The Frightening Truth About Sarah McLachlan
THE SARAH MCLACHLAN RULE
There are millions of artists out there. Why did you choose her?
Sarah McLachlan writes beautiful and stunning music. Her lyrics are profound and brilliant, but this by no means suggests that you should go out and buy every album from "Vox" to "Surfacing" and then quote all of the song lyrics that you write out.
The sad fact is, many great (and not-so-great) authors are guilty of a high fanfic crime: quoting Sarah McLachlan in their story. Yes, it is sad. These authors often get blacklisted and do not know why.
This, dear friends, is why:
- DO NOT have a character come to a sudden realization about their love life while listening to a song like "Building a Mystery" in the background.
- DO NOT have a confrontational scene in which two characters admit their attraction for each other with "I Love You" in the background.
- DO NOT have an emotional death scene only made humorous by the use of "Angel" playing harmoniously in the background. A general rule can be found in this sentence, which should be remembered always: If they have done it in a movie ("City of Angels") and if they have done it on a TV show (Alias), then you should never do it.
- DO NOT quote Sarah at the beginning of your story. Most people will not go past that opening sentence, which is unfair to you, because they are judging you on your clichéd music taste, and haven't actually read anything you've written yet.
- DO NOT quote Sarah in long, italicized passages at any point in your story, especially in blocks of words that end up consuming over two pages of your story. This is annoying to your reader; they already know the lyrics anyway, and your reader will more than definitely not be humming that song throughout your next written passages to emphasize whatever emotion you were trying to convey.
- DO NOT quote Sarah ever. There are millions of other artists out there. Use them.
Please note that both of us respect Sarah as an artist. To prove our point, however, about the overrun songfic problem, I went to FanFiction.net and typed in the words, "Sarah McLachlan" into the search. The search will only give you 100 results, which I recieved, and that's not even taking into account the people who spelled her name wrong. Let this be a warning to everyone.
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