beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Been thinking about fanfic posting best practice and how it changes in relation to the tech tools available.

Posting in parts:
(wherein I discover how it is like both television and sonnets, and how those things are like each other)
( Read more... )

... also, this wasn't quite what I set out to write.
I was going to be dry and technical about labelling.

The header on fic is something between those FBI warnings at the front of movies and the blurb on the back of books. And I guess it's another fixed form: you get a set number of lines, dealing with particular concerns in set order. Usually not so very poetic in effect though.
On mailing lists the header went in the part 0. Which avoided the arguments where some people wanted it and some people didn't - don't want to read it, just don't read 0/10.

... I'm getting a sudden urge to write a disclaimer/warnings/rating sonnet. Oh *dear*.
... maybe just a haiku?
... teach was write, poetry makes you mad...

LJ has a handy dandy tool called lj-cut that lets you stick stuff not everyone will want to read behind a link. But writers have to put enough outside the cut to get people to click on it. ( Read more... )
If the Subject line on LJ were used like the Title on mailing lists, more stuff could go under the cut. Maybe.

As it is the header goes outside the cut pretty much everywhere, giving us all the data we need to choose to read or not read. Which is cool, in it's way, but when people are xposting to half a dozen communities at once then it do get a tad bit repetitive. Also if they're not putting it in big letters in the title line it takes actually reading the body of the post to find out if it's 1/10 posted ten times or 1/10 thru 10/10 completely posted.

Not cool, dude! I might not have my glasses on!

... aaaaand we're back to how much work is reasonable to ask the writer to do to save me time.

The way I figure it with the memory-title issue is if one cut-n-paste by the author can save potentially a thousand cut-n-pastes (if it's memoried by everyone on a large community), then that small courtesy would be quite a nice gesture.

The don't-make-me-read issues are more personal. Though the accessibility issues involved in that make it a disability Thing too. Bit sideways of what I set out to write though.

What else... oh yeah, the 1/10
This apparently takes a bit of explaining to look logical.
( Read more... )
I kind of thought all that was, you know, logic and obvious, but I've seen someone argue about it and decide to do it their way instead. I always hate rules I don't know the reasons for, so I thought I'd explain this isn't a Rule, it's a Logic.

The thing with LJ is, we're all writing our own thing here. When we post to communities it's like old style mailing lists in that there's a lot of people that we're joining and they probably have some rules they'd like us to fit in with. But when we post on our own journals there's no particular requirements whatsoever. We're absolutely free to speak here, and nobody can kick us off LJ for doing it (unless we violate the terms of service, of course). But that means people who don't like the way other people are doing things can do their own thing and then say, being perfectly reasonable, that nobody else can tell them what to do. Which, true.

But the conventions have evolved as a way of conveying the information most likely to match story with reader in the least possible space, and they've been knocked about by quite a few years of use now, and do in fact seem pretty logical when you poke them. So I like them.


... what else... ah, last thing: tags

LJ and teh internets have these new handy little features called tags.
They're nifty. I like them.
I'd like them more if the things I care about enough to write about most didn't get lost when they went over some dumb limit (and without a word to me), but in general, tags are made of win.

But there's a big difference between LJ, where writers tag their own posts, and del.icio.us or however you spell it, where people collecting pages make the tags. LJ encourages people to make rules about tags that they want to impose on others. Which... can come out a bit obnoxious. Once again, more helpful to explain the Logic than to make it look like a Rule.
( Read more... ) Yet apparently some people are feeling pressured or even told off because of their tagging habits. Which is a reader problem - don't scare off the writers! Never enough fic to go around!

Though, natch, trolls are always with us, loud people in crowds also, and the old misreading problem is unlikely to go away any time soon. The usual social balance - trying not to be offended and not to offend.

... I do my best, but some days? Not so very much with the balance.



All that? Up there?
Not exactly original to me.
It's talking about conventions, so if it *were* original to me, bit of a problem.
But I thought putting it all in one place might be useful.
Putting it all in *this* place might be *less* useful, since my friends list pretty much do things the way I like already, but I thought I'd run it past y'all before I had a think about where else it might be useful to put it.

If there's other places I should link to like for references, like classic how-tos on the web that could have saved me half an hour, or other LJ posts or a community that makes it especially clear in the userinfo, that would be useful stuff to go in comments too.

I was reading something someone said about summaries on fic, and how frequently they are either trying to be clever and not telling you much, or too generic and short and not telling you much.

Which... yeah. I really don't like writing them for mine. The story already has the fewest words that tell that story... well, as close to it as I can stand to cut it down to. How to retell it really short? It ends up all flat and wonky. So mine come out kind of lame.

In my comment I said I'd never read a "How to write a summary"
so then I went to look for such a thing.

They seem to be mostly for students, and not always about fiction.

But they made me think about how we fic writers are using the word.

This one reckons that a summary should include
who the main characters are
where and when the events of the story take place
and
the main events of the story in the order in which they occurred.

so a summary like that shrinks the whole story down and tells what is in it.
prove you've read the book sort of summary.

This one is talking about summary lines for web pages. Useful. Has examples of good and bad lines at the end.
Says The lead sentence in a newspaper story is a good example
The lead sums up the story. It tells you what is covered in the story, giving you the basic information and letting you know what you can expect to find if you read further.
and some reasons for the bad versions are
it's a tease
Not concise enough, and the conclusion is not spelled out
Not the main point


But for fanfic, we are trying to tease, in order to avoid spoiling. Not newspaper leads, instead mostly blurbs. The bits that go on the back of the book to try and get you to open the cover. Cannot say all the events, for then that would give away the ending.


This one says
Refer to the central and main ideas of the original piece.
Read with who, what, when, where, why and how questions in mind.

For a start, figuring out what the main ideas were isn't always so easy. But also, if the main idea emerges as we go along, if the point of it is how things end rather than how they begin, or if the pov character doesn't really know what is going on until well into the story, how much belongs in the summary?


RFJ 1 Magician/Bateleur is, ( Read more... )
The interaction between pairing labels, attracting an audience, and subgenres, all quite complicated even before we get to the summary.

Is a summary for archiving for a different purpose than a summary for first post to LJ? I mean, if you want new readers, you want to make it intriguing without giving the end away. If you want to make it easy for repeat readers to find, you need to give them memorable keywords that are unique to that fic. Either way, saying what kind of boxes the story goes in pulls in the casual reader, the ones in the mood for hurt/comfort with some plot and moral issues, for example.



I have no conclusions.

Except maybe I need to try a different search, because 'summary' and 'blurb' may require different skills.

pet peeve of the day - people misusing the 'Part 1/10' label.

Fic used to be posted to mailing lists. Mail programs were unreliable, and variously so, meaning you could post a bunch of parts and different people would lack different parts. Solution? Label them all with numbers.

Labelling something 'Part 1/10' gives the reader the information that there are precisely ten parts of this fic, ten seperate posts, and they are looking at one of them. If they want the whole thing, they need to go find another 9.
(Unless the list uses a part 0. 0/10 means you don't have to read it to read the whole story. Its where they hide the header information.)

If someone then posts parts 8a and 8b, the system breaks. Because the existence of 8a implies 8b, and 8b implies 8a, but they say nothing about 8c through 8z, and the /10 bit no longer works because you actually need to hunt down at least 11 parts to have the whole thing.

Internet 'Part' headers are *not* chapters. They have a practical purpose. Chapters are chopped up in the places story and drama say they should be. Internet parts are chopped up in the places dictated by software limitations, or mailing list conventions, or size convenience. If there's a character limit or a size limit on what files you can send, that makes 1 part. (There are elegant ways to divide parts up. Having one huge post and one with just the famous last words works less well. But thats content, not mechanics.)

And writing /10 means you have chopped up your story, which already exists, and in front of you there are 10 parts. It doesn't mean you predict there will be 10 parts when you finish writing it. That is what /? is for, when you don't know.


The thing about the internet is that it is fluid, constantly changing, linking in assorted arrangements, with things reposted in different shapes in different places. Headers have evolved to deal with that. Breaking what they're meant for decreases their usefulness.

/cranky


In my head, there are Rules, and they make the world work. Unfortunately everyone else has Rules that are different.

Which, in my more philosophical moments, I see as positive diversity. Unless its rules like 'walk down one side of the corridor only and not in a big line with all your mates like a rugby scrum'. Positive diversity leaves room for more diversity.

And not so much when its rules like 'this word means this thing', because those rules are the only way people communicate at all, due to the lack of mind reading function.

Communication rules are really useful. When shared.