old-school fannish meme
Mar. 28th, 2024 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainCourtesy of nineveh_uk: post the first sentences of your last ten fics, and look for patterns. (Everything archived here, in case you're curious. About 50% Elizabethan / Jacobean theatre RPF, plus two straight-up Shakespeare fics, two Vorkosigan Saga, and a bit of Rape of the Lock crackfic.)
1) Rebecca greets her unexpected caller: Winifred Burbage, all brown curls and dimples and an extremely fashionable hat, accompanied by a group of women Rebecca recognizes vaguely as friends of Winifred’s from before her marriage.
2) It was the sight of By’s hands that hurt her, when he first came back from a month undercover.
3) “It seems to me,” says Nick Tooley, who is playing the First Witch, “that I have to be reacting to something when I say ‘I come, Graymalkin'.”
4) “No,” said Dr. Valdes, the chair of the Philosophy department.
5) It was not until the very end of the longest and most painful day of Horatio’s life that he had an opportunity to ask Lord Voltimand and Lady Cornelia, who had lately been emissaries to Norway, their opinions of the new king’s character.
6) John reaches for Macbeth’s part, and dips his quill again.
7) It was many, many years later, long after Belinda and her guardian sylph had been translated to the heavenly realm, that she finally thought to ask Ariel a question.
8) James contemplates the scene before him: one red head and one dark one, bent together over a playscript.
9) “Are you doing anything after church on Sunday?” asks Dick. “Why don’t you come to dinner, and then we’ll go look at some skulls.”
10) “You’re going to have how many?” said Ivan, in horrified fascination.
I think the most obvious pattern is the one I already knew about, namely, that fictional characters get past-tense narrative, and real, historical individuals get present-tense (or, occasionally, first-person past). For some reason, I have a hard time writing people who have been dead for 400-ish years in past tense ... maybe because it makes the fact that they are dead feel overwhelmingly important? I dunno.
Also, I seem to spend a lot of my of first sentences explaining who the characters are, sometimes at rather clunky length, and I think punctuation has more to do with cadence than grammar.
nineveh_uk: post the first sentences of your last ten fics, and look for patterns. (Everything archived here, in case you're curious. About 50% Elizabethan / Jacobean theatre RPF, plus two straight-up Shakespeare fics, two Vorkosigan Saga, and a bit of Rape of the Lock crackfic.)1) Rebecca greets her unexpected caller: Winifred Burbage, all brown curls and dimples and an extremely fashionable hat, accompanied by a group of women Rebecca recognizes vaguely as friends of Winifred’s from before her marriage.
2) It was the sight of By’s hands that hurt her, when he first came back from a month undercover.
3) “It seems to me,” says Nick Tooley, who is playing the First Witch, “that I have to be reacting to something when I say ‘I come, Graymalkin'.”
4) “No,” said Dr. Valdes, the chair of the Philosophy department.
5) It was not until the very end of the longest and most painful day of Horatio’s life that he had an opportunity to ask Lord Voltimand and Lady Cornelia, who had lately been emissaries to Norway, their opinions of the new king’s character.
6) John reaches for Macbeth’s part, and dips his quill again.
7) It was many, many years later, long after Belinda and her guardian sylph had been translated to the heavenly realm, that she finally thought to ask Ariel a question.
8) James contemplates the scene before him: one red head and one dark one, bent together over a playscript.
9) “Are you doing anything after church on Sunday?” asks Dick. “Why don’t you come to dinner, and then we’ll go look at some skulls.”
10) “You’re going to have how many?” said Ivan, in horrified fascination.
I think the most obvious pattern is the one I already knew about, namely, that fictional characters get past-tense narrative, and real, historical individuals get present-tense (or, occasionally, first-person past). For some reason, I have a hard time writing people who have been dead for 400-ish years in past tense ... maybe because it makes the fact that they are dead feel overwhelmingly important? I dunno.
Also, I seem to spend a lot of my of first sentences explaining who the characters are, sometimes at rather clunky length, and I think punctuation has more to do with cadence than grammar.
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Date: 2024-03-29 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-29 02:44 pm (UTC)