Neil wrote:
What grates me most in fanfic dialogue is the way many writers try to capture the exact phrasing of lines with lots of superfluous italics and '...'s (forgotten the technical term for them), together with a liberal peppering of adverbs.
This may have something to do with the fact that writers of fanfic are 'translating' the stories about Our Heroes from one genre to another, from teleplay to prose. A play (in its written form) consists of nothing but dialogue and stage directions. The actors' performance may help us feel there's more to read between the lines.
I've done a lot of translating from English to my language and I know that the constructions of the original language often sneak into translation and make it sound 'unnatural'. Sometimes when I read fanfic I also feel the effects of 'translating'. The emphasis is on dialougue, there are, as you've noticed, 'stage directions' of how to phrase the lines, lots of details on what facial expression each of the characters should show while speaking, how and where he or she moves, etc. IOW, I think many writers imagine they're creating a 'TV episode', not writing a story.
Many writers are skillful in imitating the 'spoken voice' of the main characters, both in terms of the patterns of speech and in terms of what sort of statements we expect them to make. Much greater problem, however, is to present their 'inner voice'. There we move from the realm of imitating the series into the realm of interpretation. For instance, Blake's inner voice might display more uncertainty, Avon's more warmth, Vila's more intelligence, than their 'outer voices' - depending on the author's interpretation of their characters.
I think this is where a number of authors fail. They hope that, if their characters speak the given lines in a certain way, accompanied with certain bodily movements, this will produce the same effect as in a screened episode, with all the implicit depth. It is difficult to adapt to a different genre. A short story has its own advantages over a play, which ought to be used, but are often neglected. Stream-of-consciousness, the moments when a character is alone and does nothing much in the outer world, but very much happens within. Not to mention the other elements - I was just concerned with the characters here.
N.
From: Natasa Tucev tucev@tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu
I've done a lot of translating from English to my language and I know that the constructions of the original language often sneak into translation
and
make it sound 'unnatural'.
Because in some languages verbs at the end of the sentence must often go.
IOW, I think many writers imagine they're creating a 'TV episode', not writing a story.
Sometimes this can be deliberate - 'Hunter' was written as a 'missing episode', and I tried to time it to about 50 minutes of screen time. None of my other stories were written in that way, and most fanfic doesn't work like that either, although as you say, some writers seem to be aspiring to the feel of a broadcast.
One thing that leaps out at me from the scripts, now I've had a chance to look at them, is how short most of the lines of dialogue are. I haven't done any statistical research on this, but I wouldn't mind betting that if you calculated an average number of words per speech for a script and did the same for a story, the story would come out higher. Perhaps much higher (depending on the author, probably). Characters in fanfic say a lot more, use longer sentences, are generally more 'wordy', or at least that's the impression I get.
It might also be interesting to compare relative number of lines per character, relative share between regulars and oc's, maybe other things, but it would involve a lot of hard work and might not reveal anything meaningful at the end of it.
Many writers are skillful in imitating the 'spoken voice' of the main characters, both in terms of the patterns of speech and in terms of what sort of statements we expect them to make. Much greater problem, however,
is
to present their 'inner voice'.
This is possibly one of the most insightful comments on fanfic I have ever seen. And like most such things, it's strikingly obvious once revealed. Yes, this is perhaps where many writers fall down. There is, of course, the problem that the inner voice they give a character might be true for the writer and for some readers, whilst sounding utterly false for other readers.
What I find generally irritating is that the regular characters (especially, but oc's often too) are often nowhere near 'tough' enough. I'm wary of saying this because I don't want to sound like I'm advocating some kind of macho manifesto, but they are revolutionary fanatics and/or criminals, habitually doing dangerous things, seeing unpleasant sights, forced into making snap decisions that might very well lead to someone else's death at the expense of their own. And in a lot of fanfic this doesn't come across - their 'inner voices' sound too 'soft' (another word I'm very uneasy about using), too preoccupied with 'trivial' things (also a dangerous label), too concerned with the fragility of their relationships with one another. This, to me, is the hidden hand of Mary Sue, acting within the characters themselves.
A lot of this may be because many writers are concerned only with the characters, not with the milieu. They are not interested in action/adventure plots (a lot of fanfic might be deliberately repudiating the action/adventure ethos and its tropes, which is why the characters come across the way they do), and not particularly interested in science fiction either. It was a real culture shock to me, when I first entered fandom about 9 years ago, to find that an awful lot of fans weren't into SF as such. I'd be surprised if this didn't affect the way they write the characters.
Neil
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Natasa Tucev -
Neil Faulkner