Writing Meme: "E"

[loaded_march]

If you want to prompt for the writing meme, please go here!

lizzy61 asked for "E", which is: Share one of your strengths.

I can walk in a straight line after being twirled on my rolling office chair for five minutes straight -- wait, this is about writing strengths.  Haha.  Erm.  Ignore that.


I had to think about that one.  I'm not sure what I'd personally consider one of my strengths.  What do we mean by "strengths"?  Is it powerful, emotional writing that can squeeze tears out of the toughest reader?  Is it the ability to turn in something that is absolutely pristine, grammar-wise -- don't knock it, people who grammar like a boss are to be feared.  Is it being able to outline so precisely that all you have to do later is add in dialogue?

There are always things that I wish were my strengths, but probably aren't really.  And what I think are my strengths?  Other people might disagree.

And that's okay!

But that doesn't help me to answer this question.

Right.  Strengths.  Strengths.  *mutters*  Strengths.

Just one, right?


I will go with the easy answer and go with fight and action scenes.  Gun fights.  Knock-down and drag-out fist fights.  Wailing fists and banshee screaming and berserker attacks.  Buildings falling down around people's ears, crazy aerial combat, desperate struggles for safety.

Or, like in this snippet from an unfinished/unpublished Merlin fic tentatively entitled Drive, a car race:


The Eclipse and the Civic roared up the street, hugged a tight turn that had the Eclipse in the lead by a slim margin, and disappeared.

"Not going to get much of a chance to watch him drive from here, are we?" Arthur remarked.  Several people were drifting away, bored now that the initial excitement had died.  Other people, though, were cracking tablets and cell phones open.

"A head-to-head race like this?  Believe me, they've got it planned out with video all along the route," Gwaine said.  He pulled out his phone, thumbed a few commands, and Arthur's iPhone vibrated.  Arthur glanced at the text message from Gwaine with the web address, and loaded it up.

It was a web feed with multiple cameras spliced into one single output, and Arthur held out his phone so that the three of them could watch it.  The Civic and the Eclipse stayed neck and neck on a clear stretch of road, but the game changed when they hit a more populated area.  A slow-moving box truck forced them to split up -- the Eclipse into oncoming traffic, weaving with careful, precise expertise to avoid the traffic before edging ahead and in front of the box truck; the Civic slammed on the brakes, losing speed, and swerved onto the sidewalk to avoid a family van that was going even slower than the box truck.  People scattered from the sidewalk, and the video feed cut out for a second before the pickup at the next camera, showing the Eclipse in the lead, the Civic at its rear tire.

"Not bad," Lance remarked.  Arthur nodded.

The Civic inched up bit by bit, coming even with the Eclipse again, and they drove even for a while until another patch of traffic forced them apart.  Kanen shifted gears, surging forward, while the Eclipse let him go on ahead, and without tapping the brakes once, weaved through traffic as if they weren't anything else but parked cars.  Warlock was a hot knife slicing through butter in comparison to Kanen's jerky movements, slip-streaming behind the Civic for a few furloughs before sling-shooting ahead.

It didn't take very long for Arthur to decide that Warlock was playing cat-and-mouse with Kanen, luring him forward while dropping back; surging ahead after a bit of slipstream to force Kanen to waste more of his power.  Either Warlock was bored, or he had an axe to grind; Arthur couldn't tell.  All he knew at the moment was that the man was a good driver, but he hadn't seen anything spectacular yet.

The crowd was clearing the street.  Without all the bodies, without the cars blocking it, this road was at least a kilometer of straight shot, and anyone's game.

Comments

[lizzy61.livejournal.com]

I hope we'll eventually get to read the racing fic -- this is certainly a good teaser.

I agree about your action scene writing. Another strength is your characterization skill -- your characters just leap off the page. Not that those are your only strengths, by any means. :)

[deedragonlvr.livejournal.com]

I agree with lizzy61. I would add that another strength of yours is keeping the core of the characters true in AU's. Unless the author has a plausible reason for it, it's a pet peeve of mine when the core of the character changes... even than I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it. I get that it is sometimes the purpose of AUs... to explore a different aspect of a character or a "what if" scenario (like what if Uther was the one sacrificed instead of Ygraine and how that would have changed Camelot and Arthur) but to me the core characterization is what make the characters so loved in the first place.

After having said that, I love seeing what people do (like why or how did a certain character become dark) and been surprised before... It is how I got addicted to fanfiction in the first place because I was intrigued in how an author makes their version believable when the canon or pairing is totally different . :-)

Umm, sorry for the abuse of parenthesis, my horrible grammar and ramblings. I'm afraid the lack of inner editor is my weakness.

Love your work, the teasers and you for doing the questionnaire! :-D

[dameange.livejournal.com]

Fast and Furious AU. I am so in love with you right now. OMG.

[loaded-march.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's more of a mash up between Days of Thunder, Fast and Furious, and Getaway.

Don't ask.