[ SECRET POST #5114 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5114 ⌋

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


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 24 secrets from Secret Submission Post #732.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

07. https://i.imgur.com/s85xMsm.jpg

[mishey22]

I don't really think they're rarer in published fiction. Maybe it isn't the same exact characters doing the tropes over and over, but the tropes themselves are there.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed. I've read loads of published fiction that was every bit as tropey as fic.

[(Anonymous)]

If you're hearing a distant roar, far over the horizon, that would be editors screaming "AND THAT'S BECAUSE OF US."

I get that fanfic writers are writing for themselves and for fun, but that trait is one of a few that cause fic as a whole to be so bland. A couple other culprits are young or inexperienced writers, adherence to source material (you can only stretch characters so much. Lookin' at you terrible AU's), and low barrier to entry.

Editors can't save writing, but they certainly clean it up. And help save it from tropey crud, constant repeating, meandering plot, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

*can't save bad writing

Fun that THAT is where I goofed up :P

[(Anonymous)]

A think there are a fair number of us who would love to have an editor or beta or SOMEONE able to help improve our work. Unfortunately, I doubt virtually anyone can afford to pay for that for a hobby, and that seems to be the only option these days.

[(Anonymous)]

LOL, I thought the same thing. Editors - real editors and not just fans who volunteer to proofread your work for typos - are an indispensable set of fresh eyes on a person's work. They can point out where your weaknesses lie and what parts of a story need a little help, and also what that fix might be.

The majority of fic readers don't care about that level of detail so long as their favorite ship/tropes/etc. are present, and it's hard as hell to find a really good beta to do those things, anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

I love m/m romance stories, but I like those stories to be about people with interesting or exciting jobs or who are competent, or for the very best fic where their relationship is developed as part of a bigger plot like a mystery or case.

I'm not a fan of stories like 'Chad Menier, handsome doctor, can't help falling for Taylor Hooch, champion surfer. When Taylor who falls astray of a shark, can Chad save his life and get a date?' They bore me to tears.

Unless i've missed a whole raft of books, fic is my only source.

[type_wild]

You're not wrong. With that said, I've never been bothered by structural mess in fic, since I read it neither for literary quality nor for engaging stories. I want quick and easily digested feels about my OTP, and poor prose is a far worse offender in pulling me out of the moment.

[tabaqui]

*shrug*

And here's me, looking at published stuff and trying to find stuff that makes me even remotely interested. My old favorites are awesome, but I can't seem to get interested in the summaries and even reviews posted with 99% of the new fiction/sci-fi/fantasy out there. It all sounds pretty repetitive and samey.

[(Anonymous)]

(Cozy Werewolf Anon)

Same-ish. I'm not even sure what I'm looking for anymore though. I'm willing to try anything at least once. But then you start reading blurbs and I start wondering if trad publishing has any idea of what might be 'fresh' at all.

Or at least something that's not grimdark and is fun for the sake of FUN. I've got the link for Vainqueur the Dragon on Royal Road saved b/c it might be free, but at least a protag dragon who decides maybe he should monster hunt for pay sounds entertaining! I just... need to get up the energy to read it. That and try like the first 500 pages of the Wandering Inn (also on Royal Road for free.) But there is a lot of isekai on RR and that's not 100% what I want. I know that much.

[tabaqui]

Maybe it's the blurbs, I dunno. But they all just sound...awful. And they all sound exactly like the stuff I was looking at 20 years ago.

'Plucky!Person!! escapes mean family and goes on the road where they meet Mysterious!Person!! with secrets and many skillz!! And they have a DARK DESTINY and SEKRITS that may TEAR THEM APART!!!'

Yuck.

The Expanse is the newest 'thing' I am reading, and it is amazing and excellent and I adore it. I will have to look for other things that are like that, and hope for the best.

The last time I drove and was in a real bookstore (a Barnes and Noble), the sci-fi/fantasy section was literally a bookshelf about ten feet long and six feet high and that was ALL. And mostly old old old stuff, like Azimov and Niven and things I read (or didn't like) decades ago.

[(Anonymous)]

(CWA)

Blurbs are so tough. The first Expanse book sounds kind of thriller and cop story-ish and that as far as I can remember hasn't been done much in trad scifi since Asimov's Robot Series (Caves of Steel, etc.)

Like, since it started out as an MMO thing, maybe look into LitRPG stuff? I dunno, some of it does rely on stats being an "actual universe" thing and some of it doesn't. But LitRPG is mostly an indie thing, not a trad pubbed thing. I have not had luck finding indie scifi. It doesn't have the equivalent of the SPFBO contest.

I wish Asimov and Niven and the like would end up in a nice classics section to make room for newer SFF authors. But then we'd probably end up with an entire shelf of Butcher or McGuire. Sigh. Can't win.

[tabaqui]

I am not sure what you mean by LitRPG - is that kind of 'choose your own story' stuff? (Which, for the record, I loathe.) And what does 'stats being an 'actual universe' ' mean?

I am not up on this hip lingo.

The whole Expanse series is a bit thriller/cop story, except without much in the way of actual cops, heh.

I wish they would, too; there is good stuff there, but it shouldn't be 95% of the damn shelf.

[(Anonymous)]

(CWA)

LitRPG is err... stories that use Role Playing Game style worlds as the setting of the story. And some of them make RPG stats actually IN story important. Like they mention them in the story somehow. But at the same time I've seen books like Sean Frazier's The Call of Chaos use DnD as a comparison book, b/c it is very much a DnD style adventure, without using actual statistics in the story.

There are probably some in the scifi genre. Most I've run across are fantasy. It's really popular on Royal Road, I know that much. Amazon does have a category set aside for it. Most indie scifi I've come across outside of Buroker is tedious space exploration/one man army/lost fleet types. Buroker's Star Kingdom series is at least Star Wars meets the Big Bang Theory (in very obvious ways) so it's sort of fun. (I haven't read the rest of hers. For someone who has a huge backlist, she's not too bad.)

They call portal fantasy isekai these days. The "hip lingo" confuses me too.

I think book store buyers don't know anything good that's new or don't think it will sell b/c small store problems. I honestly don't know how Asimov still sells. Color me confused. He can be so DRY. I've read all of Foundation and I can't remember a THING about it. I put it away and said "never again."

[goodbyebird]

*nudges Murderbot in your general direction* oh boy, is that the Wayfarer series nestled in there? And what's this Steerswomen all about? Maybe a series is too much right now, and I should try a single book like The Deep or The Future Of Another Timeline... Gideon The Ninth, you say?

[tabaqui]

Heeee!
I have read the first Murderbot book and enjoyed it a lot, but haven't had the funds to get the rest.

I'll take a look at the others, thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

(Cozy Werewolf Anon)

There are tons of tropes in published fiction. How readily apparent they are depends on what genre you're reading and what is selling this hot second. Romance, for instance, is chock full of tropes. YA is I guess cycling back to vampires?? (God help us.)

The thing about fanfiction as a genre is the tropes tend to jump from fandom to fandom until you see them everywhere. AUs/Crossovers/ABO/CrackyTropeFicslikeFakeDatingorOnlyOneBed

And tropes aren't bad. They've never been bad! Like, I think TVTropes has made people think they're bad. You can have the trope-ist story to trope and as long as it has engaging characters and an fanciful setting it will sell. See, Star Wars, Alan Dean Foster's Journey of the Catechist, Harry Potter, Avatar; The Last Airbender, and the Expendables. But if you rely on tropes to push the story without the great characters and fun setting then it's going to be a slog. (I won't name names, b/c I'm not mean.)

And as someone noted up thread, voice, pacing, structure, characterization, world building, those are things editors point out. And yeah, so much fanfic is unedited b/c it's for fun. And that's okay!

What should be sad is the amount of indie authors out there who are writing and publishing works not even hitting the bar of decent fanfic who need to get editors, development editors specifically. And some can't afford it, and there are some who simply don't WANT TO. Good authors write, great authors EDIT.

[tabaqui]

And unfortunately, if you aren't writing what the current pro-agents/editors want to sell (or think will sell) - you're not gonna get picked up, and you're never going to get that pro-editor to buff up your stuff.

Catch 22.

[(Anonymous)]

(CWA)

Yeep. It's a crap shoot if you're going to hit with your book at just the right time. I've seen authors go "I watched publisher's marketplace and saw this specific trend so I banged out my book and queried just then!"

Me: "I wish my brain worked like that."

[tabaqui]

Jayzus, right? My brain *might* have worked that way when I was 25, but now?

Nope.

[(Anonymous)]

(CWA)

At 25, I didn't even have an original idea or JUST had gotten an original idea. (Does math) No. I got my original idea at like 28? I've switched computers since and Word is shitty about keeping the dates on the word files right.

With agents having manuscript wish lists too, I think it just adds to the pressure of having the exact RIGHT thing as a debut. I don't even want to look anymore. Nope. I'll come up with my ideas, query, if I'm rejected, I'll publish elsewhere. This is fine. -watches world burn down-

[tabaqui]

Heeee! I think them having wish lists makes it a *lot* harder for writers, since it puts the agents into the mindset of 'must be this and this is not this', you know?

I had a ton of original ideas, but none of them were really...marketable (at least, I didn't think so, back then). I mean - same-sex leads in a sci-fi or fantasy world where gender norms are queered all over the place and sometimes there is kinky sex?

Not high on the list of things people wanted to market in the early 90s.

When i first got into fanfic, I wrote for a year, several thousand words every three or four days, posting every week, on one story. I can't even come *close* to that output now. It's so depressing.

[(Anonymous)]

I totally get it. If you're reading shippy fic, most of the time you can forget about an external plot. Or a whole hatch of characters reduced down to focus on others. And a lot of the characterizations are more of a "shorthand" based on the fandom's fanon interpretation than a fully fleshed out character.

[(Anonymous)]

SA, not that that's always bad, and often it's on purpose or even done tongue in cheek, but it can seem shallow compared to published fiction. Not always, looking at you, romance genre.