"Maybe?" I'd say that's definitely the area from which your tell derives.
Most of my professional writing life was spent doing exactly that - writing technical manuals or editing technical manuals for instructions on a variety of equipment and machinery. Telling was important, indeed imperative.
In my case, the "telling" comprised 20 plus years of writing peer-reviewed scientific publications, my contributions to patents, and now documents that must follow a highly formulaic structure and language for regulatory purposes. These are about as far from tripping the light fantastic in Lothlórien as one can get. What I write for fan fiction and what I write to make a living are entirely different beasts (or I'd like to think so).
I suspect I will have a difficult time for a long time divorcing myself from more than 20 years of legal documents and instructional manuals.
It's not easy, true, but it's certainly possible if one listens and learns...and opens up those veins and bleeds (remember that adage)? It requires a significant switch in the approach to writing, a way of entering a world or a fictional character's head. The folks who write engaging fan fiction are not all English majors, after all.
So, for me, a large part of the fun of fan fiction has been (and continues to be) learning to write in a different style than the technical stuff, rather than falling back on the latter. I'm not wholly successful at the avoidance of "telling," but hope to keep working toward a good balance between show and tell. And I don't think I am being presumptuous is saying that is exactly the critique that Spiced offers you.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 02:53 pm (UTC)"Maybe?" I'd say that's definitely the area from which your tell derives.
Most of my professional writing life was spent doing exactly that - writing technical manuals or editing technical manuals for instructions on a variety of equipment and machinery. Telling was important, indeed imperative.
In my case, the "telling" comprised 20 plus years of writing peer-reviewed scientific publications, my contributions to patents, and now documents that must follow a highly formulaic structure and language for regulatory purposes. These are about as far from tripping the light fantastic in Lothlórien as one can get. What I write for fan fiction and what I write to make a living are entirely different beasts (or I'd like to think so).
I suspect I will have a difficult time for a long time divorcing myself from more than 20 years of legal documents and instructional manuals.
It's not easy, true, but it's certainly possible if one listens and learns...and opens up those veins and bleeds (remember that adage)? It requires a significant switch in the approach to writing, a way of entering a world or a fictional character's head. The folks who write engaging fan fiction are not all English majors, after all.
So, for me, a large part of the fun of fan fiction has been (and continues to be) learning to write in a different style than the technical stuff, rather than falling back on the latter. I'm not wholly successful at the avoidance of "telling," but hope to keep working toward a good balance between show and tell. And I don't think I am being presumptuous is saying that is exactly the critique that Spiced offers you.