Generalizing about individual writing styles

[sholio]

There's an interesting stylistic thing I've noticed lately, since I've been going through a heavy-duty fanfic-reading spell in a fandom with a lot of good writers. I'm not sure why I never noticed this before, and I don't know if it's universally true, but it seems to be very true of this and other fandoms I've spent a lot of time in.

It's a style difference between the way that slash and gen writers tend to write ... the good ones anyway. Slash writing is very sensual and lush. Even when it's not describing naked male bodies, there is a rich multi-textured style to the writing -- a way of describing things in terms of all five senses, spending several paragraphs describing a sunset or developing a setting. You can often recognize a story that's going to develop into slash even before the actual slash, because of a lingering sensuality in the descriptions of soft hairs on someone's arm glowing in the sun, of the texture of a leaf's edge or the glimmer of moonlight on water. The characters' inner life is similarly rich and detailed, where many paragraphs may be spent just on the thoughts passing through someone's mind in a moment.

The writing style in most gen fic tends to be more stripped down and bare, more focused on describing events and less on the fine details. Now, I don't mean that in a derogatory way, and actually, of the two, I tend to prefer the more basic, less flowery style, especially for long works. This applies to regular published books as well as fanfic. Probably it comes out of my reading preferences, which lean more towards SF and action/adventure and less towards romance and drama. Not to say I can't enjoy the slower, more textural works; they're just not usually my first preference.

What really made me notice the difference is that even when slash writers do gen fic, which many of them do (vignettes, at least), you can still see that sensuality in the writing. Because of this, a lot of the best, really exquisite short gen pieces -- from the perspective of being really well written and beautiful to read, if not necessarily pushing my particular fan buttons -- are written by slash writers.

Now, keep in mind here that my exposure to slash is pretty limited. I'm not opposed to it on principal, but it's not my first choice as a reader and I don't tend to seek it out. So I'm mainly coming to this from an outsider's perspective. Still, I'd be interested to know what other people think, especially those who have more experience than I do with reading both.

Comments

initiating fandom analysis engine 2.0!

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Hmm, as a reader/lover of both gen & slash, I was noticing this just recently in my latest (gen) fandom! Supernatural is a weird case, because there's a lot of folks writing for it that probably would be writing slash in most cases, but stop short at incest, so end up writing gen for the Winchester brothers, albeit highly emotionally charged gen. A couple of my favorite writers in the fandom don't actually write incest, but I've mentally pegged them as slash writers based on their style...

Most (of the best) slash tends to be sensual even when not sexual, internal, metaphoric...I hesitate to say that it's a 'female' style, but I think there are, broadly, feminine vs masculine writing styles. Masculine writers tend to write more plot-based/external-action stories; feminine writers tend to put more emphasis on characters, the action being mostly internal, the story driven by emotion rather than events. Both styles can allow for stories dwelling primarily on the theme, but the themes are often different (I'm inclined to venture that masculine themes are more moralistic/judgemental while feminine themes are more explorative/descriptive, except I have no background in lit studies and therefore am entirely talking out of my ass here...)

...and smarm often screws up slash fen, because smarm is technically gen, but often reads with the intense sensuality/closeness of slash, which slash fen find misleading and ultimately frustrating...

Personally, I like a balance of the two; I really appreciate the incredibly beautiful writing of the finest slash, but I like things to happen in stories, too. And some chars/fandoms are better suited to one style or another...

Re: initiating fandom analysis engine 2.0!

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

Ah, so it's not just me! :D I do agree with you about the feminine vs. masculine writing styles -- that's a good way to phrase it. Especially if you think of it as something that isn't necessarily tied to the author's actual, physical gender: that is, you have plenty of female authors writing masculine and (perhaps somewhat fewer) male authors writing in a feminine style, as well as people who incorporate aspects of both. But as a general stylistic tendency, "masculine" or "feminine" fits quite nicely, and I know exactly what you mean -- and yeah, most slash fen seem to write in a feminine style even when the work itself is not especially slashy. Maybe it's the verbal equivalent of the very pretty, stylized drawings in most yaoi manga and doujinshi. Sure, you *could* have yaoi that's drawn in the style of, say, Dragonball Z, but you just DON'T -- even actual DBZ yaoi seems to be drawn in a more graceful, feminine style than the series itself. The fans who look for that sort of thing just seek out certain stylistic qualities, I guess. You can write your slash like trucker porn but it isn't going to result in a whole lot of slash fen reading it ...

Hm, interesting point about smarm leaving slash fans feeling frustrated -- it's all build-up and no climax! I had never really thought about it that way ... it's probably the same way that h/c fen feel when there's a beautiful character-torture setup that never actually leads to h/c. (Which, by the way, Lost keeps doing to me. Aargh.)

Supernatural probably *is* kind of an odd case because of the incest factor and, based upon my very limited exposure to the show, there aren't really any other characters for slashers to fixate upon, are there? It's the boys or nothing. You know, it strikes me that different fandoms seem to have different levels of squick for various taboos, as well. While I don't read much Harry Potter fic, for example, my general browsings in the fandom have left me with the impression that incest's not a big taboo over there -- though maybe it's just because that particular fandom is so very huge that any particular oddball coupling will have a relatively large following compared to other fandoms just through sheer statistical variation.