I'm sort of a closet fan fiction style geek; I spend a lot of time watching the way people develop their styles, the way fandom changes or additions affect style, all that. It's sometimes useful - it's made it much easier for me to know which brand-new writers I should be watching most closely, and what part of my reactions to a given story arise from the writer's stylistic differences - but mostly it's just one of those very interesting things you can't help thinking about.
One of the coolest things about SGA for me has been seeing the effects of all the different starting fandoms on the way people write in this relatively new fandom that has not yet had time to develop a real, overarching fandom style. Even now, in the middle of the second season, there's enough variance that I can often work back to the styles for fandoms I don't read by seeing how the authors from said fandom write their first SGA stories. Which is totally useless, but loads of fun.
But I never expected anything as perfectly designed to enthrall the style geek in me as the one-more-time stories from the Getting a Sense of Cliches challenge; it was custom-made for examining fandom influences and perspective shifts. (For example, I formed - although of course cannot yet even begin to support - the opinion that a different level of investment in the characters and fandom produces a different kind of story, while other fandom influences tend to affect style more than content. On the other hand, not much seems to change voice; most authors still write a given character's dialog pretty much the way they always did, allowing for changes due to maturation as a writer.) It was just...wow. I read through most of those stories three times, because that's how long it took me to stop style geeking so I could, you know, actually appreciate the stories.
(And now, of course, I'm wondering about how this interacts with writer awareness, since you were aware that the it felt different when you wrote your story. Raises a lot of interesting cause and effect questions. Hmmm.)
...But, you know, this is probably much more than you wanted to know about my private obsessions. Suffice to say that style is something I always, always notice, because it makes me deeply happy to have stuff like this to think about while I'm waiting in line at the grocery store.
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One of the coolest things about SGA for me has been seeing the effects of all the different starting fandoms on the way people write in this relatively new fandom that has not yet had time to develop a real, overarching fandom style. Even now, in the middle of the second season, there's enough variance that I can often work back to the styles for fandoms I don't read by seeing how the authors from said fandom write their first SGA stories. Which is totally useless, but loads of fun.
But I never expected anything as perfectly designed to enthrall the style geek in me as the one-more-time stories from the Getting a Sense of Cliches challenge; it was custom-made for examining fandom influences and perspective shifts. (For example, I formed - although of course cannot yet even begin to support - the opinion that a different level of investment in the characters and fandom produces a different kind of story, while other fandom influences tend to affect style more than content. On the other hand, not much seems to change voice; most authors still write a given character's dialog pretty much the way they always did, allowing for changes due to maturation as a writer.) It was just...wow. I read through most of those stories three times, because that's how long it took me to stop style geeking so I could, you know, actually appreciate the stories.
(And now, of course, I'm wondering about how this interacts with writer awareness, since you were aware that the it felt different when you wrote your story. Raises a lot of interesting cause and effect questions. Hmmm.)
...But, you know, this is probably much more than you wanted to know about my private obsessions. Suffice to say that style is something I always, always notice, because it makes me deeply happy to have stuff like this to think about while I'm waiting in line at the grocery store.