How to tell you're reading a jamjar fic.

[jamjar]

Gacked from brown_betty


1) In-jokes and things which are funny to me.
2) Lots of sentences will lack subjects.
3) It's pretty likely to have a threesome.
3a) The odds of this increase significantly if the fic was started in chat
3b) At least two of the characters involved are unlikely to have much canon interaction, nonetheless, the author's notes will claim that it still makes sense. And blame someone else for it.
3b) Sometimes, there will still be a threesome even if there are only two characters actually involved.
4) There will be a scene in which people eat, or at least have a cup of tea together. This will probably be as important, in my mind, as anything else that happens in the fic.
5) There will likely be a subtext of generalised love, if it's not made explicit, for the whole world.
6) In scenes with a lot of emotional stuff, the characters will pay a lot of attention to their surroundings, thus allowing them (and the author) to avoid thinking (or writing) about all the emotional stuff.
7) "If possible, people don't say things." She pushed her hair back. "Oh, they might speak, but they avoid saying stuff, in the "says jamjar" kind of way."
8) Things, especially at the end, will generally be unsaid. I like my confessions nicely circituitous, and people will often communicate by talking about something else entirely. Or possibly, by getting someone a cup of tea or something.
9) It'll probably be triggered by someone else, a drabblememe or a challenge, and is likely to be a combination of "it seemed like a good idea at a time," "What happens if you mix this with this?" and "Hmm,I wonder how long can I hold this extremely hot poker for."

It's hard to identify traits in my own fic. What sort of things do you think are markers on my fic? Because rubynye twigged that I'd written her 3_ships because of the spelling and that it was "plotty", and I'd always thought that I tended to write fic where nothing happened, or things happened, but they weren't really, like, a storyline or anything, just, you know, things that happened.

Comments

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

It *is* a difficult meme, isn't it? Because we write from within our own styles.

By "plotty" what I mean is that your stories tend to, and the one you wrote for me certainly did, describe an arc rather than a picture, but they also detail the pertinent moments of that arc and tie them together. One can see the processes working. Also.... my roommate has teased me and others have criticised me for writing as if my characters never did anything but have sex, but one never gets that impression from your stories even if the entierty of the story is sex. These people have concerns in their lives that come into play, sometimes through sex as well as other interactions.

Also, hooray for sharing food! It can be as intimate as sex, with less social disapprobation. :D

[jamjar.livejournal.com]

Also.... my roommate has teased me and others have criticised me for writing as if my characters never did anything but have sex, but one never gets that impression from your stories even if the entierty of the story is sex. These people have concerns in their lives that come into play, sometimes through sex as well as other interactions.

Huh. I'd never noticed that about your fic -or at least, it hasn't registered as a flaw or anything.

You know, it's funny you say that, because I really noticed as I was tagging my fic that there are fics which I mentally class as gen, even though there are slash or het relationships, because my definition of gen is a fic in which the romantic/sexual relationship is not the point of the fic. That they exist, but they're not what (for me) the fic is about. I ended up tagging as gen/non-gen, rather than gen, slash or het, because that feels closest to me. For example, the fic I wrote for you? Not about the sexual/romantic relationships, as much as the *relationship* between all of them.