I'm always a day late and dollar short. I'd heard about fanfiction.net, and understood vaguely that 50 Shades (which I couldn't get into) started off as fan fiction, but I'd never delved into the whole concept. Last night, I stumbled across the site in my internet wanderings.
Imagine my delight in finding an entire site devoted to stories about almost every conceivable (and inconceivable) movie or television show ever made. It's a procrastinator's paradise, second only to Pinterest! Not feeling much like beating the dead horse that my WIP's prologue had become, I dove headfirst into the wealth of other people's writing, good, bad and indifferent.
I found a romance story based on one of my favorite historical movies. The writing was competent, sorta corny, and crammed with anachronistic dialogue and behavior with just a hint of bad grammar together with a refreshing lack of a plausible plot. But damned if I wasn't totally into it! I missed my bedtime by an hour driving obsessively through chapter after chapter. Like when you eat an entire box of Double Stuf Oreos and you feel sick and queasy, but you gotta have just...one...more...!
And I discovered one of two things: either I have wretched taste in writing, OR the author of this page-turning super-drama knows something that I don't. She went places you don't go if you want to be a "good" writer. And I followed right along! Yeah, I was still hooting at some of the plot twists and rolling my eyes at the dialogue, but I was hooked. Would I have paid to read it? I don't know. Maybe!
How did she grab hold of my imagination and my emotions and totally enthrall me with a work that I had been sniggering at in the first paragraphs? More importantly, how can I do the same thing? Well, without the sniggering part, of course.
What is she doing right that I'm doing wrong? How do you get that energy, that spark, that whatever-it-is that gives the whole thing it's own crazy momentum that sucks a reader in and doesn't turn loose until the last page?
Wow. I gotta read some more of this stuff.
Imagine my delight in finding an entire site devoted to stories about almost every conceivable (and inconceivable) movie or television show ever made. It's a procrastinator's paradise, second only to Pinterest! Not feeling much like beating the dead horse that my WIP's prologue had become, I dove headfirst into the wealth of other people's writing, good, bad and indifferent.
I found a romance story based on one of my favorite historical movies. The writing was competent, sorta corny, and crammed with anachronistic dialogue and behavior with just a hint of bad grammar together with a refreshing lack of a plausible plot. But damned if I wasn't totally into it! I missed my bedtime by an hour driving obsessively through chapter after chapter. Like when you eat an entire box of Double Stuf Oreos and you feel sick and queasy, but you gotta have just...one...more...!
And I discovered one of two things: either I have wretched taste in writing, OR the author of this page-turning super-drama knows something that I don't. She went places you don't go if you want to be a "good" writer. And I followed right along! Yeah, I was still hooting at some of the plot twists and rolling my eyes at the dialogue, but I was hooked. Would I have paid to read it? I don't know. Maybe!
How did she grab hold of my imagination and my emotions and totally enthrall me with a work that I had been sniggering at in the first paragraphs? More importantly, how can I do the same thing? Well, without the sniggering part, of course.
What is she doing right that I'm doing wrong? How do you get that energy, that spark, that whatever-it-is that gives the whole thing it's own crazy momentum that sucks a reader in and doesn't turn loose until the last page?
Wow. I gotta read some more of this stuff.