it that I'll just point you there. This way you won't know what a tissue-paper-thin ego I am hiding from you. I got broadsided back when I was a new writer by a HP hatefic post, which asked for nasty anonymous comments about stories, but without the author buy-in. It only made me feel bad and suspect people for no reason.
I've been thinking, though, about how I am willing to accept praise from all and sundry, yet I sternly judge the bearers of not-so-happy concrit. If it's from a stranger, I want to know her street cred before I'm willing to allow that she may have a point. My conclusion is that I'm a big, fat hypocrite. Still, I think there are enough other ways for you to tell me what you think I need to hear. And to be honest, I depend quite a bit on my betas to keep me between the ditches.
Besides, we all value different stuff. (Ooh, can you sense the segue hovering on the horizon...)
(Disclaimer time - I majored in science. My last formal lit class was long before a lot of you were even born. So I should warn you that there's probably a high bullshit ratio here, and I don't know the proper meta terms that many of you do. Still I know what I like.)
There are two things I want to mention that, when done well, turn me into a slobbering fangrrl: voice and detail. I want to use a story to explain what I mean by this (show, don't tell; right, class?). It's not even an HP fic - it'sresonant8's Higher Education. It's fanfic from the movie The Breakfast Club, and although it's nice to have seen the movie, it's not necessary. The movie was full of types from high school: the popular girl, the freaky proto-Goth, the brain, the jock, and the rebel. Higher Education reunites the brain, Brian, and the rebel, John Bender.
Resonant does such a terrific job with Bender's voice that after one reading, I misremembered it as being written in first person (it's not). Every paragraph is wholly seated in Bender's POV – immediate, convincing, unwavering, intimate, and unique. Here are a few examples:
He crashed on Mitchell's couch for a while, but after a couple days Mitchell's girlfriend started bitching about his shirts on the floor and his roaches in the ashtray, and Mitchell quite sensibly chose pussy over friendship.
After that, his tale of woe got him a couple of nights in Lori Bauer's basement, with some fringe benefits from Lori herself. But Lori's stepdad made Dick Vernon look like a gentleman and a scholar. When it actually came down to threats, it occurred to John that he was, strictly speaking, a trespasser, and thus Lori's stepdad, unlike Vernon, probably wouldn't go to jail for kicking his ass, and therefore getting the hell out of there was the better part of valor.
Or this:
John had never actually had a long-term relationship, unless you counted his arrangement with Debbie Lugner, which had been more like, "Yeah, come on over any time, unless I have an early shift tomorrow or I'm seeing somebody who actually lives in town." He surprised himself by kind of liking it.
Brian didn't come around to the shop all that often -- every couple of weeks, a frequency finely calibrated so it didn't look like he was ashamed of John or scared of his co-workers, but not often enough that they got to expect him or think of him as John's best friend or anything. Mostly Brian met him at the house after dinner, or called him up and told him to save a table at Pucci's, and he'd come straight from the el station still in the clothes he wore to his summer internship at Chicago Edison, tie with a short-sleeve shirt like the dork he was.
By the end of the story, I was rooting for Bender to find true love and happiness based on how well I felt I knew and liked him.
But voice isn't the only thing to knock my socks off in this story - the detail is astonishing. Res has concocted an entire world around these two characters, entirely original. Bender works in a car repair shop, and each of his co-workers is described so clearly that I know they have completely independent lives outside of this story. And not only is this car shop described in loving detail, but so is the competitor across the street, the customers, even the cars themselves. Like this:
Dejuan left to open up his own place down in South Carolina, and Wysocki hired some scrawny rat of a kid named Chris who was barely literate and about one step up from homeless. John and Carlinhos worked a lot of overtime in the time it took the kid to decide whether he was going to bolt or stick around and grow up.
It was OK, though. Carlinhos said about two words an hour, but they worked together like four hands with one brain. The money was good. And it wasn't like John had anything else to do with his evenings.
The first job they let the kid touch was this weird little electric-blue thing like the dune buggy from a Matchbox Car set, with a set of handcuffs dangling from the rearview mirror. "Done by noon, sweetheart, or not a penny," said the guy in the tanktop who dropped it off, and Chris banged around in the back room hissing, "Fucking cocksucker faggot."
I mean, I can see that car and its owner as if he was standing in this room. Just like I can see - and smell - his cousin and her fiance:
"Johnny?" She took a couple of running steps and gave him a great big Eternity-scented hug. Damn it, somebody with tits like this would have to be blood kin, wouldn't she? "When they stopped talking about you, Ma figured either jail or the Marines, you know?"
"Man, Ange, you grew up!" Last time he'd seen her she'd been all skinny and pizza-faced. And definitely not a redhead.
She grinned, and then she pulled over a big tall fat guy with a shaved head and a huge gold chain around his neck, just like a rapper only white. "This is my fiance," she said, squeezing the guy's arm. "Mason, this is my cousin Johnny, feast your eyes, a Bender with a job! Johnny, you've just got to come to the wedding. I want to see Ma shit herself."
He didn't offer Mason his hand in case there was some kind of secret handshake he was supposed to know about.
To sum up, I think voice and detail are two areas I could use more work on, so I look to stories like this - and especially writers like Resonant - to show me how it's supposed to be done. Now it's time for class participation: link me to stories that you think use voice and detail especially well.
scoradh and parthenia14 did such a nice job of it that I'll just point you there. This way you won't know what a tissue-paper-thin ego I am hiding from you. I got broadsided back when I was a new writer by a HP hatefic post, which asked for nasty anonymous comments about stories, but without the author buy-in. It only made me feel bad and suspect people for no reason.I've been thinking, though, about how I am willing to accept praise from all and sundry, yet I sternly judge the bearers of not-so-happy concrit. If it's from a stranger, I want to know her street cred before I'm willing to allow that she may have a point. My conclusion is that I'm a big, fat hypocrite. Still, I think there are enough other ways for you to tell me what you think I need to hear. And to be honest, I depend quite a bit on my betas to keep me between the ditches.
Besides, we all value different stuff. (Ooh, can you sense the segue hovering on the horizon...)
(Disclaimer time - I majored in science. My last formal lit class was long before a lot of you were even born. So I should warn you that there's probably a high bullshit ratio here, and I don't know the proper meta terms that many of you do. Still I know what I like.)
There are two things I want to mention that, when done well, turn me into a slobbering fangrrl: voice and detail. I want to use a story to explain what I mean by this (show, don't tell; right, class?). It's not even an HP fic - it's
resonant8's Higher Education. It's fanfic from the movie The Breakfast Club, and although it's nice to have seen the movie, it's not necessary. The movie was full of types from high school: the popular girl, the freaky proto-Goth, the brain, the jock, and the rebel. Higher Education reunites the brain, Brian, and the rebel, John Bender.Resonant does such a terrific job with Bender's voice that after one reading, I misremembered it as being written in first person (it's not). Every paragraph is wholly seated in Bender's POV – immediate, convincing, unwavering, intimate, and unique. Here are a few examples:
He crashed on Mitchell's couch for a while, but after a couple days Mitchell's girlfriend started bitching about his shirts on the floor and his roaches in the ashtray, and Mitchell quite sensibly chose pussy over friendship.
After that, his tale of woe got him a couple of nights in Lori Bauer's basement, with some fringe benefits from Lori herself. But Lori's stepdad made Dick Vernon look like a gentleman and a scholar. When it actually came down to threats, it occurred to John that he was, strictly speaking, a trespasser, and thus Lori's stepdad, unlike Vernon, probably wouldn't go to jail for kicking his ass, and therefore getting the hell out of there was the better part of valor.
Or this:
John had never actually had a long-term relationship, unless you counted his arrangement with Debbie Lugner, which had been more like, "Yeah, come on over any time, unless I have an early shift tomorrow or I'm seeing somebody who actually lives in town." He surprised himself by kind of liking it.
Brian didn't come around to the shop all that often -- every couple of weeks, a frequency finely calibrated so it didn't look like he was ashamed of John or scared of his co-workers, but not often enough that they got to expect him or think of him as John's best friend or anything. Mostly Brian met him at the house after dinner, or called him up and told him to save a table at Pucci's, and he'd come straight from the el station still in the clothes he wore to his summer internship at Chicago Edison, tie with a short-sleeve shirt like the dork he was.
By the end of the story, I was rooting for Bender to find true love and happiness based on how well I felt I knew and liked him.
But voice isn't the only thing to knock my socks off in this story - the detail is astonishing. Res has concocted an entire world around these two characters, entirely original. Bender works in a car repair shop, and each of his co-workers is described so clearly that I know they have completely independent lives outside of this story. And not only is this car shop described in loving detail, but so is the competitor across the street, the customers, even the cars themselves. Like this:
Dejuan left to open up his own place down in South Carolina, and Wysocki hired some scrawny rat of a kid named Chris who was barely literate and about one step up from homeless. John and Carlinhos worked a lot of overtime in the time it took the kid to decide whether he was going to bolt or stick around and grow up.
It was OK, though. Carlinhos said about two words an hour, but they worked together like four hands with one brain. The money was good. And it wasn't like John had anything else to do with his evenings.
The first job they let the kid touch was this weird little electric-blue thing like the dune buggy from a Matchbox Car set, with a set of handcuffs dangling from the rearview mirror. "Done by noon, sweetheart, or not a penny," said the guy in the tanktop who dropped it off, and Chris banged around in the back room hissing, "Fucking cocksucker faggot."
I mean, I can see that car and its owner as if he was standing in this room. Just like I can see - and smell - his cousin and her fiance:
"Johnny?" She took a couple of running steps and gave him a great big Eternity-scented hug. Damn it, somebody with tits like this would have to be blood kin, wouldn't she? "When they stopped talking about you, Ma figured either jail or the Marines, you know?"
"Man, Ange, you grew up!" Last time he'd seen her she'd been all skinny and pizza-faced. And definitely not a redhead.
She grinned, and then she pulled over a big tall fat guy with a shaved head and a huge gold chain around his neck, just like a rapper only white. "This is my fiance," she said, squeezing the guy's arm. "Mason, this is my cousin Johnny, feast your eyes, a Bender with a job! Johnny, you've just got to come to the wedding. I want to see Ma shit herself."
He didn't offer Mason his hand in case there was some kind of secret handshake he was supposed to know about.
To sum up, I think voice and detail are two areas I could use more work on, so I look to stories like this - and especially writers like Resonant - to show me how it's supposed to be done. Now it's time for class participation: link me to stories that you think use voice and detail especially well.
