fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3234 ]

[ SECRET POST #3234 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3234 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

[Golden Girls]

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02.

[Boku no Hero Academia]

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03.

[C.S. Lewis vs. J.R.R. Tolkien]

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04.

[Pokémon, Leah Remini]

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05.

[Tales of Zestiria]

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06.

[The Man In The High Castle]

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07.

[Marjorie Liu, Sana Takeda, Monstress]

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08.

[Sleepy Hollow]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 020 secrets from Secret Submission Post #462.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 2 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I love analyzing writing styles and the mechanics of writing. Does anyone else find this interesting? Not just what people write but also how they write it. What authors do you like to analyze or what writing styles do you like or respect? Or hate on a technical basis.

Basically, anything about writing mechanics/logistics.

I remember that the first time it ever really occurred to me that there were such things as writing mechanics and skillful use of writing mechanics, I was about 11 years old, and was wondering why it was that JK Rowling could go an entire book without using a single epithet for any character who had a name, while Tamora Pierce couldn't seem to go more than a few pages without needing to use "the 10 year old" or "the girl" or "the ____-haired whoever" in order for her sentences to make sense and not repeat the characters' names awkwardly. (Although of course I didn't know the word "epithet" back then).

I did and still do really like Tamora Pierce, but that was one thing that bugged me even back then, and it was the first thing that made me really start "reading" the actual sentences and phrases in books, rather than the words seeming to transmit mental images of the action directly to my brain.

The first time I realized that there was such a thing as a book that was terrible on the grounds of terrible writing mechanics, not on the grounds of story content I disliked, was The Da Vinci Code ;)

I was a lot older before I consciously understood writing mechanics and it was like this whole new world of wonder opened up for me. I think the one that really made me notice it was The Great Gatsby. We were reading it in school, and my teachers would go over how the writer emphasized certain scenes with the words he was picking, and how each sentence and word was so carefully chosen to continue the underlying themes of the book. I don't think I would've enjoyed that book or understood it without having the fine details pointed out to me, and I have mad respect for Fitzgerald's skills.

It actually intimidated me for awhile that I would never be at that level and all authors were like that (or had to be to get published).

Yeah, it took me a long time to get my head around this stuff too, I think because I read so much and had been reading since I was so young (I have absolutely no memories of learning to read or ever being unable to read), that the concept of written text being a thing that was deliberately crafted and writing mechanics being a thing never even crossed my mind for the longest time. Writing just was, for me.

Same for me! And on a related note, I think this was why the idea of an unreliable narrator was something I didn't really get for a long time. Like, intellectually, I understood it but I always read the books I was reading as if this was how the story happened. I never really thought about an author carefully constructing each sentence and thinking about the impact it would have. There are a lot of books where problematic things (like dub-con/non-con for instance) went right over my head because the narrator didn't see anything wrong with what was going on, so there WASN'T anything wrong going on. There was no narrator; it was just a statement of facts. (I think this might come from reading so much non-fiction as well as fiction as a kid, though now I know non-fiction can have a lot of bias too). That was another epiphany for me when I started interrogating the text and not taking everything at face value.

That's really interesting, and makes so much sense! I don't recall ever personally having an unreliable narrator issue (or issues with understanding characterization in general - for some reason I always had a good handle on unreliable narrators and depiction =/= endorsement...maybe my parents got me to understand it or something, IDK). But I do remember being COMPLETELY lost on concepts like foreshadowing, or exposition, or pacing, or any rules about how to use implicit conveyance of meaning.

Like, I never saw a twist ending coming. Ever. And if stuff happened in a book, it was just stuff that happened, it never occurred to me that if stuff happened in a book, it was probably relevant to the direction the story was going. (This is probably because I read insane quantities of fairy tales and folk tales as a kid, and in those, random tangents in stories often WERE just random tangents that existed for the sole purpose of entertainment and didn't have to flow or contribute to the rest of the story in any way.)

And it utterly baffled me when someone complained about how every Harry Potter book had that one chapter where Quirrel/Riddle/Lupin/Crouch Jr/Dumbledore explained the whole background of what the hell had been going on for the whole book. It never crossed my mind that extended expository monologues weren't exactly great things to have in your story, structurally. They contained compelling information about the story and therefore I had zero considerations about how this information was conveyed.

Foreshadowing was the first literary device I really got, and I've always been pretty good at it. My big eureka moment was actually learning that you can foreshadow too much, which I really saw in the Hobbit movies where PJ had to foreshadow EVERYTHING. Tolkien even mentioned it about how anticipating everything flattened out a tale and didn't allow for surprises. You can really feel that in PJ's Hobbit.

I feel like I'm still at the beginning of studying literary critique, despite years of English classes and my English major. I buy all the writers how-to books I can find, and I just love them. Using the 3-part structure and learning pacing and starting with a hook - all of it is so fascinating to me. The craft of writing doesn't get the recognition it deserves, I feel. People only notice it when it's bad but they don't know WHY it's bad and then apply that to the good authors and recognize just how hard it is or how much WORK it is to craft something beautiful.

The first thing that always comes to mind for me is the descriptions written by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I've tried imitating them for a sort of pastiche of the hardboiled genre and it was a lot of fun.

Another random book that impresed me that I just thought of is Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It's got this amazing dream-like quality that I would love to be able to pull off.

I believe that almost any writer who can string a sentence together does something you can learn from. I just need to figure out what there is to learn from Stephenie Meyer. (Seriously, even Dan Brown does some cool stuff with tension and the pace at which readers learn answers to urgent questions.)

I can agree with this. I think most writers have some positive, interesting things in their writing. But analyzing bad writing can be so fun (and informative!) too.

I love really old stuff. I love alliterative verse and kennings. I really love how different cultures can use the structure of writing to be creative. Like, needing to find several words that all begin with the same letter without it being awkward, and so creating this really elegant or evocative kenning instead. Or, for sonnets, how you can be creative when the structure you're working in is so rigid. Or, for English writers, using sonnets when our words don't rhyme as easily as Italian sonnets.

I think Tolkien speaks to me because I'm right at home with the tropes and writing he's working with. One of the things that I absolutely love about Tolkien is all the stuff his son has published that has basically charted Tolkien's writing process. I love seeing him choose one word over another, one storyline over another, and toy with different ideas. It's just so interesting to me.

+1 to all the stuff about Tolkien. I love his writing so much, and the notes and the background as well. And his poetry too! The Song of Beren and Luthien is one of my favorite poems in existence, I have it memorized.

I really feel a deep kinship to Tolkien. He loved the same old stories I do. He loved language like I do. He came up with a dozen different directions for his stories to go into and couldn't always figure out where he wanted to go. He kept changing who was related to who and how. He wrote fragments of stories and outlines. He made timelines and maps. These are all things I do and things I LOVE to do.

And the underlying message of his works was a very good one. Tolkien is so amazing to me.

Yes yes yes all of this for me too!! We must be partial brain-twins, anon :)

I think I still don't understand "writing mechanics."

What am I even supposed to be looking for?

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[ SECRET POST #3234 ]

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