For those who don't know what slash is, visit this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction
For those who do know what slash is and who write slash fiction, on with the blog post: pronouns, names and POV. This topic will have a number of posts, and that's why I called the first edition one.
A lot of writers who send in submissions with slash content have awkward use of pronouns, names, and POV. These three things are related when it comes to clarity in a story. I'll begin with the type of poor use I dislike the most: pronouns assigned to the POV character only.
Ok, so let's say a guy named Joe is the POV character of a scene, and the other guy is called Gary. Joe and Gary. I'll write a short scene showing what I mean about pronouns assigned to POV character only.
He entered the room and found Gary seated on the foot of the bed. Gary looked up and smiled.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Gary replied.
He moved closer. Gary stood, arms opening to welcome him. They embraced, his hands sliding around the defined muscles of Gary's flank and rising up to splay across that perfect back.
All right, there it is. I hope it was very clear to you how badly written this sort of prose is. It's horrible; horrible to edit, horrible to read.
What do we see up there? Truly, only Joe has the use of pronouns. Believe it or not, I have seen published ebooks in which authors have assigned POV through pronouns. This method of POV assignment is awkward, and the fault gets compounded with more faults to make up for the sloppy/lazy use of pronouns.
First screwy thing that happens when assigning pronouns to the POV character only: bad traffic directions for the reader. Look at line two ("Hey," he said.): Readers will assign a pronoun automatically to the last person mentioned, whether this person is mentioned by proper name or not. The last person mentioned was not Joe but Gary. There is instant reader confusion the moment "he" is used to mean Joe in place of Gary when nothing was done to refocus the reader on who is performing the next action (in this case, speech is the next action). Instead of "he said", it should have read "Joe said".
Remember this: pronouns accord to the last noun mentioned. Whether that pronoun is he, she or it, that pronoun accords to the last noun mentioned. Readers logically tag their attention to the last noun mentioned. The moment a writer misuses a pronoun to refer to a noun other than the last one mentioned, the writer has misdirected the reader. Reader misdirection is not a good idea. Pronouns, the proper use of them, are like traffic signs on a busy highway.
You'll see the same misdirection happening in my example in the first line of para three (He moved closer). Again, last person acting was Gary, but who did I mean? Joe. Awful. Just awful traffic directions. Reader moves forward by one line and sees Gary standing up. Gary couldn't have been the one moving forward. So, once again, through poor use of pronouns, I've made my reader take a step back to work out my writing logic, rather than letting the reader sink into my story smoothly.
Stupid thing to do, assigning pronouns to POV only.
Compound problem: The other character's name will crop up a lot, enough to start getting awkward.
Compound problem two: To offset compound problem one, authors throw out words like those arms instead of Gary's arms, or that back, instead of Gary's back. Or, worst of all, you'll see the author saying the other man, inadvertantly making the reader think a third man is present. Or you'll see overuse of the man or his lover instead of the name Gary. His lover is at least better than using the man throughout the story, but still, if the author truly knew how to use pronouns and understood POV, this fault wouldn't be seen.
Why is using those arms and that back a fault? Well, those and that are words used to refer to nouns previously mentioned, but in my example, was his back mentioned beforehand? No. And yet authors with this terrible style choice do use those and that to refer to nouns that never came up in the story beforehand.
What does this say to me when I read a submission? That if I accept, I'll have a nightmare edit on hand. I'll have to teach this author the trade rather than do my real job.
Don't get me wrong. I do teach authors how to write better and I'm often happy to do so, but a novel written with this magnitude of errors just doesn't get accepted. The author is well below the point of where I can efficiently teach him/her the tricks of POV, which includes proper understanding of pronouns.
Last note on this style choice: Replace he with I, his with my, him with me, they with we. Do you see that? A story written in this style is first person revisited as third person. I have to wonder if authors with ebooks published in this style wrote first person novels that they hastily revamped into third person using search and replace. Whatever the case, I see it and think "not professional at all, not finished, worse than draft".
One of the excuses for this fault: Well, we write slash and we don't want the character names to show up in the text too often.
Get out my bazooka. That's an excuse that deserves destruction. Go read a well-written book with two male characters, and I'm not suggesting a slash fiction book. Any well-written, best seller with two male characters acting at the same time in the same scene: you want to bet the author did not use this style choice? So a name crops up more often. So what? And besides, if an author takes the time to analyze the use of pronouns and POV, names can be avoided to some extent. Pronouns can be avoided too. It's all a matter of carefully choosing your sentence subjects.
But that's enough for this post. We'll get to choice of sentence subjects later.Labels: pronouns and names, slash fiction |
