I don't think this spam; I think this is pointed technique discussion
and I've changed the tag appropriately.

Mike Noakes wrote:

the other numerous 'fanfic-conventions' that you never find in normal
fiction.  Flashback indicators aside, there's the large number of
dialogue/thought indicators: asteriks, tildas, etc... Personally, I can't
think of a single novel I've read that does so.

Actually, I was pondering this situation lately--I remember some
disagreement about the convention in some recent c&c. In some formal
prose, conscious thoughts are treated as quoted dialog and in others the
words are italicized, usually without quotes (sometimes both). Since you
can't underline text, the closest approximation is to _underscore the
words_ to mark the beginning and end of an underlined/italicized
passage; sometimes *asterisks* mark the emphasis but that's
trickier--some people read that as to denote boldfaced type. In the
works of Mercedes Lacky, where there is a great deal of telepathic
conversation, such passages are enclosed with colons and italicized.
Personally I think it looks ugly but it works in print.

So to summarize, actually it's not a fanfic convention, but an
adaptation of a valid literary technique which is widely, but not
exclusively, used.

an author: describing a character via episode or manga references (ie.
'she was dressed just like in that OAV episode where...').  It'd be 

Yes, that IS the height of laziness -- and it shuts out important story
elements from the reader who's not familiar with that exact detail. It
can be a hard temptation to resist, particularly if trying for a visual
or "cinematic" style of writing, or script form, but it SHOULD be.

giving pages of force-fed introductory details, for instance.  Is it
really necessary to say: this story takes place after v.32, but before
v.34, though the Googlesmash hyper-blast mongotechnique hasn't been learnt
yet?  If the reader is familiar with the series (and that, as far as I 

I think that it's a good idea, in the case of series with multiple
versions such as TV/OAV/manga continuity to state that flat out. As was
said recently, most people don't care which continuity an author uses as
long as they pick one and stay with it. Still, the statement should be a
concise one sentance long (per series, if a crossover).

One thing that I do that seems very fanfic-y may annoy you: I use scene
headers where appropriate, and I use them to show flashbacks by
including the date/time. You know, as you often see in the opening parts
of tense action movies: "An abandoned airforce base at Krovjeck,
Bylorussia, five years ago." I do this because I have multiple threads
and I jump around between them a lot. If I stopped to redescribe the
scene every time, it'd get boring, and if my story were being *watched*
it'd be immediately obvious that the scene shift had occurred. My
current story in progress has a header on *every scene* and my
pre-readers told me that it 1) made it seem like a tv episode 2) read
fast and 3) didn't annoy them at all.


Well, my 2 �.
---
Nightman
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mredding
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