so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular - they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I dont think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
QUESTIONS
Well… I don’t know about the rest of you, but I went of out my way to use the phrase “toeing out of her shoes” in the novel that I intend to publish in paper form. So there’s that.
Some of these can be sourced back to the late 1900′s wave of mass-produced paperback romance novels! This, in its own, was (is?) a serious community of people who desired and produced exactly the same type of content as fanfic, and often read each other’s works and became friends, like fanfic authors. It’s also similarly looked down upon by media and elite-culture, despite covering intense and dark themes, simply because of the prevalence of tropes and happy endings. That wave was such a distinct subset of that era of novels, and is still clinging on (though many readers moved on to mysteries), and it became such an intertwined community, that similarly if you read ten books from ten different authors, phrases you’d find no-where else (at least then) may be present in as many as all ten book, but certainly a few. “He’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers”? Replace the nouns with any other nouns, and it’s in at least 8/10 of those books. Many other phrases that appear near exclusively in our fanfic lexicon can also be found in 80′s and 90′s mass-market romances.
Oh! Here you go! This last comment is exactly what I was referring to. I haven’t read a bunch of romance novels. But I’ve read enough to associate these phrases with romance before I saw them in fic.
Often when I see people refer to fic tropes – enemies to lovers! and they were roommates! fake dating! only one bed! – I think about how these are really just STORY tropes. Super, super common in the romance novels of my youth.
