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Okay, might as well cover the writing tic now since I've been collecting examples. I have lots of things I overuse and/or use over and over in writing (after talking about it here, I actually used the light-on-liquid thing in "And Love Itself Have Rest," and anyone who wants to count the number of "more sharply than he/she intended"s in my output may feel free to). But one that's actually been pretty effective is what I call the long and lyrical sentence. These frequently come at the end of stories, chapters, significant paragraphs, etc., but they can occur anywhere. I thought about this because I used one at the end of "Improbability":
The horizon whirls; the plain is ablaze with flowers; the river is close enough to touch, and they are laughing, laughing, and the world is improbably beautiful.
and it was strangely familiar, and all the others I've used popped into my head, and I was not sure whether to be embarrassed or not; forgive me, for I know not what I do, except when I do it on purpose. There you are: lots of commas and a few semicolons for good measure, or even colons, and probably some repetition and something that sounds like a literary reference even if it's frequently not. And a fair amount of attention to the right words, and quite often a calling back to imagery used earlier (the landscape bits are not accidental. And landscapes are another writing tic of mine). So it's not lazy writing, though it would get me thrown out of a good many schools of thought. It's just a good way to set up a rhythm that gets attention, I guess, and I enjoy doing it a lot, but I'm sure it goes over the top quite often. *shrugs*
I've got a modest one in the current fic (and may have more before the end), from my jump pilot:
Britta's consciousness had hurtled through tunnels of fire, spread like a net of twanging sensory receptors across the stars, exploded in blue-green ecstasy of cinnamon and fireflies, heard symphonies played by gods.
There are certain characters who lend themselves to this sort of phrasing; interestingly, I felt John Watson was one, and James Hathaway apparently isn't, or at least I went a whole fic in his POV without going for the long and lyrical. Shepherd Book did it for me:
And then Kaylee laughed, a sun-on-cornfields laugh, guileless and delighted, in which darkness and the past were absent and nothing mattered but this moment, this lightening, this enlightenment.
And, in a more staccato, multi-sentence way, Gregor Vorbarra:
A memory, or a fantasy: an old man sitting in one of those chairs, keen eyes in a ravaged face. Measured footsteps to approach, an accustomed curbing of impatient energy; a cool hand on his forehead, in blessing. Ash, not snowflakes, falling from the sky.
And Neville Longbottom:
The alkaline tang of desert air; the near-painful sharpness of mountain fir and pine; the earth-scented bath of temperate rainforest; the inhaled breath of distant thunderstorm across a grassy plain as he searched for the blue eye of a flower none but wizards could see or care enough about to preserve.
And Severus Snape, in a big way:
The words shifted, tumbled about, formed themselves into hoops and dived through each other, hung in glittering chains in the air like Christmas lights, made towers and poems and sentences that burned themselves into Snape's brain: profound, eternal truths that he was certain he would never forget and that he knew quite well would soon vanish without trace, like that perfect moment in a dream that can never be recalled afterwards, leaving you longing for it the rest of your life.
The fic I'm editing and probably posting is "In Time of Pestilence" which is a now-AU Snapefic crossover with my original universe; I put it up on LJ ages ago, but I think it deserves a bigger audience. Here's the last sentence:
And when he spoke in response, in thanks and in farewell, he could hear the words in Dutch and in English and in a language that was older than both and as new as syllables meeting the air for the first time; and they went up like a cloud lifting darkness from the heart, and they came down like the snow swirling around the towers of Hogwarts, brightness falling from the air, to settle silently in the soft, drifting, joyful deeps of winter.
Sometimes I feel someone needs to be hit in the face with a snowball after one of those. Yikes. But it's pretty.
I do it in my original fic, too. One of my favorite examples:
Dreams lagged against reality, and therefore George's first music dream in months came at the end of two weeks spent with a violin tucked under his chin, after he'd become sick of sentimental French love songs and sprightly dance tunes and even of the bits of Leclair he could remember, after he'd spent hard-earned money to replace strings and mend a smashed bridge, after he'd thrown the cheap and squeaky fiddle he'd pilfered into the middle of the Channel in an inadvisable fit of pique, after he had slept at last on the soil of England.
It's the bump at the end that makes that one. Rhythm shifts help; here's a multi-sentence Olivia moment:
The words were English, archaic even at their seventeenth-century composition, and he spoke them not like a modern man reading from a worn leather Bible, but with the vowels and cadences in which he might have preached them to a congregation of wigs and starched petticoats, from a London pulpit later destroyed by the Great Fire. She knew that if she turned she would see the insignificant Estonian in his once-smart nineteen thirties suit, his brown hair chopped short, his hat plumed with seagull droppings. She kept her eyes on the water.
And oh, you know what else this style is good for? Sex.
There were valid premises inherent in Philippe's fingers trailing across her palm, and suppositions in his nibbles on her ear, and gorgeous theorems expressed by the patterns of his warm breath: his whole thesis was so very worth testing. His hand was on her knee now, sliding up her thigh, finding the bare flesh above the stocking, finding the heat and the wanting; she could lie here, now, anchored by these ancient stones, and let him bind her to this moment forever.
I do try to limit myself to a few flourishes here and there; those last two were in the same scene, but at least they're not Snapily endless.
So, what things do you do in writing over and over, and do you want to whap yourself in the face with a snowball or are you going to keep doing them? Or maybe that was "and" instead of "or." :)
The horizon whirls; the plain is ablaze with flowers; the river is close enough to touch, and they are laughing, laughing, and the world is improbably beautiful.
and it was strangely familiar, and all the others I've used popped into my head, and I was not sure whether to be embarrassed or not; forgive me, for I know not what I do, except when I do it on purpose. There you are: lots of commas and a few semicolons for good measure, or even colons, and probably some repetition and something that sounds like a literary reference even if it's frequently not. And a fair amount of attention to the right words, and quite often a calling back to imagery used earlier (the landscape bits are not accidental. And landscapes are another writing tic of mine). So it's not lazy writing, though it would get me thrown out of a good many schools of thought. It's just a good way to set up a rhythm that gets attention, I guess, and I enjoy doing it a lot, but I'm sure it goes over the top quite often. *shrugs*
I've got a modest one in the current fic (and may have more before the end), from my jump pilot:
Britta's consciousness had hurtled through tunnels of fire, spread like a net of twanging sensory receptors across the stars, exploded in blue-green ecstasy of cinnamon and fireflies, heard symphonies played by gods.
There are certain characters who lend themselves to this sort of phrasing; interestingly, I felt John Watson was one, and James Hathaway apparently isn't, or at least I went a whole fic in his POV without going for the long and lyrical. Shepherd Book did it for me:
And then Kaylee laughed, a sun-on-cornfields laugh, guileless and delighted, in which darkness and the past were absent and nothing mattered but this moment, this lightening, this enlightenment.
And, in a more staccato, multi-sentence way, Gregor Vorbarra:
A memory, or a fantasy: an old man sitting in one of those chairs, keen eyes in a ravaged face. Measured footsteps to approach, an accustomed curbing of impatient energy; a cool hand on his forehead, in blessing. Ash, not snowflakes, falling from the sky.
And Neville Longbottom:
The alkaline tang of desert air; the near-painful sharpness of mountain fir and pine; the earth-scented bath of temperate rainforest; the inhaled breath of distant thunderstorm across a grassy plain as he searched for the blue eye of a flower none but wizards could see or care enough about to preserve.
And Severus Snape, in a big way:
The words shifted, tumbled about, formed themselves into hoops and dived through each other, hung in glittering chains in the air like Christmas lights, made towers and poems and sentences that burned themselves into Snape's brain: profound, eternal truths that he was certain he would never forget and that he knew quite well would soon vanish without trace, like that perfect moment in a dream that can never be recalled afterwards, leaving you longing for it the rest of your life.
The fic I'm editing and probably posting is "In Time of Pestilence" which is a now-AU Snapefic crossover with my original universe; I put it up on LJ ages ago, but I think it deserves a bigger audience. Here's the last sentence:
And when he spoke in response, in thanks and in farewell, he could hear the words in Dutch and in English and in a language that was older than both and as new as syllables meeting the air for the first time; and they went up like a cloud lifting darkness from the heart, and they came down like the snow swirling around the towers of Hogwarts, brightness falling from the air, to settle silently in the soft, drifting, joyful deeps of winter.
Sometimes I feel someone needs to be hit in the face with a snowball after one of those. Yikes. But it's pretty.
I do it in my original fic, too. One of my favorite examples:
Dreams lagged against reality, and therefore George's first music dream in months came at the end of two weeks spent with a violin tucked under his chin, after he'd become sick of sentimental French love songs and sprightly dance tunes and even of the bits of Leclair he could remember, after he'd spent hard-earned money to replace strings and mend a smashed bridge, after he'd thrown the cheap and squeaky fiddle he'd pilfered into the middle of the Channel in an inadvisable fit of pique, after he had slept at last on the soil of England.
It's the bump at the end that makes that one. Rhythm shifts help; here's a multi-sentence Olivia moment:
The words were English, archaic even at their seventeenth-century composition, and he spoke them not like a modern man reading from a worn leather Bible, but with the vowels and cadences in which he might have preached them to a congregation of wigs and starched petticoats, from a London pulpit later destroyed by the Great Fire. She knew that if she turned she would see the insignificant Estonian in his once-smart nineteen thirties suit, his brown hair chopped short, his hat plumed with seagull droppings. She kept her eyes on the water.
And oh, you know what else this style is good for? Sex.
There were valid premises inherent in Philippe's fingers trailing across her palm, and suppositions in his nibbles on her ear, and gorgeous theorems expressed by the patterns of his warm breath: his whole thesis was so very worth testing. His hand was on her knee now, sliding up her thigh, finding the bare flesh above the stocking, finding the heat and the wanting; she could lie here, now, anchored by these ancient stones, and let him bind her to this moment forever.
I do try to limit myself to a few flourishes here and there; those last two were in the same scene, but at least they're not Snapily endless.
So, what things do you do in writing over and over, and do you want to whap yourself in the face with a snowball or are you going to keep doing them? Or maybe that was "and" instead of "or." :)
no subject
Date: 2012-08-22 07:28 pm (UTC)From:In the 'and' category: tricolons, as we were taught to call them when studying Virgil, things happening in threes, lists of three, sentences with three clauses (oops, there's one). I do that all the time, and it mostly works for me, though sometimes consciously breaking it with four or one works even better. Ascending tricolons, mostly, though descending ones are often good for humour. I almost always end stories with an ascending tricolon. Other rhythmic patterns also come up from time to time - I like varying short staccato words and phrases with long lingering ones, and I am generally very conscious of the rhythm of what I write as I write it and how it fits the mood I'm trying to evoke. I blame being made to learn prosody and scansion at the age of thirteen ;-).
no subject
Date: 2012-08-22 07:40 pm (UTC)From:The "moment" thing, yes; I've become very aware of that and I do the same scan and replace. And the face thing. And also cutting adverbs where not necessary. Interestingly, I glanced through the snippets I posted above and they don't have a lot of adverbs in them; apparently when I write that way I depend on nouns and adjectives rather than the reflexive adverbs I stick in other places.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-23 02:51 am (UTC)From:I have managed to get rid of breaths characters didn't know they were holding, but I notice them in too much writing, including pro writing. My characters still let out barks of laughter, though.
I am also very aware of cadence and rhythm in my writing, and in that of others.
no subject
Date: 2012-08-23 11:45 am (UTC)From: