coaltide | C.R.E.A.M

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2021

C.R.E.A.M

Coal ruins exchanges around me - spitey spitey fic y'all.

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Ayrt

Oh, I agree that it's a bad / too vague DNW without clarification!

I was just confused about the "I wouldn't know how to do this / the only way to do this would be to try an imitate another writer's style".

Personally, I wouldn't count dialogue because of course I want dialogue to be in character. Dialogue is the character's voice. Narration is, largely, the author's voice.

Narration should be heavily influenced by POV. If you write narration in exactly the same voice regardless of POV, I hope you only ever write from the POV of one character type.

+1000

That really depends on how tight your third is.

Even a full omniscient third should have some distinctive voice to it that varies with the needs of the story, if you're doing it right.

Like I'm not saying the writer's developed style is irrelevant, but if the narrative voice is blandly identical in everything you write, rather than being part of how you build the story, that's not. Good?

Sure, but the point is, if you're doing omniscient third it doesn't matter whether the camera is tracking Valjean's POV or Javert's POV, because the narrator is always Victor Hugo.

The narrator is Victor Hugo as the Les Mis narrator, who is distinguishable from the Ninety-Three narrator or the Toilers of the Sea narrator. Like we call it "Victor Hugo pastiche" (because they are all clearly him!) but if I wrote Les Mis fic as Toilers pastiche, you could tell.

Re: DNW Workshop

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 04:59 (UTC) - Expand

Re: DNW Workshop

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 05:37 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 10:53 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 19:51 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2021-10-22 04:31 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 12:20 (UTC) - Expand

Ayrt

I guess here we return to the question of whether or not the writer who gets that prompt feels like they have a voice. Because if you don't, a DNW like that is super intimidating.

Or, possibly worse, you *do* have a voice, and your voice is... not extremely different from the author you're now being told not to pastiche.

Ha, yeah. Not sure how to react to a "no mimicking the canon style" DNW when a number of the book canons I offer in Yuletide are actually beloved childhood faves that massively influenced the development of my own writing style. "Just write it in your own natural voice, don't try to sound anything like the canon," you say? Um...

Yeah it's like, actuslly the reason I love this canons and always offer it is because the original author writes very much the way I wish I could! (And occasionally people tell me I achieved it.) Like it's not that I'm slavishly imitating them, it's that I love the canon because it's like something I'd write.

(Also I think the people arguing about the question of more of canon/different from canon are missing the point that even if what I want in cql fic is something wildly creative and form defying, this is yuletide, yuletide has always been the exchange for 'i want more like canon in this tiny fandom with no fic".)

yuletide has always been the exchange for 'i want more like canon in this tiny fandom with no fic"

Yuletide has also always been the exchange for taking the fanfic in a wildly different direction than canon. These two things can coexist - not in the same fic, obviously, but certainly in the same event.

Re: DNW Workshop

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-22 13:16 (UTC) - Expand

Re: DNW Workshop

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-22 13:26 (UTC) - Expand

Which is extremely possible if that author was enough of an influence on you for you to be offering to write fanfic of their books, at that.

na

I don’t read or request book fandoms so I’m talking about live action media here, but my nightmare is reading a fic where it “sounds” like the author and not the character. I like a tight 3rd POV where the narrator sounds like the POV character and not an omnipotent author (unless the narrator is omnipotent in canon). When the narration is goofy and the POV character is stoic, I hate it. When the narration is scientific and the POV character is an idiot, I hate it.

For example, JS&MN show fic that is written in the the style of the books feel so tedious to me. Ones that match the tone of the show and fit the character’s rather than the author’s voice are amazing.

Different strokes for different folks I guess. I don’t want pistache but I do want it to fit the voice/tone of canon. I can remove that canon tone from my narration and write generic there, but if someone gifted that to me I would assume they had no grasp on the canon or characters rather than it being a “stylistic choice” and I view authors who write in the same style despite fandom to be ATG(uys/gals) migratory lowest common denominator tbh.

pastiche

I am violently allergic to pistach(io) and it is a hard DNW

That's fair. I, myself, DNW pisstakes.

Re: DNW Workshop

(Anonymous) - 2021-10-21 02:57 (UTC) - Expand

Surely the problem with your JS&MN example is that your author is borrowing the voice from a canon you didn't request. Although I do agree with your migratory/generic complaint. IME people who aren't trying to match canon don't do it because they have a voice distinctly their own, but because they don't have the skills to vary their writing to match different canon tones and voices.

I do find it hilarious how often you have misspelled pastiche in the last two days, though.

But... live action media is never in tight 3rd. It can't be, because there's a camera. And JS&MN isn't even in loose 3rd most of the time.

Like, if you consider that fight Jonathan and Arabella have when he comes out of the King's Roads for the first time, that scene is not filmed from the POV of any of the characters in it. Jonathan is elated and then indignant, Arabella is worried and then irate, Grant wants to melt into the floor - but none of that is the mood of the scene itself, which is comedy. It's not in Clarke's voice exactly (I'd argue it's considerably better than her version of it), but it's much closer to being from her POV than it is to being from the tight 3rd POV of one of the characters.

If I wanted to write you something that actually matched the tone of miniseries canon I'd have to do a very loose third or third omniscient, not the fanficcy tight 3rd that you prefer. (Especially for a fic focusing on Norrell, because Norrell's interpretation of any given situation is almost always at 90° to whatever the camera/the viewer is meant to think of it.)

Fic is converting live action into literature, coalie.

It can be. (Sometimes it's converting literature into more literature.)

And at that point you need to pick a narrator, but in almost all cases if you're choosing 1st person or tight 3rd you're necessarily narrowing the POV, because unless it's a found footage canon the camera (or the audience, if it's live theatre or something) can see things that the individual characters can't. That's true even in something like Trainspotting where there's a strong narrative voice and it's very tight 3rd/a sort of pseudo-1st person, and it's much more true of an ensemble show like JS&MN which is filmed in 3rd omniscient or a very loose 3rd.

If I wanted to write you something that actually matched the tone of miniseries canon I'd have to do a very loose third or third omniscient,

...no? Do you think that because there's a camera, all live action canons must be filmed from very loose third or third omniscient to match the "tone"? You were right when you said above that live action doesn't have a tight third POV, but there's a big difference between tone and POV! "Tight third" is not a tone. These things are on different axes.

You seem to be trying to make a direct translation of the idea of POV between two different media, and that just doesn't work, because they're different media.

Yeah, a lot of live action follows the characters' moods, so you can switch to a tight 3rd without changing the tone.

My point is that JS&MN, specifically, is not like this. It's a comedy of manners with wizards. For large parts of canon we're not meant to be feeling what the characters are feeling, we're meant to be a detached observer quietly laughing at their foibles. The miniseries changes some things, but not this; it basically mirrors the tone of the omniscient 3rd narration in the novel.

To capture that in a fic you'd either have to adopt 3rd omniscient yourself, in which case you can't write in OP's preferred fanficcy tight 3rd, or pick the POV of someone like Childermass who himself spends much of the story as a detached observer quietly laughing at the main characters' foibles.

(I've never thought about it before, but I wonder if that partially explains his popularity, along with Enzo Cilenti's unexpected hotness. People really dislike writing 3rd omniscient, and using Childermass is one of few ways to preserve the arch tone of canon in fic form if you're unwilling to do that.)

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