What are your personal "red flags" before reading any fanfic?

I've had disagreements about editors on that. I'll be told that I should put a comma in a sentence for grammatical reasons, which I find myself not wanting to do, because the comma connotates a pause that I do not wish to convey.

It's a pause for the reader.

In case of writing a Motor Mouth speaker, you can forgo them, but it's generally a bad idea otherwise.

himitsu keisatsu seifu chokuzoku kokka hoanbu na no da himitsu keisatsu yami ni magireru supai katsudou torishimari

Commas before peoples names in dialog change the meaning of the sentence. So you usually want to include them for clarity (they're more of a grammar thing, then a phrasing thing in this case).

IE: "It is the choices we make Harry." is ambiguous at best. It could mean that the choices make Harry directly, in which case, it's phrased really badly. It literally means "We make Harry though our choices", which is not what is meant at all.

"It is the choices we make, Harry." means that someone is telling "it is the choices we make" to Harry who is present for the conversation.

@Pannic: I actually tend to go the other way where I add in commas where I want a pause, even if it's not grammatically necessary.

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I'm the same way. My writing style is rather old school, and writers used to use commas far more heavily than they typically do now.

Bigotry in the name of inclusion is still bigotry.

Yeah. It's like with "Let's eat Grandpa!"

I do the same thing with semi-colons...

Same here; I abuse semicolons like crazy.

The Law of Semicolons: if you know what they are, you are probably using them too much.

"Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy."

I use semicolons a lot; I could probably just have separate sentences, but I don't for some reason.

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@Psyga: My mother once found a novelty T-shirt in a mail-order catalog, bearing this text:

Bigotry in the name of inclusion is still bigotry.

Exactly.

That's literally the first thing I learned in Grammar class when I went to College.

This is a completely random question, but can a fic switch from 1st to 3rd person? Sorry if it doesn't fit here....

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It can, but whether that's a good idea or not depends on the story. In typical circumstances, changing POV like that generally isn't the best idea unless it's done for a specific purpose.

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i'm doing it for one i'm working on, but only for very specific (repeating) situations. And it gets its own dedicated chapter each time.

switching from third person to first is jarring and weird, I wouldn't recommend going back and forth quickly or without a good explanation or for it to happen.

Exactly.

I've seen authors switch from third to first person for a few paragraphs in the middle of a chapter, just because they wanted that particular scene to be first-person. That's incredibly jarring and is usually enough to make me hit the back button.

edited 19th Nov '14 3:05:15 PM by SapphireBlue

That said, it is within the bounds of a third person narrative done in the perspective of a character to express that character's thoughts to an extent, in a way that can be similar to first person and may even appear to be a shift to first person entirely if the writer doesn't do it well enough.

It does still show a more casual approach, though, which the author might want depending on what kind of story they're writing. If you're trying to get a very "proper" tone across, don't do it.

edited 19th Nov '14 8:38:40 PM by KnownUnknown

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

Of course it can, but it depends on the situation. There's an excellent novel by Michael Stackpole called Once a Hero that alternates each chapter. It also alternates where the first-person parts are set 500 years in the past, from the POV of an important hero, and the third-person are in the present, from a group retracing his footsteps to locate an important artifact.

However, I would add, I do not think you should be changing POV any more often than each scene change, and that only if your scenes are 2000+ words. Doing it too frequently is confusing, as other tropers have noted, and absolutely don't change POV without a clear scene break.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

But don't write "I change the pov now" over said scene break...that's really a pet peeve of mine. If it is not evident on its own, then the writer didn't do a good job, and if it is, than it's insulting to the readers.

What? I have never seen that, though I've seen many different ways to put in manual lines. As long as there's some kind of separation, it's ridiculously easy to tell, but without a separation it's very easy for certain scenes to bleed together, depending on how they're written.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

Yeah, some writers (even good ones) for some reason believe it to be necessary to write "Harry's Po V", "Ginny's Po V" aso over ever single scene. This is already distracting in itself when used in a structure in which each scene is written from one single perspective. But sometime the writers use in fact an all-knowing narrator style, meaning that the switch Po V every few lines (and for a well written all-knowing narrator you certainly don't even need breaks when he describes the pov of different character, never mind interrupting the flow of the narrative every three sentences or so).

Um.... the POV switch is in this ficlet I wrote: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2642081 where 3/5 is in 1st person and 2/5 is in 3rd.....

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I ask again...where do they get the idea that they should do this? Don't they ever get any creative writing assignments in school? Don't their teachers shut this sort of thing down?

I learned to write primarily from example, by reading a lot of published books. I learned to write because I love to read, I love words, I love how versatile language can be. Why the hell do these people write? They obviously never voluntarily read anything except, perhaps, other fanfiction. Where are they getting the drive to create written works if not from a love of the written word?

Because they want to share their ideas with others?

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The body of work which is first person and switches POV is vanishingly small among the published. They are attempting something they may well not have seen tried before regardless of their reading habits. In fact for guidance on this subject they would probably be better off reading fanfic since there is more attempts at this style to be found.

And don't tell me they're bad for trying something new; experimentation is how you improve when there are no guiderails. The execution is still bad of course, but it is understandably bad rather than bad because of rank incompetence or diagnostic of the author's personal issues.

edited 20th Nov '14 1:06:14 PM by Night

Nous restons ici.