[Frith mentioned in chat that she's essentially writing fanfic about her characters these days, and largely slice-of-life fanfic at that, which is kind of awesome.]
Ahahahaaa. NEW LIFE (AND CAREER) GOAL. Though, knowing me, it'll be endless AU fanfic, and then I'll end up crossing over my own stuff, and then retreating to AO3 and crossing over my own stuff with SG-1.
I have joked about how if I ever find myself in a position where my works have somehow spawned a fandom, I'm just going to troll the fandom and get into the sorts of arguments where people argue with me about what the author really intended. And then I'll laugh, quietly, to myself. A lot.
[Aha, it was you who made the point about reader sympathy and narrative sympathy being directly inverse to each other. XD]
XD I do enjoy that piece of narrative advice! I'm sure it's not 100% applicable across all circumstances, but I tent to have a very low threshold for works that are grabbing after my heartstrings, so I find that it's pretty effective where I'm concerned.
And situational stuff, as well. I feel like, often, the less goes the character's way, the more I root for them. Which is one of the reasons I spent so much of White Collar S3 really detesting Neal, because it felt like logic was twisting itself into pretzels to make sure everything worked out for him. (Which isn't an issue restricted to S3, but it sure stood out in that season.
There's a boatload of related tricks I have a gripe with, too. Like, the "showing your character is smart by having them outsmart a clearly incompetent person." (BBC Sherlock pulled this twice in one season by having Sherlock deduce passwords which were proper names. From people who should ostensibly be highly security conscious. I had to have stronger passwords than that when I worked at a public university, and I had to change them every 90 days.) Or "Showing that the situation is dire by having everyone look at it and give up right away." (That One Doctor Who Season Finale, I am looking hard at you.) I think, really, when you're trying to engineer audience reaction, you have to be really really careful, because most of the shortcuts aren't actually good ones.
Though it would be interesting to look at the shortcuts (or shorthands) which are effective, which is something I really want to make a story of, especially in original shortfic. One example that was brought up to me a while ago was that you could make a villain more sympathetic by having them be nice to a dog, or something. I'm not sure how many people would call that out as a tropey thing (and thus roll their eyes), but you can imagine how it could be deployed effectively...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-03-12 09:53 am (UTC)Ahahahaaa. NEW LIFE (AND CAREER) GOAL. Though, knowing me, it'll be endless AU fanfic, and then I'll end up crossing over my own stuff, and then retreating to AO3 and crossing over my own stuff with SG-1.
I have joked about how if I ever find myself in a position where my works have somehow spawned a fandom, I'm just going to troll the fandom and get into the sorts of arguments where people argue with me about what the author really intended. And then I'll laugh, quietly, to myself. A lot.
[Aha, it was you who made the point about reader sympathy and narrative sympathy being directly inverse to each other. XD]
XD I do enjoy that piece of narrative advice! I'm sure it's not 100% applicable across all circumstances, but I tent to have a very low threshold for works that are grabbing after my heartstrings, so I find that it's pretty effective where I'm concerned.
And situational stuff, as well. I feel like, often, the less goes the character's way, the more I root for them. Which is one of the reasons I spent so much of White Collar S3 really detesting Neal, because it felt like logic was twisting itself into pretzels to make sure everything worked out for him. (Which isn't an issue restricted to S3, but it sure stood out in that season.
There's a boatload of related tricks I have a gripe with, too. Like, the "showing your character is smart by having them outsmart a clearly incompetent person." (BBC Sherlock pulled this twice in one season by having Sherlock deduce passwords which were proper names. From people who should ostensibly be highly security conscious. I had to have stronger passwords than that when I worked at a public university, and I had to change them every 90 days.) Or "Showing that the situation is dire by having everyone look at it and give up right away." (That One Doctor Who Season Finale, I am looking hard at you.) I think, really, when you're trying to engineer audience reaction, you have to be really really careful, because most of the shortcuts aren't actually good ones.
Though it would be interesting to look at the shortcuts (or shorthands) which are effective, which is something I really want to make a story of, especially in original shortfic. One example that was brought up to me a while ago was that you could make a villain more sympathetic by having them be nice to a dog, or something. I'm not sure how many people would call that out as a tropey thing (and thus roll their eyes), but you can imagine how it could be deployed effectively...