I really thought at first it was a POV thing, stream of consciousness or something, but nope, everybody's POV is written this way. And it does work well in some scenes! But it also works really badly in others, like when a thing is supposed to be happening and it's impossible to figure out who's doing what because there are no friggin' subject-verb-object sentences at all and the page is a mile and a half long thanks to all the paragraph breaks. Combined with a five-digit wordcount, too.
...that's really fucking weird. Like it sounds like it can and does work in some cases but the issue is that 'in some cases' bit. There's certain poetic structures and forms I'm really fond of, but I can't just slot them into everything I write because they don't work in every situation. Certain types of poems cannot be written with certain kinds of forms. Or, rather, you can write them in those forms but the poem itself will be the worse for it due to a lack of synthesis between purpose and form. That's a big problem with weirder prose styles too.
I don’t think everyone here actually hates sporking. I enjoy a good spork myself from time to time, and MST3K, the uberspork, is almost certainly not suffering from a lack of local fans. Way back in the day I remember Luka sporked a chapter of an amazingly terrible self-published novel having something vaguely to do with Christ in a very confusing way, and I laughed so hard I printed it out and read it to my friends. (This was before mobile was a thing.) The forum on which it was posted was tragically lost and I mourn that I don’t know where that hardcopy went. This entire thread is filled with quotes from bad fanfic, and jokes regarding them. We have plenty of authors here and sometimes we do have people going, I do that in my writing, is that bad? Should I feel bad? Do I need to stop? And that’s unfortunate, especially since the answer is usually “no” in any case. I think it’s a complex topic. There’s matters of degree, tone, and how people respond to hurt or offended writers. I feel pretty good about the level of dissent and response to concerns in this thread specifically at least. I don’t think most people here actually want to hurt or discourage anyone, and typically respond with chagrin if they discover this has happened. I don’t think most sporkers in general would actually want to cause anyone distress or discourage them. I do think it can be harder to modulate tone when there is a large community working towards a single purpose. It tends to affect the norms for what is considered reasonable. I think one piece of genuine wisdom that came from 4chan was, “None of us is as cruel as all of us.”
Yeah, that's...I cannot see an entire fic working that way at all. It could work wonderfully during certain sections, but it's not something you write a whole fic in!!
Yeah. It's an interesting way to highlight something to the reader, and personally I'd use something like that behind the falling action just before it starts to rise again, but would mess with the previous mood if attached to it, and you can't just leave the information out. But not the whole story, even if you include the chapter titles. Even House of Leaves acted like it was a normal book before it started playing with typesetting.
Haha, I was just gonna come in here are start talking about Danielewski. Not HoL, but The Familiar, vols. 1 - 5, which honestly don't even really pretend to be normal at all. He just goes for it in those. Personally, I find it pretty effective. I do have to be in a particular mood to read them though. I think maybe TF is more successful at that kind of thing because A) the style of writing weirdness changes based on viewpoint character and reflects their personalities/situations/emotional states, and B) isn't completely static throughout, e.g. line length and paragraph length varies, etc. I might be able to get into a fanfic that did that, but I think the monotony of only one style of writing/punctuation/paragraph length would put me off.
some summaries on ao3 are literally so self-evident that the author might as well not have a summary at all
this is more a gripe about AO3, not fanfic, but-- please, AO3, let me filter works with multiple rating levels at a time! sometimes i want to look specifically for Teen and below. sometimes i want to look for Mature AND Explicit (especially because it's not always clear where that line is.) all the archive warnings and categories have tick boxes where you can check multiple at a time, so why the hell are ratings in a drop-down menu?! it's really annoying to look for smut and have to do two separate searches with otherwise identical search terms to find everything.
... Hmm. That sounds like a relatively easy fix, and they've got a GitHub repo... But they're using Ruby on Rails, which I don't know anything about.
@hyrax this may be slightly annoying as a workaround, but the Exclude filters do have the little tick boxes, so you can use that to exclude the ratings you don’t want. it is odd that ao3 didn’t make the Include ratings filter a tick box system tho.
oh thank you! i didn't know that! ... where do i find the Exclude filters? i don't see them anywhere in the "Search Works" page, which is what i normally use to find things.
wait so you only get that sidebar if you go through "browse fandom"? (that would be why i didn't know about it.) i'm sure that's great for the big fandoms, but 99% of stuff i'm into is either small or dead fandoms. so when i want to filter Discworld fic, for example, i have to go Fandoms > Books & Literature > D > scroll scroll scroll (or ctrl F) > Discworld, and then i can filter by the ships i want and whatnot. that is significantly more annoying than just typing "discworld" in the fandom field and "havelock vetinari/samuel vimes" into the relationships field on the search page. sorry, i'm not griping at you, @GlassesBlu or @garden, that's genuinely useful. i'm just really annoyed that you don't get any of the filter options if you go through the "search" page instead of the "browse" page, because for my purposes "search" is way easier to use.
if i go "search works > Discworld" (or just type "discworld" into the search bar at the top right) i get no sidebar. if i go "browse works" or "fandoms" i get the sidebar, after i find the fandom i want, but as soon as i type anything into a search bar? no sidebar in the results.
:O How odd I don't know whats up with that eta: I misread you, I got the same results, you have to go to the discworld fandom thingo directly @hyrax
yeah, and my complaint is that "go to the discworld fandom thingo directly" takes a lot more steps than a search does, because it doesn't show up on the front page of the fandom browse function.
could you bookmark the discworld thingy in your web browser or keep a tab on your browser with it open?
Not sure if this is useful, but you can bookmark specific fandom tags using the favorite function, which will bring you straight to those fandom pages from your AO3 homepage.
@unknownanonymous @KingStarscream yeah, that's an option. but that's just one of my many fandoms, and it's annoying to have to bookmark every single fandom that i might occasionally want to find fic for. honestly i don't understand why AO3 doesn't show that sidebar when you do a search. or give you "exclude" options from the search page itself.
