[FFML] Re: [Fanfic][Ranma/SM] Relatively Absent: Chapter 4


At 08:27 PM 4/15/2003 -0700, Gary Kleppe wrote:

Mark Shurtleff <gaijin@sfcmd.com> wrote:


At 06:08 PM 4/15/2003 -0500, Jon Rosebaugh wrote:

Many people run the thoughts into the text like that. It may take a little
extra work, but you can get a lot more result out of it.


Actually, most standard fiction novels that I've read put the thoughts of a
character in normal quotes and the use something like >>"I wonder who he
is," she thought<< instead of she 'said'. I normally use italics for
thoughts when I write, since I publish primarily to my web site from a Word
source file.  The {{...}} convention is a compromise I use when converting
to plain text format.


Whether to indicate thoughts with any sort of special delimeter is a
stylistic choice. But if you do use delimiters, there's no need for a
key which explains what they signify. Just about any reader will figure
them out as soon as he or she sees them in context, and explaining the
obvious can make your readers feel as though you're insulting their
intelligence.

Gary Kleppe
http://www.garykleppe.org/comics.html


That's an interesting take, Gary. I don't use a key, except in the Author's 
notes when I have more than one, when I post a story to my website. I 
included it on the plain text FFML posts because I thought it was accepted 
custom to do so.

No implied insult intended, honest!

Decided to throw my 2 cents in on this one.

One of the biggest pet peeves I have with character thoughts (meaning the thing that just bugs me the most about them) is this use of "key"ing.

Creating a key at the begining of a fic (usually) with things like

<> = thoughts
** = panda signs
... = emotive silences
:) = old and busted
^_^= new hotness

ect.

But, my reasons for why they bug me isn't the same as Gary's. To me the "key" doesn't really insult anyone's intelligence... but the use of the key is what bugs me.

Lemme explain what I mean.

Thoughts... specifically the thoughts of characters have always been a mystery to a lot of people, mainly because the rules for how they are done don't fit well into the "plain text" format that fan fiction uses.

Many authors typically use one of a number of conventional representations of character thoughts when putting things in print, things like Italics (unquoted or quoted), single quote (rather than double quote), or just by doing dialog format without any quotes at all (this is the most confusing imo)
This "non-uniformity" of how authors represent the thoughts of their characters (imo) just ends up confusing many authors.
However, much of this confusion can be overcome by using narative voice instead of thoughts... where something like this

Ben looked around the bare room. "Now that Doris is gone, there is little to keep me here," he thought to himself. He started packing his few belongings with an air of saddness, then added to himself."It's time for me to leave this place."

to this

Ben looked around the bare room. Now that Doris was gone, there was little to keep him here. He started packing his few belongings. It was time for him to go.

Narative voice... it's a good thing.

Of course there are times that voiceing thoughts is unavoidable to advancing the story, and I opt for the no quotes italics option (This is to my knowledge the most accepted format for indicating thoughts).

Unfortunately italics can't make the leap into fanfic plain text... unless you do it in rich text/html that is, and honestly I don't know why we don't use rich text/html instead of this plain text format.

Of course there are some ways to indicate italics that are shared among most word processors (underscores are placed on either side of the italicized text) such that if you copy and paste the text into your word processor, that it'll appear as italics. But I do think that some sort of "standard" needs to be established to clarify how thoughts can be distinguished in electronic fiction, since they have them in print fiction.