Spoiler warnings

Over a piece of toast before heading out to the community garden (which I will do in just a moment) I read this story about spoilers in Sunday's Washington Post, which I guess counts as a spoiler in itself (much of the Sunday paper gets delivered on Saturday).

Warning before you click: contains spoilers for a number of TV shows you may not have watched. Also calls the spoiler epidemic that follows from adoption of new technology a "first world problem," which, you know, it totally is. But people have strong feelings about this sort of thing.

I tend to be spoiler-averse, though I'm not panicky about it and it depends on the context. I'm amazed and glad that I managed to remain mostly unspoiled about "Lost" until watching the remainder of it this spring (I did know about a few of the deaths, because you can't help seeing people's OH NOs all over the internet, but not the details, and not most of the plot). Which is part of why I try not to reveal its spoilers myself, so the remarkable number of people I know who haven't watched it can enjoy going ACK! just as I did if they so choose. But most of the time I recognize that if I'm watching a show years after it aired (or months, or days even) I'm going to hit some spoiler bumps, and sometimes (see "Angel") I just want to read a summary and get on with betaing people's fics. (Someday, penwiper26, I will watch the rest. Maybe while you're watching "Lost.")

So I try to remember to warn if discussing or writing fic for something other people may not have seen or read, whether for minor insignificant spoilers, spoilers that really matter, or spoilers that will be so incomprehensible they may not matter but you won't get anything out of reading the thing they're in. (A lot of things are in that last category, including the story I posted yesterday. Well, it's in categories two and three, I guess.)

I know some people care more than I do, and some much less. I'm also the sort who likes to approach book series or TV episodes in order, and I'd think that goes with wanting to avoid spoilers, although the two may not overlap completely. There's the jolt of discovery at important plot junctures, and then there's just wanting to learn about characters and happenings in a logical progression. Sometimes I can deal with "I know this character dies in season 3, but aside from that I want to view his arc as it's presented, with all the details that make him real and will make me regret him when he goes." And of course sometimes you want to anticipate big deaths and betrayals so they won't hurt so much. I certainly like going back and rereading/rewatching while knowing that the Big Reveal is coming, because foreshadowing's better after the fact. :)

The point of the article, I think, is that we're going to have to deal with this, more by getting used to be spoiled than by developing new etiquette for letting out secrets - though as usual the fan community is well ahead of the water cooler community in both these respects. I've done spoiler space and spoiler cuts and taking communities off the reading list, and I've also developed a quick-skimming gaze and a thicker skin, but in the end you just have to learn to be polite, tolerant and accepting, which is a good way to get through life in general. (Spoiler: we all die in the end, and it doesn't matter terribly much that you found out about Lady Sybil by reading the Health section.)

the Spirits of all Three shall strive within me*

A few months back isis did a post about her negative reaction to present tense fiction, in which she discusses how despite being supposed by many to be more "immediate," to her present tense is distancing. It's a good post *pause for you to read it* and I understand what she's getting at even though I don't "bounce off" present tense in the same way. I do often feel there's an excess of This Is The Now in fanfic, but as long as something's well written I don't care much what tense it's in, and there are lots of things that will throw me out of a story faster than verbs with s on the end.

However, I'm as prone to navel-gazing as the next writer (you all have figured this out by now) so I do think about tense along with all the other elements of a story (also, being a writer of time travel books gets you noticing it even if you're committed to using standard past tense narrative). Until last year, I wrote almost exclusively in past tense, and when I moved into using present I thought of it as an effect of suddenly writing a lot of visual media fic - that "immediacy" thing. (A lot of other things changed this past year, of course; one could make all kinds of false assumptions about, say, menopause or hyperthryroidism or empty nest syndrome causing present tense to break out. I don't think we need to go there.) Certainly when I'm writing, to choose a totally random example ha, Vorkosigan fic, I'm going to write in past tense, because my style is not wildly different from Lois Bujold's, and to some extent I'm modeling on the books. I can think of a few examples of Vorkosigan things I might choose present tense for - it would be interesting to write Memory fic from Simon's POV that way - but in general I don't consider anything but past tense.

(I'm not sure "consider" is the right word, actually. But more on that later.)

Some published fiction is written in present tense, of course; most of what got me thinking about this last week was finally getting around to reading Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, which by the way is just as wonderful as Wolf Hall, and let me tell you, reading about Thomas Cromwell and writing about Ben Linus (even a Ben Linus on the way to reformation, if I may confusingly use that word) is an interesting and strikingly appropriate combination. Oh my. No, I do not want to read the crossover, though I would like to watch the chess game, or listen to the trash talk. Anyway. WH and BUTB are in present tense, which I remember clearly not noticing until well into WH, which tells you how well it works. And I suppose if I were to write Mantel fanfic (there is a vanishingly small chance of this) it would have to be in present, or it wouldn't sound right. The opposite (writing present-tense fic based on something in past tense) is somewhat more likely (for me, I mean; other people do it all the time).

( you are reading more )

*The Past, the Present, and the Future, not the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Thanks again, Ebenezer.