4, 6, 10, 11
Thank you for the ask. :)
4. Answered here!
6. thoughts on critique
IMO critique is good and a necessary thing for developing one’s skills as a writer. Constructive, of course; silliness like ‘ermagerd u suk loki would nvr do that!!!11!!1’ or even well-articulated bashing is just people being petty and childish. However even with good, constructive criticism I think the critic has to be aware of which among their reactions are based on personal bias vs. what is simple a continuity problem or a worldview mismatch or awkward phrasing, etc. Awareness of how one’s own experiences in life effect one’s reaction to media are super important in critquing it. For example, I am intensely critical of Maya Hansen’s 'But sure you can call me a botanist’ line from IM3, a bit most people probably didn’t notice or care about, because of my professional background. Other people might not care; that’s okay and no failing of them as a critic. They’re not coming at it from a personal history relating to the topic.
I don’t actually agree with fandom’s stance on unsolicited concrit being verboten, because it results in a large number of fanfic writers’ never really improving, but I also get the reason it exists. A lot of people just make fic to relax and have a hobby, and to compare it to my amateur photography you can be assured if someone came to me critiquing my pictures of butterball chipmunks on treestumps or moths on my garage you can bet I’d respond with, “Well you’re certainly entitled to your wrong opinion.”
10. what are your strengths wrt writing?
I avoid heavy exposition, which is a strength in that it means I’m less inclined to go on and on and on in settings where that would be out of context. I don’t personally think exposition is always bad, though I do think few people know how to actually do it correctly when they first begin as a writer. They see reams of expository text by their favorite authors and emulate it–nothing wrong with emulating what you like–except, exposition can easily bore someone and be a huge turn off. At the start of a story, where you have about 5-10 sentences to get their attention and keep it, this is a bad thing to do. Related: no purple prose.
I think I’m probably pretty okay with dialogue, because (as mentioned below) I’m a talker and I…I won’t say I obssess over it, but I examine how people talk and try to find ways to bring it across in a written text. I’m very interested in how to write dialogue and make someone really hear it (not all the time, though, because in some works it’s not necessary), because in TV and movie fandoms that’s a lot of the work’s context. Said is my friend. Dialogue tag adverbs are on a tight leash.
Research. I have my professional career to thank for this, but I research the shit out of anything I’m writing. I don’t care if it’s a fandom piece. I read whole books on a single subject to do so.
11. what are your weaknesses wrt writing?
I am slow. Like, really slow. I consider this a weakness because it means I can often lose the thread of something I want to write before I get it on a page. This is tied to how I am an intensely slow reader, and I re-read everything I write, like, one billion times. That in turn causes me to memorize my story too much, so I lose track of where the reader might be in their own reading of it and what I might need to reinforce.
I typically write out of order, and any other out-of-order writers will probably know this means I might have a scene in mind and wind up trying to make a fic produce that scene. Sometimes this is totally okay but sometimes it’s not and the fic winds up being shoehorned. It’s hard to recognize that when it’s happening until after I’ve spent a few days/weeks going 'why can I not hook this into the rest’. It also means I have to do a few full rereads to remind myself of my continuity, or I’ll wind up with stranded sentences of things which were changed/removed. It also means I have to do a lot of 'stitching together’ and this is a very excruciating process.
I obssess too much over body language and physical gestures. One of my editing passes is actually a 'remove excessive physical gestures/references’ pass, that’s how bad I am about it.
I fall into sentence length and cadence patterns easily, so on anything >2k I do a full editing pass which is just looking for this.
I am hypersensitive to word repetition, so I wind up trying hard to avoid it, and that can result in lulz when it comes to word usage.
In terms of any movie/TV show fanfic, I think I’m probably too dialogue focused, though this probably stems from how a lot of the plot movement in films I prefer heavily favors character interaction over physical interaction. Even though I’m writing for action-oriented fandoms, I wind up applying a less action-y writing style to it. (Also, among people I know, I am a talker, so there’s that.)
Writing memeage.
