Tavia wrote:

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.

Curiously enough my non-B7 fan (and non-writer) other half made precisely the same criticism this evening on perusal of some of the TTBA proofs. We came to the conclusion that some of the problem might be that many fanfic writers spend a lot of time on the internet and so develop text-based ways of conveying emotion, including italics, ellipsis and emoticons, which they then find tricky to disgard when writing fiction.

As a prime offender on this point (and one who, reading this, has just made a resolution to make every effort to stop doing it, really and truly), I don't think it has a whole lot to do with the internet. (Although I have seen "internet-ese" influence some of my writing habits in other ways.) Can't speak for anybody else, but in my case, at least, it comes from wanting to write down dialog exactly as I "hear" it, but realizing (often in extreme frustration) that simply writing down the words leaves out a lot of the qualities of the speech. In my head, there are also pauses, inflections, subtle emphases... To leave those out seems to be leaving out important (to a character junkie) information, but there's no simple, elegant, non-grating way of putting them *in*. I tell myself that *I* as a reader have no trouble generating (re-creating?) all that stuff from the simple words-on-paper (at least, not if the writing and characterization are good to begin with), and I should trust my own readers to do the same thing. I am now telling myself this again. But it's difficult to escape the feeling that I'm leaving some of the most important stuff out. (I do the same thing with facial expressions, which I think I tend to overdescribe, although nobody's complained about that yet, the way they have about the punctuation.) I think what I *really* want is to be able to put a fanfic on the TV screen so everybody can see and hear things exactly as I imagined them, but CGI technology ain't nearly that good yet. :) (And even if it was, I'd probably have absolutely no talent for it, alas.)

-- Betty Ragan ** bragan@nrao.edu ** http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~bragan Not speaking for my employers, officially or otherwise. "Seeing a rotten picture for the special effects is like eating a tough steak for the smothered onions..." -- Isaac Asimov