#26 — Vanek! with a Jurco

[dekedangle_rpf_mod]

This is the twenty-sixth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Comments

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

It means you fall in love with your words so much, you won't cut extraneous scenes or characters, even if they don't help the story.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

That's a pretty uncharitable take on things. Maybe I don't want to "help the story". What does that even mean, anyway? There are lots of ways to write "good" fic and there's no hard and fast objective standard. To me, self-indulgent fic just means writing your favorite things, even if might not be popular.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Uncharitable? I thought I was answering a question about what people mean by the term self-indulgent? I'm not calling your writing self-indulgent. I don't even know you or your writing.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

This. I don't interpret self-indulgent as being any different than iddy or idfic, as someone described above. Self-indulgent fic can be well-written or poorly written, just like anything else.

I feel like what people don't recognize is that a story is always going to be emphasizing some themes and elements over others. It's built into the medium. A self-indulgent story is one that emphasizes the things you most enjoy and spends less time on the things you don't. For me, a self-indulgent sex pollen fic would spend most of the time on the emotional aftermath. For lots of other people, a self-indulgent sex pollen fic would just focus on the porn! Neither of those is inherently a bad story.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

A the AYRT RT

I wouldn't call anything you mentioned self-indulgent, so maybe we just define the term differently. But I meant like you came up with a really poetic and cool way to describe the color red, so you leave in the sentence because you love how it sounds even though the only red thing in the fic is the victim's blood gushing out and the flowery description doesn't go with murderer's triumphant POV. But you're so proud of that description, you can't bear to cut it.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

this is how i've always defined it. not as anything to do with the writing, necessarily, but a story that is exactly the kind of story an author loves.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

Indulgent has a wallowing feel that I would not ascribe to someone just choosing subject matter they like.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

Helping the story is such a self-explanatory statement. Honestly. Fics generally have more than one thing counting for or against it, but the reasons stated by AYRT are in the negative column for a lot of otherwise good fic. IMO, it comes up as a complaint in the fic discussion thread frequently enough to be an objectively bad feature.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

No, "helping the story" is such a self-important statement, premised on the idea that things you think will help the story will, in fact, objectively do so, and that things you think will be detrimental to the story will, in fact, objectively be so.

But that's kind of bullshit. I personally feel that non-linear narratives should die a quick death and the authors who use it are probably trying too hard to be deep. But that's my personal opinion. Non-linear narratives are not objectively bad (or good). Authors don't owe me linear narratives.

And if they want to write it, it's not something that "shouldn't be there but was because they wanted to self-indulge". It's something that's there because they wanted to write it.

Re: Writing Thread

[(Anonymous)]

You can keep acting like there aren't factors that worsen a fic, but it'll still be pretending. It's laughable, but you do you. But you can stop acting like this is a simple case of, "Thos author didn't write what I want, wah." There's a reason people value honest betas, readers, and second opinions; because people often aren't as objective with their own work. They ~~indulge~~ at points where they shouldn't. Yes, it's what they wanted to write at the time. No, that doesn't mean it was the best choice for that fic, and a decent amount of writers, myself included, care about fixing those mistakes.