Sunreturn! (well no, actually more cold rain. Theoretically sunreturn!)

[melannen]

espresso_addict asked about my writing process.

Since the alternative is actually writing, here it is:

Well, it starts with an idea, as you do.

I have tons of story ideas. Usually, these days, they're either an idea that was put up by somebody else as a prompt; or they come from taking a fact or what if, or making a connection between several of them, and realising that taking that for granted could lead interesting places. Sometimes I dream/hallucinate them though, not gonna lie.

I shove my ideas into the quiet damp places in the back of my brain, and if they start to sprout into something that looks like an actual story, if they are lucky I will pull them forward into the light and start actively working on them.

This does not mean actually writing any words. This means taking the idea and playing with it in my head, in my idle moments, until I have a pretty good idea of what the whole finished story is going to have to be.

Around this point I also start asking myself if this is a story I need to write right now. If it's on deadline, the answer is obviously yes. :P If it's not, I think about things like: how long is it going to be, do I have time & energy for something like this right now; do I have the skill to do this story justice as this point in my life; is there an audience that needs to see it; are other people writing something similar but doing it WRONG; do I REALLY REALLY want to write it, or just think it's sort of cool; is it a time-sensitive idea that's won't work if I don't write it now; and so on. If the answers to all those questions is "no, not right now" I usually try to shove it back into the place where dormant ideas sleep; if the answer is "no, never" I usually write up what I've got and post it to the internet in hopes of exorcising it. :P This works better for some ideas than others, as my bottomless wips folder will demonstrate.

Sometimes the same idea can get pulled out and then reshelved multiple times, if stuff comes up that reminds me of it, but then I decide the time is still not right, and it'll go back into the nursery, having changed and grown some in the meantime.

Anyway, after I've played with it for awhile in my idle brain moments, I usually know the basic plot line, the underlying structure, the planned length, and have multiple scenes lined up (some of them worked out in great detail, some of them less so.) I've usually told myself the entire first couple of scenes, down to the dialogue punctuation, several times.

(This is something that I've always done but I felt a lot better about it after I read somebody's writing-about-writing and they talked about how writers who don't do rough drafts usually just write their rough drafts in their heads. That's what I'm doing, writing the rough draft in my head. It is real writing work, and it counts as having a draft.)

This process, from having the first seed of the idea to having a pretty good rough draft worked out in my memory, can take anywhere from five minutes to many years, depending on the story. (I think so far the record for a story that was eventually 'finished' is the Young Wizard/Highlander crossover, which took about five years to go from idea to putting the first word down. But three years later I'm still playing with the original sequel idea that's just as old, and I have older stories yet that may be ready to be written one day.

Once I have a pretty good mental draft, and I've convinced myself that yes, this is the story I can and should be writing right now, I sit down and start writing it from the beginning. I keep my WIPs in Scrivener because that way I don't lose them; I write either directly in Scrivener, in Notepad, or in WrittenKitten, and I hardcode the HTML formatting that DW/LJ/AO3 use.

When I start a new story I go as far as I can in one sitting. Usually I get through at least those first couple of scenes I already have memorized note-for-note, unless I get interrupted by something that completely breaks my stride.

If it's a fairly short story, I finish it in that first sitting in one good flow of words, let it sit for no more than a day or two, give it a second read for typos and less-than-good phrasing, and then post it off.

If it's not going to be finished in one sitting, I either write until I need to be doing something other than writing, or I write until the writing part of my brain wears out and needs to stop. If it's because something external is making me stop while the words are still flowing, I try to stop right in the middle of something exciting so that it'll be easy to pull me right back in when I can get back to it. If I'm going to write until I make myself stop, I usually take it to the next natural stopping place after I start feeling done.

If I don't finish it on the first sitting, that's the point at which writing goes from "fun and easy" to "impossible".

In fact for a long time if I didn't finish it in one sitting, I didn't finish it, as you can see from the long stretch on my AO3 account where there was nothing finished that was longer than a couple thousand words, and that rarely.

I've gotten better lately at forcing myself beyond that first stopping point, but it's still really hard. Because not only do I have to recapture the flow of the writing, I have to recapture the exact same flow I had every other time I worked on the story, and it's like trying to cross the same river twice. Or trying to cross the same river every day for a month, even.

So mostly what I have here is a v. small bag of tricks, which work variably well:

Before I start writing, I assign myself a certain amount of time in which I am not allowed to do anything else that involves words - no reading, no listening to TV or radio, no chat, no talking to people - and if I'm lucky, the story will still be close enough to the top of my mind that it floats right back up and is ready to go again.

(If I'm having a really bad case of the dunwannas, I tell myself that for this time period I am UTTERLY BANNED from writing the story, and often that's enough that by the time I'm 'allowed' to write again, it feels like story is trying to burst from all my appendages.)

I read books and stories that will get my mind firmly back in the mindset I need for the story. If it's fanfic, canon usually works for this. Although, note I said "read books" - if the canon is not a book, re-immersing myself in canon doesn't work. Because if I'm watching TV, my brain wants to tell stories via scripts and cinematography. If I'm reading comics, my brain wants to tell stories via dialog boxes and still images. Etc. If I want to write from there I have to mentally translate the story to prose, which is REALLY HARD, because entirely different things go into a story in different formats. There's a reason why pretty much all the fandoms I've been any kind of prolific in have been book canons.

If I'm trying to write for a non-book fandom, I can still immerse myself in other people's fanfic, and that works pretty much as well as canon. Tie-in novels work too. Of course absorbing the voice, etc. second-hand can lead to drifting farther and farther from actual canon, but if I read enough fic by enough different authors, it averages out, usually. (This is why you will try in vain to get me into small non-book fandoms. If there isn't already a critical mass of fic to trick my brain into thinking it's a text-based fandom, it's usually just not going to be worth the pain of trying to write for it. ...Maybe if I ever get better at vidding, or fandom ever decides script-style fic is copacetic again.)

With original fiction, obviously there will not be canon or fanfic I can immerse myself in, but there will usually be something my brain associates with the story - either fiction in a similar genre that I'm sort of sparking off of, or nonfiction books that cover some of the ideas I'm trying to write about. (Nonfiction stuff will sometimes work for fic, but in fic I'm much more worried about capturing a pre-exising character voice that may not come naturally to me, so I need something in-character too.)

If that works, I will stop reading - sometimes in the middle of a sentence - because the story in my head has suddenly been jump-started and IT IS TIME TO WRITE. Because of this, one short re-read can last me quite a while, if everything is working properly.

This is also why I am often very squirrelly about reading/watching things ONLY WHEN THE TIME IS RIGHT. Because if I'm trying to finish a story- and let's face it I am always trying to finish a story - reading/watching/listening to the wrong thing can knock me completely off track (and sometimes onto an entirely different one...)

One thing that does not work for me is to force myself to sit and just put words on the page. They will be the wrong words, and nothing is as likely to stall me out of a story entirely as tacking the wrong words on the end of it.

If I do get stalled, which happens a lot, I usually try deleting the last several paragraphs/last session's work, in case it's a "you put down the wrong words" problem. I will often just shelve the story to let it rest for awhile. I'll work on something else, and then eventually read something to drop me back into the first story and try again.

Sometimes I will let it sit for quite awhile - long enough to lose my vivd impression of what the story SHOULD BE and ISN'T AUGH and I can come back to it with just a sort of rosy nostalgia that I started writing something fun once, and that's usually enough to break the block and let me keep going again, unless I come back to it and hate it, or have forgotten WTF I thought was doing.

If I know I'm going to be dropping a story for more than a couple days, I usually write up a super-basic outline of what I want to do in the rest of it, right in the same file as the story. The level of precision can very - sometimes it's just a list of five or six major sections, sometimes it's scene-by-scene, sometimes I'll even include a little blocking or a list of things that need to be covered in a certain conversation. It is never very detailed, though. It's meant more as a list of keys to retrieve the memory files where the draft is stored than notes that can stand on their own. This means that occasionally I come back to a WIP after several months/years and have NO IDEA what my notes mean, but usually if I've forgotten that much it's best to start over from brass tacks anyway. And if I do too much detail in an outline I get bored of the story.

Here's the "outline" I had for the Pac Rim fic that's the last thing I finished. You can see it only picks up after I'd already written the first couple thousand words (you can also see that it's supposed to become a Five + One Times Newt and Herman Had Sex fic someday if we all get really lucky):

*(talking to tendo: sexual attraction shared)
*(kaiju?)
*(ask the wonder twins)
*(asking the wonder twins - they don't want sex, closeness is nice, Kaidonovskys)
*(come back to bed Hermann)

--hermann pov: tentacles
--newt pov: raleigh
--hermann pov: vanilla
--newt pov: drift
--hermann pov: submit

And here's the one for the Guardians of the Galaxy longfic I'm [theoretically] currently working on:

X Peter -> drax RE: sanctity of marriage, going home again
X {nebula as counterpart bodyguard}
X Gamora -> Peter RE: sex, american marriage traditions
X {Drax and Rocket get the files}
Rocket -> everyone re: Groot
{killing the scientist for bounty?}
Peter -> Groot re: Rocket
{Yondu___ mission, infinity stone, groceries}
Peter -> Rocket re: wedding
{radio transmission for Asgard}

wedding: handoff to Thor, telling Peter, dressing, walking up the aisle, the marriage, the ceremony, Nebula, dancing, Thor, bailing out the others
X epilogue one" grandad
X pilogue 2 tentacles

end.

sequel -> get off Xandar, you have the stone.
paradise planet.
getting drunk.
the Milano is stolen.
Boats.
Nebula.
Stargazing.
the Kree warship.
Cmdr. Jansen
'ain't no mountain high enough'
you slept with him???

These are really not set in stone - as I keep writing I will reorganize, swap scenes around, add and subtract details, etc. Often scenes end up being WAY more long and complicated than I planned when making the outline. The lists work better for that than the fancy plot-visualizer things like Scrivener's pinboard function, though, mostly because there's less whitespace and I can see the whole shape of the story in one glance this way.

Anyway, once I'm to that point, I usually just work down the list of scenes, more-or-less in order, although occasionally I will work ahead if that's where my brain is. I'm also usually revising the earlier parts on-the-fly, sometimes as things need changed due to stuff I discover in writing the later parts. Also I'll go back and re-read from the beginning fairly often and revise as I go. (The mental-drafting process is really not in chronological order, though, I don't get to linear until I'm doing the words-on-a-page bit.)

Once I'm down to the last couple tick-marks in the list, I usually sit down and push through all in one go, whether I feel like it or not, just so I can be DONE. (By that point it usually flows pretty easy, because I've been working toward this ending for ages, and I've already worked out all the kinks.)

With longer fic, once it's done, and of course depending on deadline pressure, and on how desperate I am to start getting kudos, I may or may not do some major revision. I'll read it over directly after finishing (usually in some kind of posting preview) to hopefully catch any obvious typos or extra arms or whatever. Once in a long, long while I'll get a beta at this point, but usually if it reads OK to me in the re-read I'll just go ahead and damn the torpedos and post the thing.

If there's stuff that bothers me in the re-read that's going to need fixing on the level of moving major story blocks around or adding significant content or whatever, and I still care enough to want to make it better, I'll re-read it again while thinking specifically about the problems, and then let it sit for at least a couple weeks (..usually more like a couple months) while my brain ponders how to fix it, and I achieve slightly more emotional detachment.

I've never done more than one post-typed-draft round of revisions.

Then I do another typo check and send the thing out to its audience as soon as the time is right. I only post fanfic online when I'm going to have at least the next hour or two free to stare at the computer because I will either be a) obsessively reloading to check for kudos, or b) wishing I was obsessively reloading to check for kudos.

While I am obsessively reloading, I will invitable, regardless of how many betas and self-copyedits I did, discover at least two HORRIFICALLY OBVIOUS typos or errors, which I will then fix. I will also make sure to answer all my comments as soon as they come in for about the first seventy-two hours after posting. At this point I will be overcome with a deep hatred of the story accompanied by the conviction that it sucks and everything about it sucks, and will ignore the existence of the story until this passes.

At some later date I will re-read it reminiscently, discover that not only does it not suck but it's WAY better than what I'm currently working on, and find at least two more super-obvious typos.
That basically marks the end of my writing process for that story.

...and all of that is really misleading because it's not so much my writing process as what I know my writing process should be.

My actual writing process more often than not is "flail, whine to friends that writing is impossible, post unrelated tl;dr meta on DW accompanied by a disclaimer that I should be writing, screw around on Tumblr. Words? No, no words. No more words ever. *wordvomit something that I can pretend is a complete story that makes sense in the two hours before the deadline*."

..It is always changing, though. I can actively feel myself getting better at writing longer and more complicated stuff now. Note to self:It would be interesting to do this again in five or ten years and see how utterly different it is.