fic tone

[lobelia321]

It occurred to me today that when I write a fic there is a sense that the fic has a particular *place*. There is a tone that is unique to it, and if I can only catch that tone, if I can only inhabit that place, the fic will be all right. It's more than word choice -- in a way, if I have found the story's place, it can govern the word choice. It's more than characterisation and pairing. It does have to do, for me, with setting and dynamics between the characters. But it's even more than that, it's quite gut deep-down. It's like striking the right chord on a musical instrument. Sometimes I try to psyche myself into it by listening to particular bits of music over and over, because music can serve to shut out rational planning and get at the intuitive muse or whatever to call it. But psyching doesn't always work. Sometimes it just comes with the flow of words: I look back at a paragraph or section and think, *that*, that just there is *it*.

It's a tone, a mood, a voice, a place. I can recreate it without being at the computer or with my notebook; I can sort of withdraw and settle into the fic-tone. And they are all quite different: Boring!Orli, for example, requires a completely different set of mind from Desert Prince, although both have Orlando and both are a series. They almost have different colours and shapes in my brain. They ask for different words and moods.

Some of my stories don't have a special tone or place. They were written in a hurry, as improvs, or they fell apart and never got posted. They remain on the surface.