I think I may have oversold how much I know about the fic before I start putting words down on paper. ^_^ Except not really, because if it's a fic that's ready to be written I probably can just reel out at least the first 1000 words or so, basically from memory - they won't necessarily be word-for-word the same, but they'll be pretty close, esp. in terms of dialogue and important turns of phrase. And I can look at one of those one-or-two word scene lists and if I'm lucky that'll be enough to start the scene reeling out in my head.
Part of it's probably practice - until I got old enough to read under the covers at night, I spent probably three hours a night telling myself stories while I couldn't sleep, so I had a lot of practice telling myself stories from memory early on. And since I can't do any writing work while I'm distracted by other verbal stuff (tv, books, people) all my best story-working time is when I'm doing stuff like driving or walking or other situations where I can't write it down, so since there was no alternative I trained myself to tamp it down real good in memory. When I was in college I was writing a lot of 100-word drabbles, and I'd write them in my head while walking back and forth from classes, and when I got to where I could sit down, I could write it out and still be spot on 100 words.
And I can't really do a lot of working-the-story-out on paper, because while it's in my head it's really fluid and nonlinear, but when I start pinning stuff to the screen it sort of goes dead, and I can't change it as easily, and that usually just kills the story?And once I get it to where it doesn't need to be so fluid anymore, I might as well just write the story itself. So I sort of learned to hold a lot of it in my head sort of in self-defense. (I spent a lot of time trying to draft/plot on paper, though, and not getting very far - when I realized that drafting-in-my-head was a thing I could be allowed to do, I started, eh, treating it more like work? And as a result it started working a lot better.)
It's probably something that a lot of people could learn to do with practice - after all, in non-literate and semi-literate societies that's how basically all stories are made, and people in those cultures can hold AMAZING amounts of stuff in their working memory. But don't be jealous of it - I'd much rather be able to do the writing-down part, because I know if it's only in my head and I lose it out of my head, it's gone forever.
And yeah, I think my main issues with the wrong-medium thing are POV-related: most TV and superhero comics tend to use something that my brain translate into a sort of a limited-omniscient POV, where the POV follows multiple characters and switches focus from character to character and doesn't get too far into anyone's heads, and that just doesn't work at all for my writing style. And even little things like how with a book canon, you don't have to worry to much about how you describe the characters in prose, because you can just go with the book, wherease in TV or comics you have to figure out the descriptions themselves, just trip me up. I can, it's just a lot harder, and the version in my head keeps constantly wanting to revert back to the TV-style storytelling. I'm glad it's not just me who notices it as an issue, even if you're a lot better at working around it. ^_^
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Part of it's probably practice - until I got old enough to read under the covers at night, I spent probably three hours a night telling myself stories while I couldn't sleep, so I had a lot of practice telling myself stories from memory early on. And since I can't do any writing work while I'm distracted by other verbal stuff (tv, books, people) all my best story-working time is when I'm doing stuff like driving or walking or other situations where I can't write it down, so since there was no alternative I trained myself to tamp it down real good in memory. When I was in college I was writing a lot of 100-word drabbles, and I'd write them in my head while walking back and forth from classes, and when I got to where I could sit down, I could write it out and still be spot on 100 words.
And I can't really do a lot of working-the-story-out on paper, because while it's in my head it's really fluid and nonlinear, but when I start pinning stuff to the screen it sort of goes dead, and I can't change it as easily, and that usually just kills the story?And once I get it to where it doesn't need to be so fluid anymore, I might as well just write the story itself. So I sort of learned to hold a lot of it in my head sort of in self-defense. (I spent a lot of time trying to draft/plot on paper, though, and not getting very far - when I realized that drafting-in-my-head was a thing I could be allowed to do, I started, eh, treating it more like work? And as a result it started working a lot better.)
It's probably something that a lot of people could learn to do with practice - after all, in non-literate and semi-literate societies that's how basically all stories are made, and people in those cultures can hold AMAZING amounts of stuff in their working memory. But don't be jealous of it - I'd much rather be able to do the writing-down part, because I know if it's only in my head and I lose it out of my head, it's gone forever.
And yeah, I think my main issues with the wrong-medium thing are POV-related: most TV and superhero comics tend to use something that my brain translate into a sort of a limited-omniscient POV, where the POV follows multiple characters and switches focus from character to character and doesn't get too far into anyone's heads, and that just doesn't work at all for my writing style. And even little things like how with a book canon, you don't have to worry to much about how you describe the characters in prose, because you can just go with the book, wherease in TV or comics you have to figure out the descriptions themselves, just trip me up. I can, it's just a lot harder, and the version in my head keeps constantly wanting to revert back to the TV-style storytelling. I'm glad it's not just me who notices it as an issue, even if you're a lot better at working around it. ^_^