Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2011-08-18 11:03 pm
edenfalling) wrote2011-08-18 11:03 pm
Entry tags:
[Meme] 30 Days of Fanfiction -- questions 16-18
16 – Summaries: do you like them or hate them? If you use them, how do you come up with them?
Summaries are VITALLY IMPORTANT, people! Please, please put them on all your stories. How am I supposed to know if I want to read your story if you don't tell me who and what it's about?
That said, I am terrible at writing them myself. Over the past few years I've begun to tack on a specific mention of any notable pairings at the end, because that is a cheap and effective form of advertising, but the summary itself can be anything from an evocative quote to, well, an attempted summary of a story in one to three sentences, which is not an easy art. :-/
-----
17 – Titles: are they the bane of your existence or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you write chaptered fic, do you give each chapter an individual title or not?
I suck at titles. Occasionally a title will come to me in a burst of inspiration, but other than that, they are definitely the bane of my existence. I often resort to random lines of poetry or mangled quotations... that or I end up with things like "Drought," "Fire," Ice," "Shame," "Debts," "Lies," "Tides," "Remembrance," "Liminality," "Secrets," "Knives," "Lemonade," "Luxuries," "Endurance," "Ephemera," "Family," "Seeds," "Babel," "Curses," "Lessons," "Rituals," "Compatibility," "Balance," "Heritage," "Hindsight," "Traps," "Samsara," etc. Single nouns are not particularly informative, nor, more pertinently, are they particularly memorable. Seriously, even if you have read everything I've written, I highly doubt you can assign all the preceding titles to the correct stories -- or even to the correct fandoms -- without looking through my master fic lists.
(Single word titles are also harder to search for, if you've lost the link to somebody else's fic and don't remember the writer's name. Something like "The Way of the Apartment Manager," on the other hand, is unique enough that it won't turn up anything but my story.)
Sometimes I title individual chapters. Sometimes I don't. It mostly depends on whether I started a chaptered story with the intention of writing a novel/novella, or with the intention of writing a one-shot that I later expanded. For example, "Tides," "An Ounce of Prevention," and "The Courting Dance" are all expanded one-shots and have individual chapter titles, whereas "Lemonade," "Weregild," "Strange Likeness," and "The Way of the Apartment Manager" were planned as multi-chapter stories from the start and do not have individual chapter titles. And then, just to make things difficult, there is "Secrets," which was planned as a novel and has individual chapter titles anyway, or "First You Have To Get There," in which each scene has its own title. *hands* Hey, I never claimed to be consistent.
-----
18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?
Um, life? I read things, experience things, think about things, and dream about things, and they combine and recombine endlessly. The human mind is always asking "what if?" and "what next?" and "if so, why?" -- always trying to weave a story out of randomness. Ideas are not the hard part. Execution is the hard part.
-----
Ithaca is gearing up for the start of fall semester at Cornell and IC, which means a new wave of students who need to have it beaten into their heads that when you enter a store in a group, I need to ID all of you before I can sell tobacco to any of you. This is a requirement so I don't sell tobacco to someone who will immediately hand it over to an underage friend. Your verbal assurance that said ID-less friend is of age and/or doesn't smoke cuts no ice with the law. And no, you cannot just have the ID-less person leave the store. I cannot un-know that ze was with you a minute ago. You cannot all leave and have the would-be purchaser return in five minutes, either; I will still know you were with a group.
If you want to buy tobacco, leave your ID-less friends outside the store. This is not rocket science. But every semester, I have to explain it all over again, and smile and apologize while entitled young idiots get pissy at me for doing my job according to the rules.
...
I was never that bad when I was their age. Then again, my addictions of choice are caffeine and books, neither of which is an age-restricted substance. *wry*
Summaries are VITALLY IMPORTANT, people! Please, please put them on all your stories. How am I supposed to know if I want to read your story if you don't tell me who and what it's about?
That said, I am terrible at writing them myself. Over the past few years I've begun to tack on a specific mention of any notable pairings at the end, because that is a cheap and effective form of advertising, but the summary itself can be anything from an evocative quote to, well, an attempted summary of a story in one to three sentences, which is not an easy art. :-/
-----
17 – Titles: are they the bane of your existence or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you write chaptered fic, do you give each chapter an individual title or not?
I suck at titles. Occasionally a title will come to me in a burst of inspiration, but other than that, they are definitely the bane of my existence. I often resort to random lines of poetry or mangled quotations... that or I end up with things like "Drought," "Fire," Ice," "Shame," "Debts," "Lies," "Tides," "Remembrance," "Liminality," "Secrets," "Knives," "Lemonade," "Luxuries," "Endurance," "Ephemera," "Family," "Seeds," "Babel," "Curses," "Lessons," "Rituals," "Compatibility," "Balance," "Heritage," "Hindsight," "Traps," "Samsara," etc. Single nouns are not particularly informative, nor, more pertinently, are they particularly memorable. Seriously, even if you have read everything I've written, I highly doubt you can assign all the preceding titles to the correct stories -- or even to the correct fandoms -- without looking through my master fic lists.
(Single word titles are also harder to search for, if you've lost the link to somebody else's fic and don't remember the writer's name. Something like "The Way of the Apartment Manager," on the other hand, is unique enough that it won't turn up anything but my story.)
Sometimes I title individual chapters. Sometimes I don't. It mostly depends on whether I started a chaptered story with the intention of writing a novel/novella, or with the intention of writing a one-shot that I later expanded. For example, "Tides," "An Ounce of Prevention," and "The Courting Dance" are all expanded one-shots and have individual chapter titles, whereas "Lemonade," "Weregild," "Strange Likeness," and "The Way of the Apartment Manager" were planned as multi-chapter stories from the start and do not have individual chapter titles. And then, just to make things difficult, there is "Secrets," which was planned as a novel and has individual chapter titles anyway, or "First You Have To Get There," in which each scene has its own title. *hands* Hey, I never claimed to be consistent.
-----
18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?
Um, life? I read things, experience things, think about things, and dream about things, and they combine and recombine endlessly. The human mind is always asking "what if?" and "what next?" and "if so, why?" -- always trying to weave a story out of randomness. Ideas are not the hard part. Execution is the hard part.
-----
Ithaca is gearing up for the start of fall semester at Cornell and IC, which means a new wave of students who need to have it beaten into their heads that when you enter a store in a group, I need to ID all of you before I can sell tobacco to any of you. This is a requirement so I don't sell tobacco to someone who will immediately hand it over to an underage friend. Your verbal assurance that said ID-less friend is of age and/or doesn't smoke cuts no ice with the law. And no, you cannot just have the ID-less person leave the store. I cannot un-know that ze was with you a minute ago. You cannot all leave and have the would-be purchaser return in five minutes, either; I will still know you were with a group.
If you want to buy tobacco, leave your ID-less friends outside the store. This is not rocket science. But every semester, I have to explain it all over again, and smile and apologize while entitled young idiots get pissy at me for doing my job according to the rules.
...
I was never that bad when I was their age. Then again, my addictions of choice are caffeine and books, neither of which is an age-restricted substance. *wry*