Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2007-05-30 03:07 am
tenlittlebullets) wrote2007-05-30 03:07 am
"I don't want any lunch."
Hahaha. My brother, who was always more of a sports person and not so much one for the written word, has shocked my socks off with an impressive demonstration that he has fully inherited the family bullshit genes. I have somehow been roped into helping him write an essay--it's a lot more fun when the assignment isn't yours--and the sheer amount of arrant nonsense we have cooked up in the name of interpreting poetry is staggering. Not only that, but the clunky prose he churned out in middle school has somehow morphed into USDA prime pretentious BS! Oh brother dearest, I'm so proud of you. The long sentences, the semicolons, the unnecessary flinging about of vocabulary, the vaguely supercilious tone... in function it lacks a certain eloquence, but in form it's bloody perfect.
In other news, I want porn. Porn I haven't read before. Porn that isn't mine. Preferably porn that involves Enjolras on top, because that's underrepresented and it really shouldn't be, but I'm not feeling terribly picky at the moment.
While I'm in an analytical frame of mind, I could write a mini-essay on the peculiar style common to certain fanfic, how its manic insistence on showing instead of telling leads to the cloaking of the point and the retreat into more and more obscure methods of "showing," how my mental need to verbalize and acknowledge the unspoken connections in my mind makes me really bad at writing in this style, and how my efforts to conform to it have pretty much destroyed my confidence in my ability to write... but it'd be tl;dr and nobody would read it, and honestly there are better ways for me to expend my energy. Like, say, finding other styles to write in and practicing with them. Or doing more historical research, in order to add artistic verisimilitude to what would otherwise be a bald and unconvincing narrative.
--actually, that's it. The showing-not-telling has gone so far, in the style I'm talking about, that the fic ceases to be a narrative and becomes an evocation of a particular moment, emotion, whatever. That's why I can only write shortfic: I'm always tempted to ape that style when I write fanfiction, and it's very hard to make stuff happen in prose like that. It doesn't move, it just... wallows. And I can't write like that for more than a thousand words or so.
I have to practice to get away from it. Now, if only I could muster up the determination to practice. XD
(There's another mini-essay brewing in my head about Hugo's decision to set the latter half of LM at the inception of the July monarchy, before the shit had had time to hit the fan on radicalism and socialism and other fun -isms, but even thinking about it makes my head hurt a little, so I'll just stop. right. there.)
Shit, I should go back to school. It's good for my brain.
In other news, I want porn. Porn I haven't read before. Porn that isn't mine. Preferably porn that involves Enjolras on top, because that's underrepresented and it really shouldn't be, but I'm not feeling terribly picky at the moment.
While I'm in an analytical frame of mind, I could write a mini-essay on the peculiar style common to certain fanfic, how its manic insistence on showing instead of telling leads to the cloaking of the point and the retreat into more and more obscure methods of "showing," how my mental need to verbalize and acknowledge the unspoken connections in my mind makes me really bad at writing in this style, and how my efforts to conform to it have pretty much destroyed my confidence in my ability to write... but it'd be tl;dr and nobody would read it, and honestly there are better ways for me to expend my energy. Like, say, finding other styles to write in and practicing with them. Or doing more historical research, in order to add artistic verisimilitude to what would otherwise be a bald and unconvincing narrative.
--actually, that's it. The showing-not-telling has gone so far, in the style I'm talking about, that the fic ceases to be a narrative and becomes an evocation of a particular moment, emotion, whatever. That's why I can only write shortfic: I'm always tempted to ape that style when I write fanfiction, and it's very hard to make stuff happen in prose like that. It doesn't move, it just... wallows. And I can't write like that for more than a thousand words or so.
I have to practice to get away from it. Now, if only I could muster up the determination to practice. XD
(There's another mini-essay brewing in my head about Hugo's decision to set the latter half of LM at the inception of the July monarchy, before the shit had had time to hit the fan on radicalism and socialism and other fun -isms, but even thinking about it makes my head hurt a little, so I'll just stop. right. there.)
Shit, I should go back to school. It's good for my brain.
no subject
I'm not sure how one would justify putting Enjolras on bottom...
no subject
And yet I appear to be one of exactly two people who have ever written him on top. WTF, fandom?!