Weird Things That Affect My Writing

[hells_half_acre]

So, I've noticed a few things about my writing as I've been working on The Novel Project. For your entertainment, here they are:

1. Even when I'm writing "bad guy" dialogue I still can't bring myself to use homophobic slurs. Like...I just can't type them. It's weird, because I think I wouldn't have trouble writing racist things, and I've had no problem having them use the word "retard"...but, for some reason I just can't bring myself to type that word that means cigarette in the UK. :P Which is really ridiculous, because I used to say it all the time myself when I was around 13 and didn't know any better.* Anyway, so, my bad guys are surprisingly tolerant assholes.

2. Every time I use the word "she", I think of my grandmother saying "Who's she, the cat's mother?" And then I want to replace it with the woman's name.

3. After reading and writing mostly stories involving only men, I tend to use full names rather than pronouns, even in scenes where there is only one boy and one girl. At least one of my readers finds it annoying, but I just can't stop. :P

4. Even though I'm a huge supporter of the evolution of language, now that I KNOW "alright" isn't a word, I have a really hard time spelling it that way...but, "all right" looks ridiculous to me...so I'm constantly using "okay" instead.

I'm sure there are more...but these are the main ones. 

*I was never homophobic. I just didn't understand that joining my friends in using homophobic language wasn't helping society.

Comments

[et-tu-lj.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a story where derogatory language would have been appropriate, but I think I'd probably be the same way. Most of the time I find myself writing from the POV of the character who'd be hurt by such words so I can write it in order to show the reaction to it, but I'd struggle with it if I couldn't show the internal reaction. Tbh, I have trouble using even made up slurs like mudblood, which gets annoying when writing internal Death Eater politics. *sigh*

I know exactly what you mean about getting used to writing all male scenes and having to be OCD about your pronouns. Though for me it's something I have to pay close attention to, so when I actually have a man and a woman talking it's horribly liberating and exciting. I get carried away and use nothing but pronouns for the whole scene because I CAN. lol

"All right" bothers me endlessly. I use "alright" in dialogue if the character's relaxed and informal. If they're uptight and I can't justify it I use "okay" or something else instead, to avoid "all right." So that choice becomes part of the style bible for each character because I'm hyperconscious of it every time.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Yeah...in the chapter of The Novel Project going out this week (or possibly two weeks from now), I think I eventually just had to use the word "fruitcake" instead of the other word, because....yeah, I just couldn't do it. :P

But that's the odd part, because I'm fine with mudblood and even racial derogatory terms - but, maybe it's like you said, I can only do it from certain perspectives and in certain circumstances - and the part of my novel where I needed to us the word, there wasn't a point made about the reaction...so it would have just been...out there.

Though for me it's something I have to pay close attention to, so when I actually have a man and a woman talking it's horribly liberating and exciting. I get carried away and use nothing but pronouns for the whole scene because I CAN. lol

It's funny, because before I got into fanfiction, I used to write a lot of short stories where I didn't use names AT all...it was either all "I" and "you" or all "he" and "she". It's like I'm either one extreme or the other :P

I just wish some authority somewhere would make "alright" an officially recognized and grammatically correct word so that I could stop being so self-conscious about it. :P But yeah, I'm the same as you...I think I do end up putting "alright" for a lot of my informal characters in fanfiction, and then just use "okay" the rest of the time.

[et-tu-lj.livejournal.com]

I used to write a lot of short stories where I didn't use names AT all

I still do that, even in fanfiction. I like playing with reader expectation, so it plays against whichever character they think it is, or can be read in more than one way. Makes it hard to fill in header info though. lol