![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The problem with reporting on Dragon*Con is that there's just so much to cover.
Do I talk about the two-day Writing Critique Workshop I did? Do I talk about the cosplaying? Do I talk about the people I met and caught up with and had fun with over the course of the week?
Do I talk about all of it?
I guess all of it is probably the best option. There's a lot to unpack at any rate.
We'll start with the Writing Critique Workshop, which was run by Jody Lynn Nye and was very valuable for me in terms of realising just how far along my writing is and how I can improve it.
I can write. This shouldn't be a revelation, but it kind of is.
In fandom, one is accustomed to a wide range of writing skills. Some people are really good, some people are terrible. Some people have good stories to tell but their style doesn't gel with me. Some people have a reading style I can really get behind, but their stories are not my thing at all.
But the most difficult and delicate things that usually have to take place in professional, original fiction - characterisation and setting - are things that the fanfic writer can skimp on a little. You can float, coast, cruise, safe in the knowledge that the characters you're writing have baselines and you don't have to define them.
Unless you're like me and you like the characters who don't get a baseline drawn for them, so you have to develop them yourself.
The workshop consisted of 20 students, each of whom submitted an excerpt of a story up to 7K, along with a synopsis if the story was not complete in the excerpt. Our 'homework' for the workshop was to read through the excerpts, critique them, and give our critiques in the workshop.
Reading through the excerpts was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. This is partly because I was doing it right up until the day we went into the workshop (I kept putting it off) and then I had to rush job it.
There were writers who had a good style - readable, interesting turns of phrase and ways of characterising things - but who didn't have a grip on characterisation. There were writers who you got the sense they had a really good picture of what was going on - but it was all in their head, and their writing style failed to convey that. And there were writers who clearly didn't know what they were writing and didn't have the skill to portray it and...
Yeah.
The memorable ones (and not in the good way) were:
The character who sat in an empty medical reception room for 40 minutes with his cat in a carrier beside him, and didn't do anything. He didn't call out, he didn't go exploring, he didn't walk about. He didn't even look at anything in the room, study a poster or a plant, poke around behind the desk. At that point, I declared the guy to have the personality of tofu and the only reason I kept reading was because I had to critique the story. This was known as 'the line of death' - someone else's term - a.k.a. "the line after which I wouldn't have continued reading the story".
In addition to which, the character came off as a psychopath. He came off as having no feelings and didn't show himself to be very likeable. And when your character has a cat and is indifferent to the prospect of its death when you both go into cryofreeze...yeah, he's not going to appeal to anyone with any kind of affinity or fondness for pets. So, psychopath. And possibly borderline creeper, since the adolescent girl who's playing around his place in his flashbacks ends up being his romantic interest by the end of the story. (I think she'd grown up by the time they hooked up, but still; hallmarks of creeper.)
When you looked at the guy who'd written all this, it became kind of clear why the character was the way he was. The writer was white, male, clean-cut, and just a touch on the socially clueless side.
The other particularly memorable one was a story where the author had a really good style...but I couldn't like the protag. A adolescent who creates a danger to her fellow students the first time she tries out her powers, turns out to be more powerful than all the people who are going to teach her, and then basically tells the school where she's supposed to be taught and trained that they're idiots because she has a different belief system to them. Unintentionally unlikeable protag - but she was forgiven everything by the narrative because she was supposed to be SPESHUL.
That one was frustrating, because the writing was really good. But the character sucked and was the epitome of the whiny, self-involved adolescent.
There was the story where it felt like the author was doing the Oppression Pile-Up to make us feel sympathy for the character (but the character mostly whined about how Everybody Hatez Her).
There was the Merlin legend where it felt like the author had a whole canon behind the scenes but was trying to fit so much into the action that I couldn't brain.
There was the guy who was trying to write a story about "Jesus and the Three Days In Hell" and thought he could sell it. (Yeah, nope, buddy.)
My story got taken pretty well. Mostly people wanted to know more and had a few questions about the world. Jody (Lynn Nye) suggested that it needed to start later - that I'd wasted about 1000 words on the protag running across a stretch of land that gave nothing to the story - totally true. And my synopsis read more like market copy than synopsis. So tightening, rewriting the start, streamlining it a lot more. I think it helps that it's about 8 years old by now and complete at Novella length (20K) and I've never done anything with it. I never knew what to do with it before. I guess I have to find something to do with it now.
And write the next complete story. When I get through the stuff presently on my plate. To which I've just added an![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
avengersfest pinch hit. On a really crazily busy week.
But I has a bunny!
Do I talk about the two-day Writing Critique Workshop I did? Do I talk about the cosplaying? Do I talk about the people I met and caught up with and had fun with over the course of the week?
Do I talk about all of it?
I guess all of it is probably the best option. There's a lot to unpack at any rate.
We'll start with the Writing Critique Workshop, which was run by Jody Lynn Nye and was very valuable for me in terms of realising just how far along my writing is and how I can improve it.
I can write. This shouldn't be a revelation, but it kind of is.
In fandom, one is accustomed to a wide range of writing skills. Some people are really good, some people are terrible. Some people have good stories to tell but their style doesn't gel with me. Some people have a reading style I can really get behind, but their stories are not my thing at all.
But the most difficult and delicate things that usually have to take place in professional, original fiction - characterisation and setting - are things that the fanfic writer can skimp on a little. You can float, coast, cruise, safe in the knowledge that the characters you're writing have baselines and you don't have to define them.
Unless you're like me and you like the characters who don't get a baseline drawn for them, so you have to develop them yourself.
The workshop consisted of 20 students, each of whom submitted an excerpt of a story up to 7K, along with a synopsis if the story was not complete in the excerpt. Our 'homework' for the workshop was to read through the excerpts, critique them, and give our critiques in the workshop.
Reading through the excerpts was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. This is partly because I was doing it right up until the day we went into the workshop (I kept putting it off) and then I had to rush job it.
There were writers who had a good style - readable, interesting turns of phrase and ways of characterising things - but who didn't have a grip on characterisation. There were writers who you got the sense they had a really good picture of what was going on - but it was all in their head, and their writing style failed to convey that. And there were writers who clearly didn't know what they were writing and didn't have the skill to portray it and...
Yeah.
The memorable ones (and not in the good way) were:
The character who sat in an empty medical reception room for 40 minutes with his cat in a carrier beside him, and didn't do anything. He didn't call out, he didn't go exploring, he didn't walk about. He didn't even look at anything in the room, study a poster or a plant, poke around behind the desk. At that point, I declared the guy to have the personality of tofu and the only reason I kept reading was because I had to critique the story. This was known as 'the line of death' - someone else's term - a.k.a. "the line after which I wouldn't have continued reading the story".
In addition to which, the character came off as a psychopath. He came off as having no feelings and didn't show himself to be very likeable. And when your character has a cat and is indifferent to the prospect of its death when you both go into cryofreeze...yeah, he's not going to appeal to anyone with any kind of affinity or fondness for pets. So, psychopath. And possibly borderline creeper, since the adolescent girl who's playing around his place in his flashbacks ends up being his romantic interest by the end of the story. (I think she'd grown up by the time they hooked up, but still; hallmarks of creeper.)
When you looked at the guy who'd written all this, it became kind of clear why the character was the way he was. The writer was white, male, clean-cut, and just a touch on the socially clueless side.
The other particularly memorable one was a story where the author had a really good style...but I couldn't like the protag. A adolescent who creates a danger to her fellow students the first time she tries out her powers, turns out to be more powerful than all the people who are going to teach her, and then basically tells the school where she's supposed to be taught and trained that they're idiots because she has a different belief system to them. Unintentionally unlikeable protag - but she was forgiven everything by the narrative because she was supposed to be SPESHUL.
That one was frustrating, because the writing was really good. But the character sucked and was the epitome of the whiny, self-involved adolescent.
There was the story where it felt like the author was doing the Oppression Pile-Up to make us feel sympathy for the character (but the character mostly whined about how Everybody Hatez Her).
There was the Merlin legend where it felt like the author had a whole canon behind the scenes but was trying to fit so much into the action that I couldn't brain.
There was the guy who was trying to write a story about "Jesus and the Three Days In Hell" and thought he could sell it. (Yeah, nope, buddy.)
My story got taken pretty well. Mostly people wanted to know more and had a few questions about the world. Jody (Lynn Nye) suggested that it needed to start later - that I'd wasted about 1000 words on the protag running across a stretch of land that gave nothing to the story - totally true. And my synopsis read more like market copy than synopsis. So tightening, rewriting the start, streamlining it a lot more. I think it helps that it's about 8 years old by now and complete at Novella length (20K) and I've never done anything with it. I never knew what to do with it before. I guess I have to find something to do with it now.
And write the next complete story. When I get through the stuff presently on my plate. To which I've just added an
avengersfest pinch hit. On a really crazily busy week.But I has a bunny!
Tags:
no subject