[ SECRET POST #2238 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2238 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 097 secrets from Secret Submission Post #320.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - 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

[(Anonymous)]

Alexandre Dumas can be kind of hard to get through if you're not, uh, flexible with what styles of writing you're willing to read.

...Actually, a lot of classics are written in styles that would get you tarred and feathered in fanfiction circles. (First person, third person omniscient, change viewpoints every other paragraph, put down the thesaurus and no one gets hurt, super-perfect characters, wallowing, lousy dialogue, bizarre grammar, let's not go into the problematic-because-they're-dated aspects...)

[visp]

Urrgh, Dumas. He really went on about things.

[(Anonymous)]

Depends on where you catch him, I think. Though I've read Victor Hugo and Mervyn Peake, I've a high tolerance for long, random digressions, so I might not be the best person to talk. But Dumas' Valois Romances were pretty on-point most of the way through, and I really enjoyed them.

[visp]

Never read those, actually. And I'm not entirely opposed to Dumas, I just find myself skipping through a lot of it.

[(Anonymous)]

So do I, sometimes. I shouldn't, really, but with a lot of the 'paid by the word' authors, you get to the point where you can sort of judge when they're starting to go off-track, and skip ahead to where it looks like they've started getting back to the actual plot. Not all of them, though, because some of the bastards were sneaky and kept putting crucial plot elements in the middle of random digressions, presumably either to test if you're still reading, or in serialised stories to justify the section to the publisher.

I do love them, though :)

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry to bother you here, you're a bit of a prize idiot, but I saw you mention this soemwher else and have to ask, can you link me to that epic AVENGERS Thor Mpreg fic? It was like 36 chapters with a lot of angsts, at first he didn't know who the father was because he hadn't felt anything when Loki raped him from behind, he thought it was just a massage (lol), and the baby almost died becayse he didn't notice he was in labor. He was also worried about getting fat and bloated with fat ankles and anorexic for a while I hope you didn't take it off line it was soooooo good!

[visp]

Assuming you're just one of my weirder trolls, I have to say, nice one. It's inventive and detailed. If you're actually looking for fic, I have to say sorry, I'm not a fanfiction writer.

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, a lot of classics are written in styles that would get you tarred and feathered in fanfiction circles.

Oooh this is actually a thing that drives me bonkers, but perhaps not in the way that you meant. People will be like, "ONLY USE 'SAID' AND 'REPLIED.' OTHER DIALOGUE TAGS ARE RIDICULOUS, GOD." But then you crack open some Dickens and there are ten different dialogue tags to a page. So you're like, "well, Dickens sucks, because look at these things that he did," and the same people respond, "DICKENS IS ONE OF THE BEST WRITERS OF ALL TIME, FUCK YOU."

Anyway. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that what constitutes "good" writing is as dynamic as the language in which one is doing the writing, and I wish that more people would acknowledge that rather than insist on there being hard and fast rules.

(On a related note: I decided to look up why "all of a sudden" is incorrect a number of months ago. Turns out that there's actually no good reason for it. One "explanation" I found even went so far as to note that, one day, "all of a sudden" might be used more commonly than "all of the sudden" and therefore be correct, but for now, it's not correct, simply because it's not the most common usage. WTF?! How can you define a "rule" as "the thing that most people are doing these days?")

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

No, that drives me bonkers in pretty much the same way. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

DA: It's called prescriptive vs descriptive grammar. Prescriptive stuff is the stuff they teach you in English classes about what the "correct" vs "incorrect" ways to use the language are. Descriptive stuff is frequently "incorrect" according to prescriptive grammars, but because descriptive grammar is simply the way native speakers of a language use that language, it's "correct" in its own right. So if you imagine prescriptive grammars being some stodgy old librarian who won't accept self-published lit into their library because it's not "the most common" form, and descriptive grammars being self-publishing authors (like some books you can get on Amazon) and works by those that write fanfic hosted on places like AO3, maybe it makes more sense? If self-publishing got huge, eventually the stodgy librarian would have to allow that type of lit into the library because it was the most common type of published work, and the older novels from places like Penguin or Random House were considered archaic (or no longer in demand). Even if the stodgy librarian still thinks that a book still doesn't count as "literature" unless it's been workshopped and eventually approved by an objective and very experienced editor.

[coffeeyoukai]

I rarely have problems with style (hell, I tend to write in second person half the time, which is about as unorthodox a style as you can get) but the style of most classics just bore me. It's just the rather... what would you call it? old-fashioned? way the author speaks that I just can't get engaged by. Which is a pity because I think I'd love the plot of several of those classics, I just can't stand trudging through the writing.

[(Anonymous)]

Dumas uses a lot of qualifiers "the older man" etc, which aren't really used in modern writing.

I adore the first half of The Count of Monte Cristo, but can't get through the second half, sort of lost the will when it all gets so complicated and rambly. The relationship between Dantes and the old chap who is the prisoner though, that whole section is wonderful.