You call that a paragraph, maggot?
Jan. 5th, 2003 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bktheirregularYeah, yeah, I know that livejournal entries are supposed to be more often than every three weeks. Well, apologies to EM.TV, Henson, Inc., and the Farscape crew, but sometimes dren happens.
Note that I am not apologizing to the Sci-Fi Channel. Yo, Sci-Fi guys, my name's Bruce, I'm preparing to become a lawyer, and I am Farscape.
Ahem. And now for something completely different.
Bad fic. You know what it is when you see it; sometimes you know it's gonna be a stink bomb from the first word of the first line. Sometimes you look at a fic, thinking, "hey, this is a cool concept!", hoping for the reward of fanfic readers: finding a gem that will keep you absorbed and reading until an absolutely unholy hour of the night.
And then you get about six paragraphs in, you see something that your brain just can't manage, and all of a sudden you're clawing for your Walkman, cranking up the first station you can find, and you don't even care that they're playing Britney Spears because you need to get that fic OUT OF YOUR HEAD!
It happens. I've got a soft spot for crossovers, myself; if I see two worlds collide, I can't help but wonder how it comes out. I found the Buffy fandom through a crossover with The X-Files, and I didn't regret it.
So I looked around, found something on the Heliopolis archive for Stargate SG-1. It was a crossover between SG-1 and Buffy. Could be interesting, I thought.
Until I read about Sam Carter in her lab, explaining how she was a "former slayer".
Um, excuse me, one Slayer dies, the next one's called, HELLO?
I didn't progress past that line in the fic. Incidentally, that's how "The Scarab" got started; I was just so cheesed off that they wasted the concept. I mean, come on, even I could come up with something better than that!
Well, it wasn't that simple, and a year later I'm still working on it, but hopefully I've got a half-decent concept.
You tell me.
So. Poor concept can kill a fic.
So can poor execution. There was another Buffy/Stargate crossover, dealing with the alien primitive Unas showing up on Earth, but that died in my head because the grammar and formatting made it a chore to read. That plus a reliance on coincidence to bring the two canons together. It might be a good fic, all told; I don't know. I never made it through.
And then ... and then, there are the fics where absolutely *everything* is done wrong. Someone writing in one continuous paragraph, writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that is painful to even look at, let alone try to read. Then you begin to separate out the sentences, mentally insert paragraph breaks, and the writing is so insipid that you can't process it. And then you try to decipher it in your own mind, and you realize that beneath the impossible-to-read grammar, under the hurts-to-think-about-it style, lies a concept so ... idiotic? ... that the realization that you just wasted all that effort makes you run out into the street, screaming, hollering, shoot me! torture me! make me watch the Nets!
Then you realize that the New Jersey Nets are a good team, which means the Apocalypse must be nigh, so you'd better get your head together fast.
That was me yesterday, to a degree. Ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
celli; she saw it.
They have writing classes, if you look in your local paper's advertising section. There are places that teach people to write. And there are some people out there writing who desparately need to learn how to write. I'm not talking about people who write for themselves; I mean people who write things and put them out on the Internet, to scar the brains of the unsuspecting.
What these people need is a sort of writing boot camp. I don't mean something to turn them into a Faulkner or a Hemingway; no, I mean these people need to be taught how to write dialogue, and how to use paragraphs.
They need to be taught. By drill sergeants if necessary. As in, "You call that a paragraph? I've seen better paragraphs in Marmaduke, maggot!" Or "Pair up your quote marks! I see one more hanging quote mark, you're gonna be copying out Hamlet's soliloquy until your eyeballs bleed!"
Call your Senators and Congresspersons. Make the Writing Boot Camp a reality. These hacks are a menace to the sanity of the entire writing community.
Note that I am not apologizing to the Sci-Fi Channel. Yo, Sci-Fi guys, my name's Bruce, I'm preparing to become a lawyer, and I am Farscape.
Ahem. And now for something completely different.
Bad fic. You know what it is when you see it; sometimes you know it's gonna be a stink bomb from the first word of the first line. Sometimes you look at a fic, thinking, "hey, this is a cool concept!", hoping for the reward of fanfic readers: finding a gem that will keep you absorbed and reading until an absolutely unholy hour of the night.
And then you get about six paragraphs in, you see something that your brain just can't manage, and all of a sudden you're clawing for your Walkman, cranking up the first station you can find, and you don't even care that they're playing Britney Spears because you need to get that fic OUT OF YOUR HEAD!
It happens. I've got a soft spot for crossovers, myself; if I see two worlds collide, I can't help but wonder how it comes out. I found the Buffy fandom through a crossover with The X-Files, and I didn't regret it.
So I looked around, found something on the Heliopolis archive for Stargate SG-1. It was a crossover between SG-1 and Buffy. Could be interesting, I thought.
Until I read about Sam Carter in her lab, explaining how she was a "former slayer".
Um, excuse me, one Slayer dies, the next one's called, HELLO?
I didn't progress past that line in the fic. Incidentally, that's how "The Scarab" got started; I was just so cheesed off that they wasted the concept. I mean, come on, even I could come up with something better than that!
Well, it wasn't that simple, and a year later I'm still working on it, but hopefully I've got a half-decent concept.
You tell me.
So. Poor concept can kill a fic.
So can poor execution. There was another Buffy/Stargate crossover, dealing with the alien primitive Unas showing up on Earth, but that died in my head because the grammar and formatting made it a chore to read. That plus a reliance on coincidence to bring the two canons together. It might be a good fic, all told; I don't know. I never made it through.
And then ... and then, there are the fics where absolutely *everything* is done wrong. Someone writing in one continuous paragraph, writing in a stream-of-consciousness style that is painful to even look at, let alone try to read. Then you begin to separate out the sentences, mentally insert paragraph breaks, and the writing is so insipid that you can't process it. And then you try to decipher it in your own mind, and you realize that beneath the impossible-to-read grammar, under the hurts-to-think-about-it style, lies a concept so ... idiotic? ... that the realization that you just wasted all that effort makes you run out into the street, screaming, hollering, shoot me! torture me! make me watch the Nets!
Then you realize that the New Jersey Nets are a good team, which means the Apocalypse must be nigh, so you'd better get your head together fast.
That was me yesterday, to a degree. Ask
celli; she saw it.They have writing classes, if you look in your local paper's advertising section. There are places that teach people to write. And there are some people out there writing who desparately need to learn how to write. I'm not talking about people who write for themselves; I mean people who write things and put them out on the Internet, to scar the brains of the unsuspecting.
What these people need is a sort of writing boot camp. I don't mean something to turn them into a Faulkner or a Hemingway; no, I mean these people need to be taught how to write dialogue, and how to use paragraphs.
They need to be taught. By drill sergeants if necessary. As in, "You call that a paragraph? I've seen better paragraphs in Marmaduke, maggot!" Or "Pair up your quote marks! I see one more hanging quote mark, you're gonna be copying out Hamlet's soliloquy until your eyeballs bleed!"
Call your Senators and Congresspersons. Make the Writing Boot Camp a reality. These hacks are a menace to the sanity of the entire writing community.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Word. Dude. Etcetera.
Date: 2003-01-17 10:48 am (UTC)Damn straight. Just reading the summaries for some of these can make you go blind, especially if you read the Bad Fic! recs link that Celli's got off her lj. Dear lord. I know we should encourage small children to be creative... but why must their parents allow them internet access to share their attempts with the world? Why, God, why?
And if they're not small children, they should either be sentenced to Writer's Camp, or, or, I dunno. I want to say shot, but that doesn't seem cruel enough.
Ha! Forced to read fic in a medium they don't love, without spellcheck, off a black page with green writing, pop-up ads, bad sound effects, and either bad romantic sap ("Ooo, Angel, I wuvvvv you") or melodrama ("Save me, Bubbles!" "I can't, Buttercup! Waahhhh!" *sniff*).
AHem. Sorry 'bout that.
ANYWAY. Just wanted to say here that I do love your Buffy/Stargate fic, so finish it, or post s'more, or something, soon please? I'm a big crossover addict myself (I'm assuming you've read "Witness" if you were in X-Files fandom) and it's the easiest thing in the world to screw up, imo. And the simplest to *fix*, which is what makes me insane when they don't. Yours, on the other hand, manages to change POVs while keeping everyone in character, and impart the necessary info at a pace and in a style consistent with the realities of both shows and the laws of common sense.
Oh, and I really really love your two Firefly recs too. THat's a heckuva lot saner and more civilized take on Inara's job than many stories I've had the misfortune to run across. And the Jayne voice in his story is a riot. Heh. Yes, you just squirm, ape-boy. You were very naughty. Nervously wondering which one of 'em is gonna kill you first is justified payback!
:>
Chris
Nine-to-five is the enemy of good fic, I think.
Date: 2003-01-17 02:46 pm (UTC)Oh, you forgot one form of torture for the worst of the writers: make them read it in one of those impossible-to-read fonts, like one of those Gothic variations.
The Buffy/Stargate fic is chugging along, as much as possible when my time is chewed up by a forty-hour-a-week mind-numbing job plus taking an intensive bar review course (it's like the Aurora Chair, only boring).
Don't worry, though; the next part will be coming very soon. With luck. I hope.
:) (crossing fingers)
Bruce