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eponymous_roseNote to self: You have a much bigger f-list than you think. Cool memes mean lots of fun participation, but the internet also has a worrying tendency to explode all over you. Will definitely reply to all this weekend. I hope. :D
Anyway, now that I've managed to reserve a table (and chairs, probably) for my birthday dinner in a couple hours, it's time for another meme! This one's about writing, and is cheerfully stolen from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
t_eyla. And we're gonna ignore that flagrant use of the passive voice and move on.
Ideas. Where the hell do they come from? Can you make those little fuckers show up?
"Are you in charge here?"
"No, but I'm full of ideas."
I am, really. :D One of my roommates asked yesterday how I come up with ideas, so to illustrate I told her to point to any object in the room. She picked a clock; I said: "Five minutes. Five one-minute periods in someone's life." And then wrote the fic. That's how it works! I do collect random thoughts that occur to me, but most get filed away in a dusty little corner of my mind on the off-chance that I wind up a horror writer at some point. My brain is a scary place.
Wild horse-bunnies. When a story just gets pulled right out of you. Do you get them?
You mean Athena!fic that seems to spring fully-formed from my head? Yeah. Sometimes. A lot of the time I start with a few sentences, delete them about forty times, and then it all comes together. When I do wind up with a runaway fic, I typically have no recollection of having written it.
Writer's block. Have you been scourged?
I see writer's block in a totally different light than most people seem to do - rather than not having anything to write about, or not having the right words to use, I typically find myself in a situation where I've written myself into a corner, plot-wise. But I usually do this on purpose because, sooner or later, I'll come up with a clever way of getting out of it. And if all else fails, I can always plant a Deux ex Machina somewhere earlier in the fic and use it to get my characters out of trouble by the end! (Obviously, I try to discourage this tactic, because it's on the cheap side. Thus why I post my chapters one-by-one, while writing. Keeps me honest!)
Clean up duty. Do you like editing?
I don't edit while I write, and when I do edit my own writing, it's generally nothing very big. Most chapters of "The Deepsky Atlas" were written in one go, without so much as stopping between sentences, and the only editing I did was to add or subtract one or two words at the end. I adore editing other people's work, but get impatient with my own (case in point - "What the Thunder Said", which would have been a lot tighter and more coherent at about 4/5 the length, but I was so tired of messing around with it that I just posted). This is definitely something I'm gonna work on this year!
The ending. Is it hard for you to find the ending?
No. Ninety percent of the time, I have the ending in mind when I start the story - even if I don't have any idea what the plot's all about, I know where I want it to end up. With "Five Places the Doctor Never Took Liz Shaw", I knew the last section would be called "Home", but beyond that I hadn't a clue what was going to happen. I knew I wanted "Come the Rain" to end with some quote from An Unearthly Child, twisted slightly. (And at that point, I didn't even know what I'd be writing about!) The exception is my longer pieces - Wanderer Fantasy (though I do have a vague impression of how I want to end it, and am trying to talk myself out of it), Deepsky Atlas (which I am consciously not planning, as an experiment), and Empty Planet (though I do have several possible endings in mind). From chapter to chapter, though, by the time I've written the first sentence I'll generally know where I want it to end.
Beginnings, though, typically kick my butt. That's the exception to my no-editing-while-writing policy - I'll rewrite an opening sentence thirty or forty times before I give up and move on.
The title. Where do you get yours? Do you have yours when you start the story?
I used to put a huge amount of work into my titles, but my latest tactic is just to snatch up my book of T.S. Eliot and pick a line at random. *grins* I do like it when the title can be used to trigger reactions over the course of the story (I do hope "Comes the Rain" makes a little light bulb go off during the second section, with the thunder), but it's not a terribly important part of the writing process to me. When I do pick a title, though, I try to go with something a bit unusual - pick a cliche and only use a few of the words.
Plot. If you plot out your stories first, raise your hand.
I... well, let's put it this way: I strongly dislike plotting stories, with some extremely significant exceptions. "The Deepsky Atlas" is my test of this - I don't plan anything before sitting down to write the story. And by the time I've made it through a few paragraphs, I generally have a sort of outline, more structurally-based than plot-based for the most part. Chapter six, for instance, went something like: "Banter, fight scene with incongruous baddie/tie with next chapter, rescue not quite in the nick of time, shock ending." That's it; that's all I knew was going to happen until I wrote it. Currently, I haven't a clue what's happening next chapter, except that it ties in with the above fight scene. This is the most I will plan and feel comfortable with in a short fic/chapter - if I plan more than this, for the most part, writing tends to feel like wading through concrete ("Things Best Left Unseen", while it did have some fun moments, was also one of the most painful fics to write because I thoroughly overplanned it). For someone whose writing is often extremely structured, this can be very weird (and often leads to the middle sections of multi-part vignettes being less interesting, because I always know where I want it to end up).
Why do I dislike plotting? Well, I had a heckuva time trying to explain it until I finally got around to reading Stephen King's "On Writing", where he emphasizes that the whole idea is to tell the truth. Be honest about your characters - they'll hijack the plot sometimes, they'll all (right down to the guy buying a beer on the other side of the bar) think they're the hero of the piece, and you'll have to live with that. If I ever, ever find myself shifting a character slightly to fit the plot, or even to fit the tone or the mood of the piece? It's not pretty; sometimes I'll stick with it because it's the only way to get to the ending I want, but most of the time I'll just change the plot to fit the characters.
POV. How do you choose your POV for a scene? For a story?
I cannot emphasize this enough: don't switch POVs within a scene! Please! If you're writing in the third person, you're still writing from POVs. Don't have the Doctor think that something's bound to go wrong and then type: "Rose was thinking along similar lines."! They're not psychic (well, probably not - it's your story, you never can tell) - so if you're gonna stick with the Doctor's POV, say something like: "By the way Rose was edging slowly towards the exit, he guessed she must be thinking along similar lines."
Okay, rant over. They say that, in typical third-person writing, you should write from the POV of the person who has the most to lose overall in the scene, has the potential for the most emotion (or lack thereof, if that's what floats your boat). That works.
What I'm doing for "The Deepsky Atlas" (yes, it's just a guinea pig of a story, that one) is alternating between chapters from Harry's POV and from Sarah's POV. And, because I'm just crazy that way, I'm changing the plot so that, say, an odd-numbered chapter will have Harry fall madly in love with a sentient bookshelf, or an even-numbered chapter will have Sarah taking over the universe (Disclaimer: the previous statements may or may not be future plot points.). But that's atypical, and I'm not sure I like ascribing this much structure to the POV. We'll see if it lands me in hot water from now on.
(I generally have a lot of trouble writing from the Doctor's POV - well, variably; I'll happily write Ten, but wouldn't dare attempt Four.)
Challenges. Do you like them? Do they inspire you?
Sure, I like them! Challenges are fun, because I always, always try to interpret the prompts in weird ways. Which is, no doubt, terribly frustrating for the poor person who's come up with the prompt in the first place. Sorry.
Sex. Do you like writing sex?
(Yes, I have written it.)
I am a genfic writer for a reason - I find it easier to tell the truth about a character when romantic relationships aren't involved. It's very, very tricky to judge what a character would or wouldn't do at the best of times, and in the throes of passion that gets still more, uh, impossible. Falling in love, cliche though it is, has different connotations and meanings and, heck, different definitions for each reader - it's a lot like writing humour, except that in humour at least there are cultural norms that tend to identify what most people will find funny and what people won't. If your target audience is a kindergarten class, you'll pick different jokes than for a senior's home or a group of college students. Sexual preferences are so impossibly varied that it's outright impossible to push most people's buttons, and incredibly difficult to manage it for more than a handful of readers. And when you're asking your readers to believe a sexually explicit relationship that only ever appears on TV in edited form, that gets very, very hard to do (ooh, puns not intended).
And that's why I avoid writing porn in fanfic, at least (original stuff is a bit of a different beast, because the reader's opinion of your characters is a blank slate to begin with; none of these rational and irrational loves and hates that come with an established and much-loved character).
The reason I write genfic, though, mostly comes down to the fact that I write fanfic to expand on canon, to give my own little spins to it. If I write in a fandom, it's because I adore the show/book/what-have-you itself; the style, the mood, the themes. I like to emulate it because writing's more fun if I enjoy reading what I've got at the end. That's all there is to it!
Okay, so that wasa little a lot on the longwinded side. But now you know all my secrets.
Uh-oh.
Anyway, now that I've managed to reserve a table (and chairs, probably) for my birthday dinner in a couple hours, it's time for another meme! This one's about writing, and is cheerfully stolen from
t_eyla. And we're gonna ignore that flagrant use of the passive voice and move on.Ideas. Where the hell do they come from? Can you make those little fuckers show up?
"Are you in charge here?"
"No, but I'm full of ideas."
I am, really. :D One of my roommates asked yesterday how I come up with ideas, so to illustrate I told her to point to any object in the room. She picked a clock; I said: "Five minutes. Five one-minute periods in someone's life." And then wrote the fic. That's how it works! I do collect random thoughts that occur to me, but most get filed away in a dusty little corner of my mind on the off-chance that I wind up a horror writer at some point. My brain is a scary place.
Wild horse-bunnies. When a story just gets pulled right out of you. Do you get them?
You mean Athena!fic that seems to spring fully-formed from my head? Yeah. Sometimes. A lot of the time I start with a few sentences, delete them about forty times, and then it all comes together. When I do wind up with a runaway fic, I typically have no recollection of having written it.
Writer's block. Have you been scourged?
I see writer's block in a totally different light than most people seem to do - rather than not having anything to write about, or not having the right words to use, I typically find myself in a situation where I've written myself into a corner, plot-wise. But I usually do this on purpose because, sooner or later, I'll come up with a clever way of getting out of it. And if all else fails, I can always plant a Deux ex Machina somewhere earlier in the fic and use it to get my characters out of trouble by the end! (Obviously, I try to discourage this tactic, because it's on the cheap side. Thus why I post my chapters one-by-one, while writing. Keeps me honest!)
Clean up duty. Do you like editing?
I don't edit while I write, and when I do edit my own writing, it's generally nothing very big. Most chapters of "The Deepsky Atlas" were written in one go, without so much as stopping between sentences, and the only editing I did was to add or subtract one or two words at the end. I adore editing other people's work, but get impatient with my own (case in point - "What the Thunder Said", which would have been a lot tighter and more coherent at about 4/5 the length, but I was so tired of messing around with it that I just posted). This is definitely something I'm gonna work on this year!
The ending. Is it hard for you to find the ending?
No. Ninety percent of the time, I have the ending in mind when I start the story - even if I don't have any idea what the plot's all about, I know where I want it to end up. With "Five Places the Doctor Never Took Liz Shaw", I knew the last section would be called "Home", but beyond that I hadn't a clue what was going to happen. I knew I wanted "Come the Rain" to end with some quote from An Unearthly Child, twisted slightly. (And at that point, I didn't even know what I'd be writing about!) The exception is my longer pieces - Wanderer Fantasy (though I do have a vague impression of how I want to end it, and am trying to talk myself out of it), Deepsky Atlas (which I am consciously not planning, as an experiment), and Empty Planet (though I do have several possible endings in mind). From chapter to chapter, though, by the time I've written the first sentence I'll generally know where I want it to end.
Beginnings, though, typically kick my butt. That's the exception to my no-editing-while-writing policy - I'll rewrite an opening sentence thirty or forty times before I give up and move on.
The title. Where do you get yours? Do you have yours when you start the story?
I used to put a huge amount of work into my titles, but my latest tactic is just to snatch up my book of T.S. Eliot and pick a line at random. *grins* I do like it when the title can be used to trigger reactions over the course of the story (I do hope "Comes the Rain" makes a little light bulb go off during the second section, with the thunder), but it's not a terribly important part of the writing process to me. When I do pick a title, though, I try to go with something a bit unusual - pick a cliche and only use a few of the words.
Plot. If you plot out your stories first, raise your hand.
I... well, let's put it this way: I strongly dislike plotting stories, with some extremely significant exceptions. "The Deepsky Atlas" is my test of this - I don't plan anything before sitting down to write the story. And by the time I've made it through a few paragraphs, I generally have a sort of outline, more structurally-based than plot-based for the most part. Chapter six, for instance, went something like: "Banter, fight scene with incongruous baddie/tie with next chapter, rescue not quite in the nick of time, shock ending." That's it; that's all I knew was going to happen until I wrote it. Currently, I haven't a clue what's happening next chapter, except that it ties in with the above fight scene. This is the most I will plan and feel comfortable with in a short fic/chapter - if I plan more than this, for the most part, writing tends to feel like wading through concrete ("Things Best Left Unseen", while it did have some fun moments, was also one of the most painful fics to write because I thoroughly overplanned it). For someone whose writing is often extremely structured, this can be very weird (and often leads to the middle sections of multi-part vignettes being less interesting, because I always know where I want it to end up).
Why do I dislike plotting? Well, I had a heckuva time trying to explain it until I finally got around to reading Stephen King's "On Writing", where he emphasizes that the whole idea is to tell the truth. Be honest about your characters - they'll hijack the plot sometimes, they'll all (right down to the guy buying a beer on the other side of the bar) think they're the hero of the piece, and you'll have to live with that. If I ever, ever find myself shifting a character slightly to fit the plot, or even to fit the tone or the mood of the piece? It's not pretty; sometimes I'll stick with it because it's the only way to get to the ending I want, but most of the time I'll just change the plot to fit the characters.
POV. How do you choose your POV for a scene? For a story?
I cannot emphasize this enough: don't switch POVs within a scene! Please! If you're writing in the third person, you're still writing from POVs. Don't have the Doctor think that something's bound to go wrong and then type: "Rose was thinking along similar lines."! They're not psychic (well, probably not - it's your story, you never can tell) - so if you're gonna stick with the Doctor's POV, say something like: "By the way Rose was edging slowly towards the exit, he guessed she must be thinking along similar lines."
Okay, rant over. They say that, in typical third-person writing, you should write from the POV of the person who has the most to lose overall in the scene, has the potential for the most emotion (or lack thereof, if that's what floats your boat). That works.
What I'm doing for "The Deepsky Atlas" (yes, it's just a guinea pig of a story, that one) is alternating between chapters from Harry's POV and from Sarah's POV. And, because I'm just crazy that way, I'm changing the plot so that, say, an odd-numbered chapter will have Harry fall madly in love with a sentient bookshelf, or an even-numbered chapter will have Sarah taking over the universe (Disclaimer: the previous statements may or may not be future plot points.). But that's atypical, and I'm not sure I like ascribing this much structure to the POV. We'll see if it lands me in hot water from now on.
(I generally have a lot of trouble writing from the Doctor's POV - well, variably; I'll happily write Ten, but wouldn't dare attempt Four.)
Challenges. Do you like them? Do they inspire you?
Sure, I like them! Challenges are fun, because I always, always try to interpret the prompts in weird ways. Which is, no doubt, terribly frustrating for the poor person who's come up with the prompt in the first place. Sorry.
Sex. Do you like writing sex?
(Yes, I have written it.)
I am a genfic writer for a reason - I find it easier to tell the truth about a character when romantic relationships aren't involved. It's very, very tricky to judge what a character would or wouldn't do at the best of times, and in the throes of passion that gets still more, uh, impossible. Falling in love, cliche though it is, has different connotations and meanings and, heck, different definitions for each reader - it's a lot like writing humour, except that in humour at least there are cultural norms that tend to identify what most people will find funny and what people won't. If your target audience is a kindergarten class, you'll pick different jokes than for a senior's home or a group of college students. Sexual preferences are so impossibly varied that it's outright impossible to push most people's buttons, and incredibly difficult to manage it for more than a handful of readers. And when you're asking your readers to believe a sexually explicit relationship that only ever appears on TV in edited form, that gets very, very hard to do (ooh, puns not intended).
And that's why I avoid writing porn in fanfic, at least (original stuff is a bit of a different beast, because the reader's opinion of your characters is a blank slate to begin with; none of these rational and irrational loves and hates that come with an established and much-loved character).
The reason I write genfic, though, mostly comes down to the fact that I write fanfic to expand on canon, to give my own little spins to it. If I write in a fandom, it's because I adore the show/book/what-have-you itself; the style, the mood, the themes. I like to emulate it because writing's more fun if I enjoy reading what I've got at the end. That's all there is to it!
Okay, so that was
Uh-oh.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
since I'm going to be crazy busy tomorrow...
Date: 2008-01-26 12:15 am (UTC)(:
Re: since I'm going to be crazy busy tomorrow...
Date: 2008-01-31 04:02 am (UTC)I don't know if I can stand that much awesome. Really I don't.
Thanks so much! :D Wombat! Wombat!
(And there was much cake consumed. Mission accomplished!)