Animal companions

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

When writing an AU with daemons or other psychic animal companions, it is deeply creepy to use canon humans as said companions, especially when that's how they shuffle aside all the women.

I haven't in my latest reading found where all the black people end up, but that's the other thing that happens a lot.

Humans, especially those from minority groups, are not beasts of burden with their whole lives determined by their attachment to a particular white man.

Even if that would mean them being a snarky soundtrack in said white man's head, and even if the animal companion is taking that critical best friend role, it's just creepy to make them into non-humans.

There's been enough centuries of dogma suggesting women are a lower order of creation than men, don't go making your story say it again.



... to those with a different set of reading preferences I may seem to be going off on one rather randomly, but seriously, this happens every time.




It's also not the most interesting thing to do with it. You could start with the character you're giving a psychic other half and then do something like split out an aspect of their personality or make their companion mirror them in some way. That way they keep all their friends in human shapes, but you can use the psychic animal device to highlight and emphasise certain things about all of them.

High fantasy and mock medieval english

I did a degree in English with Cultural Studies, so now I have a lot of opinions on language use, for all the good that does. And this makes reading high fantasy… kind of painful, on occasion.

Everyone is trying to be Tolkien. But Tolkien had a background in language, and made particular choices from available English, for his audience and era. Language has moved on, and most of his imitators are just copying the bits that stuck out for them. It limits their palette rather badly.

English happens in different registers, different levels of formality and informality, different specialist vocabularies to do with subcultures or occupations. It can, through use of more latin or anglo saxon root words, slide between class backgrounds. It can sound formal and posh or formal and common. It can denote the difference in class or respectability between the speaker and the one spoken to. You can get a pretty good idea of where in a hierarchy people stand by who they feel they can talk down to and who they try to polish their vocabulary with. And this is without the subtleties of region or gaping great divisions between British and American usage.

When people try and write like high fantasy they tend to throw out the variations to do any of that. Everyone speaks with the same levels of formality, because everyone is straining to sound like the narrator in every other middling high fantasy.

This isn’t me trying to tell other people what talking proper sounds like. Every language use group puts together their own version of how to do English. That’s fine.

But if you’re writing, it takes a really fine hand to be able to do the whole breadth of emotion and characterisation in the register equivalent of a monotone. Modern English gives you options like public school boy, northern miner, surfer dude. They'll all talk different to their mum and their mates and their boss or employer. If you can't vary your characters enough to get similar range, how distinctive can you make them? If everyone talks the same, all the time, with everyone else, you’ve dropped more than half the toolkit.

To put it another way, very few characters know they’re in high fantasy. A noble or king speaking in the throne room may well aim to communicate with posterity and foreign dignitaries, and hence may well polish things up to that particularly ponderous note. But most people, most of the time, are going to think they’re down the pub, or on a road trip, or heading to the shops. They just aren’t going to use the same vocabulary.

Everyone tries to write kings and courts like Shakespeare, but when he did it the nobles talked posher than the commoners, and most of them used dick jokes.

Liven things up a little.

(no subject)

how is this fic 30K words of two characters standing vaguely near each other while their friends tell them they should be in love?
in the middle they go on a journey together, off screen, and this is apparently where they spent enough time together to start even liking each other, but the fic doesn't seem to find this important enough to watch?
I mean, it's not even that it's a gen fic, it doesn't spend any time watching the plot either, huge important things happen and we find out when someone rushes in to the hospital room or meeting room or hotel room to tell someone else about them.
also there was one fight.
just the one.
which didn't last very long on account of passing out of nearly dead.
so it's not an action story neither.
and now there's declarations of love and next there will be sex?

it's like the whole 30K just kind of hung around back stage telling us about what was going on, and now there will be porn. But it's not a PWP either, because that's far too much blushing and matchmaking conversations for a PWP.

I want to hit the whole thing with the magic show not tell stick and, like, invert the story, so it follows completely different characters around for half the time and completely different scenes for the other half.

Bring the reader along for the ride

so if you're writing a romance, you want the reader to fall in love along with the character.

show us this character through their lovers eyes. ( Read more... )

If I'm sitting down to read tens of thousands of words about a couple of fanfic characters, then yes, I'm already kind of enamoured of them. But I want the story to show me a new angle on why, illuminated by this particular author. To do that, they have to show me these people through eyes that are falling in love with them all over again.

do that and it's golden.