Fic Talk > General Discussion
The BSB fanfic related pet peeve thread
Carter-Orange:
I'm guilty :(
I've put a few lines of songs into one of my fics, but it's supposed to be Nick writing a few lines of poetry, so it does have a purpose.
I don't mind songs in fics if they are relevent to the story.
julilly:
--- Quote from: Carter-Orange on February 21, 2009, 09:06:09 AM ---I'm guilty :(
I've put a few lines of songs into one of my fics, but it's supposed to be Nick writing a few lines of poetry, so it does have a purpose.
I don't mind songs in fics if they are relevent to the story.
--- End quote ---
Yes but that's a few lines. I hate when the whole chapter is like:
John went to the store. He heard a song on the in-store satellite radio that they always kept tuned to the same station even though there's no way he would know that.
2
5
l
i
n
e
s
o
f
l
y
r
i
c
s
So he left cuz he didn't like that song.
Chaos:
I'm with you; if it's relevant to the story, I don't mind it at all. However, there are some stories where the lyrics are being used in lieu of an actual story and that's really not my cup of tea. (mmm tea.) It can be nice to have a "soundtrack" and it's okay to use more than a few lines of a song if it's actually serving a purpose other than to just simply have the song in the story (i.e. I've read stories that were essentially about 100 words longer than the lyrics to the song that is included in the story--there is one sentance of "fic" to one verse of song, etc...)
Of course, I must say that we all have done most of these things. It all comes with developing our writing. I *know* I'm still guilty of the being too wordy and of doing the telling-not-showing (still catch myself doing that all the time...ugh!) And I'm terrible when it comes to using proper grammar (altough sometimes I do that purposely, depending on the character...) I like reading these threads to find other things that I'm doing that I may not even be aware of until someone else points them out.
Also note, even if you recognize something from your writing in threads like this, remember that there are exceptions to every rule. Just because you (proverbial, not you specifically ;)) do something mentioned here, doesn't make your writing bad by any means--it's just something that you may want to be aware of when you are writing and make decisions like "is this really necessary to the story/does it serve a purpose other than to show that I like it?".
RokofAges75:
Speaking of song lyrics... there was this fic I read once (not on AC) where the author posted the lyrics to an entire song as one chapter... and that was it. That was the whole chapter. None of her writing at all; just this song LOL.
Chaos:
I think I've read that one ;)
The thing with that is that they could actually get into trouble for copyright infringement for doing just that (it's unlikely that anyone would pursue it; especially with all those lyric sites out there, but...technica lly speaking, they're using more than what would be considered "fair use".) If it's just a few lines, it's not so much of a copyright issue, but the whole thing--especially if not including some original work as well...yeeeah. pushing it. lol
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