Fanfic writing post from author Diane Duane

[roane]

I don't know if any of you may have seen this today on Tumblr, but author Diane Duane is a Sherlock fan and apparently a pretty avid reader of fanfic. She made a post called Johnlock fanfic: On Balloon Words, Idiom!cest, and the Building of Better Smut. Although she's writing specifically about Sherlock fic, I think a lot of what she has to say could apply to any fanfic, or really, any writing.

Heh, here she tackles one of my fanfic pet peeves:

When you’re in one character’s point of view in the middle of a descriptive scene, you can make a pretty strong case that the descriptors used for other characters the POV character is interacting with should be the POV character’s descriptors, not those you might associate with omniscient-narrator mode or some similar “uninflected” third-person writing voice.

This being the case: it would make me intensely happy (should anyone be interested in doing that) if people would please lose the continual use of epithets when writing from one primary character’s POV, especially in intimate circumstances. “The doctor.” “The Army doctor.” “The consulting detective.” And the ones that particularly get up my nose: “The taller man” / “the shorter man” / “the older man” / “the younger man” / etc. etc. ad nauseam.

Comments

[linaewen]

Yes, yes!! And epithets that refer to hair color!! :-D

Since I admire Diane Duane's work, I will now go read the article and see what she says about the things I do -- I may not refer to my characters by their hair color, but I'm sure I do other things that should be stopped immediately. ;-)