hells_half_acre (
hells_half_acre) wrote2012-04-29 11:09 pm
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Weird Things That Affect My Writing
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.
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.
no subject
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