For some reason I cannot manage to put 'said' in my fics that are in 1st person.Originally Posted by Kotonoha
I tried once, it came out feeling off.
For some reason I cannot manage to put 'said' in my fics that are in 1st person.
I tried once, it came out feeling off.
It's actually all the rage now in writing advise to not include "he said/she said" sort of specifiers. I usually want to smash the face in of whoever started that because I honestly can't read more than three lines of back-and-forth dialogue without a signifier and keep track of who the hell is actually talking.
Localizationing stuff
That's it.
Ah, well, there's still snarkiness in there. I actually used that one before obtaining Fate/stay Night.
I don't mind people not using "he said/she said" if characters are fleshed out enough for me to figure out who's saying what just by their manner of speech, but it's a pain otherwise. I also get tired of people who do use "he said/she said" but nothing BUT the word "said." Get SOME diversity. I'm not asking for you to bust out the thesaurus, but when I've seen the word "said" 10 times in the past 30 seconds it's a little irksome.
Tred the Fine line.
Last edited by 2ndsly; September 25th, 2011 at 11:56 PM. Reason: spelleng arrors
Especially when they don't separate individual speakers into different paragraphs.
*shudders*
Unfortunately, there's a slippery slope one faces with that. You start replacing "said" with other words, and then it gets too purple prose-y. Most writing advice there is to keep with "said." On the other hand, most writing advice doesn't want you to just sit there spewing dialogue back and forth. People are dynamic and tend to do things when talking, even if they're little. Speaking stone statues, we are not. So just having "said" is bad when you could be describing action, describing feelings, describing anything else other than the act of speaking.
Last edited by Arashi_Leonhart; September 26th, 2011 at 12:07 AM. Reason: Grammar after writing fics goes to shiiiiiit
Localizationing stuff
I agree. There's probably a balance SOMEWHERE, but this is fanfiction we're talking about, I'm not expecting literary perfection, which is why I never bring it up when it bothers me, but this is the "Things that annoy you in fanfiction" thread, so I threw it out there.
I apologize. It's a phobia of mine that I'm trying to cure.
As a novice writer myself, I feel proud to say I know or have avoided most of these annoyances (and hopefully will avoid them for the future too).
1. One thing I really hate is the feeling I'm retreading Fate/UBW with absolutely no change despite something happening in the beginning. For those you who know TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStationsOfTheCanon
Essentially, if I'm reading you're story then there better be SOMETHING different from the original VN to keep my interest or else I'll feel like I'm going through someone's summary of F/SN.
2. The second thing I hate is actually the opposite of Elf's annoyance. I sometime read some non-FSN writing and this one writer I follow basically enjoys exposition and "tell, dont show" dialogue that sometimes makes me want to shotgun a puppy. Basically, he often puts in a half page of exposition I literally skip and miss absolutely nothing from doing so. I suppose its a combination of issues from "Show, dont tell" and useless "info dump".
As a question on writing back to the BL community: What's most people's opinion on taking liberties with canon? I'm not talking about the just plain WRONG cases that break canon like a think piece of plaster but rather the borderline cases. I'm going to use GB's HoS as an example since people on BL seem to know it. To be frank, it shouldn't have been possible for Louise to summon Shirou as a Servant. It requires a Holy Grail and a summoning ritual (though that's technically not always required). Not to mention that technically Shirou should have been literally invincible against all attacks except magic. However, if he followed it like that then there would have been no story at all.
Another example are those time travel fics where Shirou or Rin go back to the beginning of the war. It's a grey area but technically not possible without some stretching of rules.
Shirou keeps insisting the terminology "Servant" in that, but really, he's just regarding it with things that he knows. How Louise summons people from a modern-day world is exactly the same as it appears in HoS as it is in Zero no Tsukaima, so really there isn't a problem. Including the fact that, as Shirou points out later on, he's a flesh and blood live human, not a dead Heroic Spirit--which is what the Grail summons.
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Well, exposition which completely stops the plot for multiple pages happens in Nasus writing quite a lot. Infodumping is unavoidable if you want to write something Nasuverse-y, because the concepts mostly are far too complicated to just be woven into the narrative.
[04:55] Lianru: i3uster is actuallly quite cute
Ahh. I should have perhaps clarified a little. Its perfectly fine if its a Nasuverse info dump. I specifically recall Nasu's explanation of Gae Bolg's reversal of causality to be a "wtf that's awesome moment". What I look at, however, is more of a "dude, this is like the 4th time you've stated this information in almost the same format and it was redundant the first time you said it". He basically needs more brevity in his work.
well about the talk on the gae bolg:
the thrust/melee version does reverse casualty and the only way to defend it is either to have a hax defense(avalon, godhand) or to quickly get out of the range. its pretty much stated somewhere that archer jumps out of range in their fight is cause he knows about this.
the thrown one is pretty much similar to a nuke except rather than just a big boom, its a penetrating boom. archer's complete rho auius barely stopped it while an incomplete one of shirou stopped excalibur.
oh and its possible to get rid of characters without easily making the viewers anxious. just write it up with a valid reason like "shinji and sakura are at place X". and you can also add things to avoid making their fans angry like "sakura was already saved by shirou and co, and she isnt here cause she's going overseas or something to get away from things for awhile".
I know. This irks me too. Hell, I would need a reasoning of years or something very shocking to make a character change like that. In fact, in a table RPG I'm playing, my character was transformed into a girl for 7 years, and he/she still felt like a guy (and lately I managed to break the curse, fortunately). It was interesting when another character of the same race as mine, but "male" appeared and my character, in the Master's word, begun to feel attracted to him. It happened that, at the end, that character had the other part of the mask that cursed me, and it was a girl transformed into a guy. So we managed to break the curse.
IIRC, the side material says that Gae Bolg trust would fail to connect with the heart if it can't strike from the beggining, so I think that if Archer pulled Rho Aiass before Lancer use Gae Bolg, it would fail.
But in the Death Flight scene, he pulled the Aiass after Lancer used Gae Bolg so I think that Death Flight doesn't reverse the causality.
Another theory is that it always impacts the area Lancer was aiming, instead of the heart, because it's an anti-army NP.
Ugh, I hate it too when I can skip paragraphs (or sometimes, even a page or two) because it didn't add absolutely anything to the story except useless info dump that doesn't say anything new or interesting.
BTW, a question. What means TGing a character? Transgendering it? (not sure if I said it right)
Spoiler:
Yep.
This too.
I've read an awesome book about how to write Horror, and there's a whole chapter on dialogue. Even though it was for writing horror, there was a LOT of useful information there for writing other things. Anyway, one of the things the author of that chapter talked about when people write dialogue is people afraid of the word "said". A majority of beginning writers, myself included once upon a time, wanted to use stuff like "growled", "sneered", "sighed" etc.
Which the writer pointed out you really can't say anything while sighing. You can say something with a sigh, but you can't "sighing".
Also, when I see Wall-O-Text with no breaks or very few breaks I don't read.
on the whole gae bolg thing, this is from drinks and I cant independently verify it, so its a bit questionable, but apparently CM says there really isnt a sure hit/homing clause to death flight, its really more of just such a large blanket explosion it cant miss the target.
Well, it's not exactly hard to get hold of....
Of course.
Or, they could just give up and kill him, I suppose
Yeah, dialogue without a clear indication of who is actually talking is really annoying.
I think that the issue is that it often happens in Japanese stories, because it's usually obvious from the structure and formality of the sentence who is speaking, and some people seem to think that that should therefore translate over to English too....
To me, it depends. Breaches of canon which the author admits to and which are essential for the plot I'm usually OK with, as long as the characters are right (or, if they've changed, it is justified by their backstory), but gratuitous ignoring of canon for minor reasons or incorrect characterisation I just can't stand.
Well, personally I don't like that, although there are cases where it's justified and it's better than ignoring her entirely. Writing out a character who by rights probably should be there because you don't like them or can't be bothered to characterise them properly is just plain lazy, TBH.
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