let's discuss!

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

this if for those of you who read fanfic, which is hopefully most of you.

what are your fanfic pet peeves? is there a pairing or genre you won't read? do you hate mistakes in canon?

for me it's more about grammar. i get irritated with bad spelling (use spellcheck!), poor use of punctuation (besides commas because there are about 40 rules. you should know the basics), and capitalization. in posts i don't bother with caps. but when i publish i try to make it as correct as possible.

other things are the use of certain words. there/their/they're, we're/ were/where, bare/bear, lie/lay/laid etc., i/me, overuse of italics and bold. to me italics are good for emphasizing certain words that should be stressed, either in dialog or narration, sounds coming off the television/phone or written words read by the narrator or out loud in dialog, musical lyrics. it just makes it easier to understand that it isn't normal sounds. i only use bold in my author's note, disclaimer, and warnings.

also, i won't even read a fic that has all the text bunched up because someone didn't press enter. or something with only about 200 words.

also, when you address someone it should be like,   Person, blah blah. with the comma there. that just bugs me.

for specifically CM i won't read Morgan with anyone but Garcia. i don't know, i just think they belong together and i love that Garcia is one of very few average sized women on television. in spite of what hollywood wants us to think, most women are more Garcia's size than JJ's.

Comments

[banee-noel.livejournal.com]

Grammar or improper uses of words, that bothers me. I can normally continue to read regardless but if it seems to be a problem throughout I stop reading, a few errors here and there happen. I should know, I write fics myself and goodness knows I had trouble before I found a beta.

I like narrative, not just all dialogue, it makes it harder to keep up with what is happening if all there is is the characters talking to each other. Plots that jump about too much are annoying, or they just seem poorly developed.

As to pairings, I haven't read much in the CM fandom lately, but I don't particualarly go for that much. I don't know why, maybe I need to read more of it lol. I prefer male/female personally, nothing wrong with slash it just isn't my cup of tea. I tend to like stuff that is revolving around a case I guess.

[cloudzrshibby.livejournal.com]

I hate plot-jumping too.

I'd agree about the "more narrative, less dialogue" bit, but I'd be a huge hypocrit because everything I write tends to get really dialogue-y. :(

[banee-noel.livejournal.com]

It is so distracting, one minute the characters are in one place and suddenly somewhere else.

lol - I have written ficlets without one word of dialogue, so I guess it would be something I'd like. Sometimes lots of dialogue is great, but when it doesn't have anything to tell me where they are, give a feel for the setting, it seems to lack in a way.

[cloudzrshibby.livejournal.com]

I hate it in general, like even with other books and movies and stuff. It gets so annoying and confusing.

Sometimes when writing I feel a lot of dialogue is needed. Like, I don't wanna sit here and explain everything. I'm the narrator. Its already my job to tell you about what isn't said. I feel that having my characters explain the important details is important. But I dunno. Sometimes I write tons of dialogue, other times the chapters consist of mainly narration. This is from my story-writing, btw. I haven't written a fanfiction in ages. Of course, it was the same deal with those stories too.

[banee-noel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sometimes it needs to go a little slow to build up to the exciting stuff.

I think it depends on the story too. Some stuff I have written works with no dialogue, other stuff needs it. Really depends on what is going on in the story as well as the length. Longer/chapter stories certainly don't lend themselves to no dialogue like a short one could.