packing, and a musing on writing styles

[edenfalling]

Am doing the headless chicken dance of packing-avoidance. When the cleaning lady leaves, I will start doing the headless chicken dance of actual packing.

I hate hate hate moving.

Still, as of Saturday I will be back in Ithaca and ensconced in my new apartment. It's not really an apartment, per se, but a room in a shared house, but still. It's mine, all mine! And paid for mostly with my own money!

There's something very satisfying about independence.

In story news: am experiencing great disgust toward Tom Riddle at the moment, which has "Secrets" temporarily stalled since my next scene features him as a major participant. Have been twiddling around with some original stuff instead, and managed to finally bash through an outline of one story that's been nagging at me for several years now. I still may never write it, but at least now I have a clear outline for what I'm not writing!

Will probably attack the Gormenghast fic with the Editing Pen of Death tonight. It feels a little odd to read, since it's not quite my usual style. Oh, you can still tell that I wrote it, and it's not really in Mervyn Peake's style either (I have decided he's one of those irritating inimitable people), but I can easily see the places where I was tweaking myself into a slightly different storytelling pattern from my usual one.

Then again, I wonder how much my usual patterns have been affected by two and a half years of writing in JKR's world? I did start out trying to imitate her to some degree, though her style is definitely closer to mine than Peake's is. So how much of my writing is my own, and how much is still influenced by Harry Potter?

It's an interesting thing to think about.

Comments

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

In story news: am experiencing great disgust toward Tom Riddle at the moment

Hmmm. I actually have great disgust toward Tom Riddle all the time. So you're doing better than I am on that score. I haven't found any redeeming virtues in him yet.

So how much of my writing is my own, and how much is still influenced by Harry Potter?

I let some non-HP friends read my (mostly abandoned) genfic, and one comment I got was "you've got (JKR's) style down pat." My response was "this is MY style, so maybe that's why I like JKR's writing so much - it's how I would write if I were actually trying to write original fiction." So I kind of know what you mean. The only style I know is my own is my smut style (!:) since I have no direct evidence that JKR writes smut ;)

[edenfalling]

Oh, I don't find redeeming virtues in Tom. I'm firmly convinced he's a sociopath. But I waver between considering him one of my favorite characters to write -- he's so focused his dialogue almost writes itself, and frankly I sometimes share his disdain for 11 year old Ginny -- and being so utterly disgusted that I can think like him that I wouldn't touch his scenes with a ten foot pole. I've just hit the latter extreme, and therefore won't be able to continue "Secrets" for a few days. *sigh*

As for the writing, it's a little hard to compare sometimes, since my original fiction is... often rather different in subject matter from my fanfiction. And the worlds I create are vastly different from JKR's. But I think, looking back on some stuff I wrote in my early teens, that I'm probably in your boat -- my natural style is somewhat similar to JKR's. Just less whimsical, I think, with less tolerance for using 2D characters to hold positions, and with a different way of writing dialogue. (That's what I find hardest about working her world. We really don't write dialogue the same way at all, and it shows sometimes when I work canon dialogue into my scenes.)