![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Meme & writing ramble
Jul. 4th, 2011 12:12 pm3 – For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favorite characters to write?
Hmmm. This is difficult to answer. It's not that I don't have my favorites. Christian, Chris Jericho, and Tazz. It's that my characters are so wound up in the elaborate social structures I create, that it's difficult to write that character without writing about the half-dozen characters they're dealing with at the moment. Does that make sense?
I'm surprised by how many characters in my stories aren't there physically. They are mentioned, thought about, fought over, plotted against, snarked on, and dismissed, but most of them do not ever make an entrance. I should probably re-tool that skill towards writing ghost stories or something.
***
I finished reading an awful book last night. Among the 4653585421152254333 things wrong with it was the banter in the dialogue. The banter, itself, could be subdivided into 35665432164 wrong things too: racism! white knighting! mansplaining! racesplaning! But honestly, the problem was a lot of it wasn't funny. And when banter isn't funny, it feels out of place, forced, and asshole-ish. Plus by the end of a 500+-page book, it just felt tedious.
I fretted about this because my stuff is full of banter. While I tend to think my dialogue os at least moderately funny, we all know one person's funny is another's whose bright idea was it to put a window in front of the sun?
Adding to that, was the bad banter's attempt to be ~edgy~. Well, maybe edgy is the wrong word. The author is one of those white guys who seems to think that if whites and blacks called each other racist names in "good jest" that this whole racism problem would just trickle away. So the dialogue is crammed with awful words, spoke in the tone of boomer racism, and instead of being edgy or transformative, it's just disgusting.
Which made me think about the story I posted about last week. The one with the ableist language. I like write edgy; I try to stay away from edgy-for-edgy's-sake or look!-ma-I'm-sofaking-~edgy~, but much like humor in banter, I worry I'm not dancing as delicately on the edges as I think I am.
Hmmm. This is difficult to answer. It's not that I don't have my favorites. Christian, Chris Jericho, and Tazz. It's that my characters are so wound up in the elaborate social structures I create, that it's difficult to write that character without writing about the half-dozen characters they're dealing with at the moment. Does that make sense?
I'm surprised by how many characters in my stories aren't there physically. They are mentioned, thought about, fought over, plotted against, snarked on, and dismissed, but most of them do not ever make an entrance. I should probably re-tool that skill towards writing ghost stories or something.
***
I finished reading an awful book last night. Among the 4653585421152254333 things wrong with it was the banter in the dialogue. The banter, itself, could be subdivided into 35665432164 wrong things too: racism! white knighting! mansplaining! racesplaning! But honestly, the problem was a lot of it wasn't funny. And when banter isn't funny, it feels out of place, forced, and asshole-ish. Plus by the end of a 500+-page book, it just felt tedious.
I fretted about this because my stuff is full of banter. While I tend to think my dialogue os at least moderately funny, we all know one person's funny is another's whose bright idea was it to put a window in front of the sun?
Adding to that, was the bad banter's attempt to be ~edgy~. Well, maybe edgy is the wrong word. The author is one of those white guys who seems to think that if whites and blacks called each other racist names in "good jest" that this whole racism problem would just trickle away. So the dialogue is crammed with awful words, spoke in the tone of boomer racism, and instead of being edgy or transformative, it's just disgusting.
Which made me think about the story I posted about last week. The one with the ableist language. I like write edgy; I try to stay away from edgy-for-edgy's-sake or look!-ma-I'm-sofaking-~edgy~, but much like humor in banter, I worry I'm not dancing as delicately on the edges as I think I am.
