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Ah, nothing like a little grandstanding in one's entry title. Anyway, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sub_divided asked me about The Process in the fic meme here. The sad thing is, it takes me forever to finish a fic, but I can write a decent essay in the space of half an hour, which is what I did here. And so, here's more than you ever wanted to know about how I write fics.
I'm not the sort of person who pretends to have invisible muses that speak to me and walk me through the writing process, but it's absolutely without question that the part of my brain responsible for generating stories is not the part that is usually in charge. I am mentally incapable of creating a complete story before writing, and the progression of any given fic is as much a mystery to me until I finish writing as it is to someone reading it off the street. It's hard to express properly, but I have very little control over the stories I write. Again, this isn't because the characters are real and 'talking' to me, but rather because story conception takes place in a part of my brain I'm not very good at getting to, and I have to spend an enormous amount of time and energy coaxing stories out of it.
Self-contained stories don't come to me at all. Instead, I get a single mental image similar to a manga panel, or a snippet of dialogue, or a concept. Once this happens, the trick is to concentrate on it while not actually thinking about it, holding it in the back of my head while I go do other things. I usually do this for anywhere from one day to a month.
Next, I consciously begin rolodexing through possible directions the story could take, which is when I actually start trying to write snippets down. Again, it's hard for me to get into the mental state where I can do this. I spend several days preparing to sit down and write, at which point I do one or two sentences of complete crap and give up in disgust, then let the story percolate for another week or two. This continues until something clicks, and I get a better handle on the story and am able to write something worth keeping.
I'm then able to decide on either a climax or an ending (but usually not both), which gives me a sort of goal to work toward. It's important to note that at this point I still don't have any real ideas about plot progression or what the story will be like as a finished whole, but what I do have is a sense of space: here's my beginning concept, here's the other bit I've devised for it, and I know that this much of –something- has to occur between the two for it to be an effective story.
Think of it like walking into a room with a partially finished jigsaw puzzle on the table with the unused pieces missing. One glance is enough to tell you the dimensions of the finished puzzle, even if you have no idea what shape the missing pieces take or where they are at the moment.
To give a concrete example of this process, let's say I have a mental image of L screaming in anger at Light's corpse, Light having just committed suicide. I keep this image in the back of my mind, taking it out and playing with it every now and then, and eventually a concept arises to accompany it: Noteless!Light has discovered that he was Kira and is horrified by what he's done. I then keep that in the back of my mind for (in this case) two months, during which point I attempt to capture that image in writing and am usually unsatisfied with the results.
Finally I nail it down, discovering in process that the story is actually going to be told from L's perspective, and that L is damn pissed that Light's killed himself without first revealing what he knows about Kira to L. This then merges with another concept I've been playing with – that L's eccentricity is just an act, and that he hates Light because he is every bit as intelligent as Light, except when it comes to human interaction, which results in this sort of soul-rotting resentment.
So I take another little snippet I've had, this one mostly exposition, of L thinking about why he hates Light, and paste it at the top of the suicide scene. Here's where my concept of space comes in. I think of the scenes I get as punch lines. Just as with a joke, there has to be adequate buildup before the punch line, or it loses its effectiveness. This is the part I'm best at – figuring out how much space is needed from the opening to the punch line. The problem is that I'm horrid at figuring out what exactly should fill it – the puzzle pieces are missing and I don't know how to find them. This is usually the point at which my WIPs stall for good, as well as the point where one will find me on AIM, bitching to all and sundry about how I have this brilliant idea, but am utterly incapable of fleshing it out.
So, the story is either abandoned forever, or I slowly start carving it out, phrase by phrase. It's here where I start to compare writing to excavation or sculpture. I've got this amorphous block of concept and I have to shave and chip the excess off of it to get to the story inside. Of course, there's a danger here of marring the block to the point where it ceases to be a feasible sculpture, and the same is true for my fics. There's a tension between this and my awareness of space to be filled as well, because I don't want to write scenes whose only purpose is to take up space, but I don't want the story to spin out of control either.
And here's where I run into more trouble, because I write my best stories straight through. No randomly writing a bit here and a bit there and then going in and knitting them together for me. The fics where I try to do that are the fics that almost never get finished. It has to do with the space again – I can't handle a bunch of disparate scenes without any idea of how to dovetail them, or how much more space might be hiding in the joints. So I'm using words to convey concepts, but I have to wait for the concepts to occur to me before I can start molding them into words.
So I bang the fic out, sentence by sentence, and I have a hard time writing the next sentence until the preceding one is perfect. I often have to go back and reread what I've written from the beginning, one sentence at a time, in order to get the next few bits down. This creates another big pitfall, as I sometimes get so tired of rereading a fic that I give up on it before I get to the ending. But it's something that I have to do, because I've tried just coughing anything out onto a page and then going back and editing, and it is a writing style which I absolutely can not make work.
Finally comes the point when I've agonized over the fic for so long that everything just clicks and then I can get the thing written in a matter of hours. Usually, this happens several months after I first decide to turn the snippet into a fic, but sometimes (Yashoku, the fic I wrote forabsenceofmind, and Made Me Do It are two examples of this), I sit down, everything clicks right away, and the fic just gets written.
I put that last bit in the passive tense because the fics do indeed get written, in that I get ideas faster than I can type and I am not consciously in control of any it. I think a lot of the hair-pulling I do before writing most fics is actually a function of this – I find the experience of just letting a story write itself so uncomfortable that I consciously make it difficult.
So this state persists until the story is done. Like most other things, the doneness of a story is a mystery to me. I just suddenly know that, even if I have remaining concepts or scenes, all the space for this particular fic has been filled, and it's time to polish it off.
The polish stage involves saving the fic to my lj, my jump drive, and several locations on my computer to make sure that Nothing Happens To It, because I will not be dealing with it for quite some time. It's here that I usually go off and write other fics (more on this below). Anyway, I now sit on the fic for a few days to a week. This gives me a bit of a cool down period in which to forget what I've written so that I can go back and edit with a clear head.
The editing involves going through and treating the fic as a whole, fixing any bits that still seem rough or disconnected, and tinkering obsessively with wording over the course of six or seven rereads. Once I am satisfied that the fic is saying exactly what I want it to say, I then send it off beta readers (for the fandoms where I have them) or post it to the web (for the fandoms where I don't).
Now follow some more random observations I've made about my own writing:
Once I hit the click stage, I really do end up in an alternate state of consciousness, to the point that it becomes noticeable to other people who happen to talk to me after I've just finished writing. I'm usually extremely keyed up after I've finished writing a fic, and it takes a couple hours to cool down. I tend to write best at about midnight to three in the morning, which is another reason I don't write as much as I'd like, because going to work the next day is hellacious when you've been up till two am writing and then hopping around for another few hours trying to relax enough to fall asleep.
Anyway, there's usually a brief interval after I've finished a fic during which I can quickly and easily write any number of other ones (if I don't absolutely have to get to bed), because I'm still in the altered consciousness state. This is usually why I post fics in bursts, although I will try to space the posting out by a least a week. Unfortunately, if I don't keep writing during this window, it often takes me a couple of weeks to refuel before getting back into a state where I can start writing again, regardless of how many new snippets or concepts occur to me in the interim.
So, yup. Process.
これで以上です。
sub_divided asked me about The Process in the fic meme here. The sad thing is, it takes me forever to finish a fic, but I can write a decent essay in the space of half an hour, which is what I did here. And so, here's more than you ever wanted to know about how I write fics.I'm not the sort of person who pretends to have invisible muses that speak to me and walk me through the writing process, but it's absolutely without question that the part of my brain responsible for generating stories is not the part that is usually in charge. I am mentally incapable of creating a complete story before writing, and the progression of any given fic is as much a mystery to me until I finish writing as it is to someone reading it off the street. It's hard to express properly, but I have very little control over the stories I write. Again, this isn't because the characters are real and 'talking' to me, but rather because story conception takes place in a part of my brain I'm not very good at getting to, and I have to spend an enormous amount of time and energy coaxing stories out of it.
Self-contained stories don't come to me at all. Instead, I get a single mental image similar to a manga panel, or a snippet of dialogue, or a concept. Once this happens, the trick is to concentrate on it while not actually thinking about it, holding it in the back of my head while I go do other things. I usually do this for anywhere from one day to a month.
Next, I consciously begin rolodexing through possible directions the story could take, which is when I actually start trying to write snippets down. Again, it's hard for me to get into the mental state where I can do this. I spend several days preparing to sit down and write, at which point I do one or two sentences of complete crap and give up in disgust, then let the story percolate for another week or two. This continues until something clicks, and I get a better handle on the story and am able to write something worth keeping.
I'm then able to decide on either a climax or an ending (but usually not both), which gives me a sort of goal to work toward. It's important to note that at this point I still don't have any real ideas about plot progression or what the story will be like as a finished whole, but what I do have is a sense of space: here's my beginning concept, here's the other bit I've devised for it, and I know that this much of –something- has to occur between the two for it to be an effective story.
Think of it like walking into a room with a partially finished jigsaw puzzle on the table with the unused pieces missing. One glance is enough to tell you the dimensions of the finished puzzle, even if you have no idea what shape the missing pieces take or where they are at the moment.
To give a concrete example of this process, let's say I have a mental image of L screaming in anger at Light's corpse, Light having just committed suicide. I keep this image in the back of my mind, taking it out and playing with it every now and then, and eventually a concept arises to accompany it: Noteless!Light has discovered that he was Kira and is horrified by what he's done. I then keep that in the back of my mind for (in this case) two months, during which point I attempt to capture that image in writing and am usually unsatisfied with the results.
Finally I nail it down, discovering in process that the story is actually going to be told from L's perspective, and that L is damn pissed that Light's killed himself without first revealing what he knows about Kira to L. This then merges with another concept I've been playing with – that L's eccentricity is just an act, and that he hates Light because he is every bit as intelligent as Light, except when it comes to human interaction, which results in this sort of soul-rotting resentment.
So I take another little snippet I've had, this one mostly exposition, of L thinking about why he hates Light, and paste it at the top of the suicide scene. Here's where my concept of space comes in. I think of the scenes I get as punch lines. Just as with a joke, there has to be adequate buildup before the punch line, or it loses its effectiveness. This is the part I'm best at – figuring out how much space is needed from the opening to the punch line. The problem is that I'm horrid at figuring out what exactly should fill it – the puzzle pieces are missing and I don't know how to find them. This is usually the point at which my WIPs stall for good, as well as the point where one will find me on AIM, bitching to all and sundry about how I have this brilliant idea, but am utterly incapable of fleshing it out.
So, the story is either abandoned forever, or I slowly start carving it out, phrase by phrase. It's here where I start to compare writing to excavation or sculpture. I've got this amorphous block of concept and I have to shave and chip the excess off of it to get to the story inside. Of course, there's a danger here of marring the block to the point where it ceases to be a feasible sculpture, and the same is true for my fics. There's a tension between this and my awareness of space to be filled as well, because I don't want to write scenes whose only purpose is to take up space, but I don't want the story to spin out of control either.
And here's where I run into more trouble, because I write my best stories straight through. No randomly writing a bit here and a bit there and then going in and knitting them together for me. The fics where I try to do that are the fics that almost never get finished. It has to do with the space again – I can't handle a bunch of disparate scenes without any idea of how to dovetail them, or how much more space might be hiding in the joints. So I'm using words to convey concepts, but I have to wait for the concepts to occur to me before I can start molding them into words.
So I bang the fic out, sentence by sentence, and I have a hard time writing the next sentence until the preceding one is perfect. I often have to go back and reread what I've written from the beginning, one sentence at a time, in order to get the next few bits down. This creates another big pitfall, as I sometimes get so tired of rereading a fic that I give up on it before I get to the ending. But it's something that I have to do, because I've tried just coughing anything out onto a page and then going back and editing, and it is a writing style which I absolutely can not make work.
Finally comes the point when I've agonized over the fic for so long that everything just clicks and then I can get the thing written in a matter of hours. Usually, this happens several months after I first decide to turn the snippet into a fic, but sometimes (Yashoku, the fic I wrote for
absenceofmind, and Made Me Do It are two examples of this), I sit down, everything clicks right away, and the fic just gets written.I put that last bit in the passive tense because the fics do indeed get written, in that I get ideas faster than I can type and I am not consciously in control of any it. I think a lot of the hair-pulling I do before writing most fics is actually a function of this – I find the experience of just letting a story write itself so uncomfortable that I consciously make it difficult.
So this state persists until the story is done. Like most other things, the doneness of a story is a mystery to me. I just suddenly know that, even if I have remaining concepts or scenes, all the space for this particular fic has been filled, and it's time to polish it off.
The polish stage involves saving the fic to my lj, my jump drive, and several locations on my computer to make sure that Nothing Happens To It, because I will not be dealing with it for quite some time. It's here that I usually go off and write other fics (more on this below). Anyway, I now sit on the fic for a few days to a week. This gives me a bit of a cool down period in which to forget what I've written so that I can go back and edit with a clear head.
The editing involves going through and treating the fic as a whole, fixing any bits that still seem rough or disconnected, and tinkering obsessively with wording over the course of six or seven rereads. Once I am satisfied that the fic is saying exactly what I want it to say, I then send it off beta readers (for the fandoms where I have them) or post it to the web (for the fandoms where I don't).
Now follow some more random observations I've made about my own writing:
Once I hit the click stage, I really do end up in an alternate state of consciousness, to the point that it becomes noticeable to other people who happen to talk to me after I've just finished writing. I'm usually extremely keyed up after I've finished writing a fic, and it takes a couple hours to cool down. I tend to write best at about midnight to three in the morning, which is another reason I don't write as much as I'd like, because going to work the next day is hellacious when you've been up till two am writing and then hopping around for another few hours trying to relax enough to fall asleep.
Anyway, there's usually a brief interval after I've finished a fic during which I can quickly and easily write any number of other ones (if I don't absolutely have to get to bed), because I'm still in the altered consciousness state. This is usually why I post fics in bursts, although I will try to space the posting out by a least a week. Unfortunately, if I don't keep writing during this window, it often takes me a couple of weeks to refuel before getting back into a state where I can start writing again, regardless of how many new snippets or concepts occur to me in the interim.
So, yup. Process.
これで以上です。
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Although I can back to old concepts, I really dislike doing it, and I think everything good I've ever done was written stright through. With maybe a break to run up and down the halls for a little while because yes, ENERGY. It's like creative energy finds physical expression when I write--I can imagine just how you must feel. Getting back on topic, the only reason I re-use old snipets at all--often they become something completely different from what I'd originally intended--is because I really dislike throwing things away. So, it isn't so much finishing as using the old story as raw material for a new one.
Another similarity--the percolation period. Yes, absolutely, you start with a concept and then you have to justify it yourself. This part takes me a couple days, same as you--the difference is that when it does occur to me, I usually do two outlines--the first made up as I go, and the second a refinement of the first. I can't do them on the computer but have to write them out by hand. I find it helps to have the entire story in mind when you start to write the beginning sections. If you've never tried this, I'd recommend it--you can make the outline as detailed as you'd like (mine are VERY detailed) and they really help you out when you get stuck writng a certain section.
And then, I write in order like you. The first paragraph is always the most--I won't say polished, but re-read and edited, because I often have to stop and go back to the beginning. In the right mood, I can write for seven or eight hours straight. But only late at night--I think the earliest I've ever started writing is ten thirty.
The only place this analogy breaks down is in editing. I have no self-control, so I post after a single read through and then go back and edit later.
(Speaking of muses, I once had a dream where an LJ author I very much admire sat me down and dictated a fanfic to me. Entire. But I couldn't remember it when I woke so I have no idea if it was a good idea or not.)
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I reuse bits because a lot of my write-delete-write-delete cycle is getting the dross out of my head. I know when I've stumbled on a good line or concept, but I'm not able to purify it enough the first few times I try to write it. And yes, I write so infrequently that I really hate throwing anything good away.
You're dead on about the justification aspect. A lot of the fanfic I write is me putting my theories and speculation (hence, my specfic label) into narrative form, which is more interesting than making 1,000 'hey I have a new theory about Page 42' posts to my lj.
Unfortunately, outlines are a pointless exercise for me, because the story only fills itself in while I'm writing it. Making an outline that says: A, Q, and T happen and then things happen in between them is a waste of time when the only way I discover the rest of the alphabet is to dive in. I wish I could make outlines work, but every time I've sat down to write one, it either bombs, or I end up just writing the fic anyway!
Amen on the writing late at night deal. I actually didn't go to bed last Tuesday night, because I got started on a fic at 11pm and just kept at it until I left for work at 8am. Urgh.
I've actually dreamt original shoujo manga in manga format - write down to the text on the pages, and in Japanese no less. When I can't get the fanfic going, I try to rewrite some of those, just for kicks.
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Dam--good analogy. Drawback to outlines for me is that sometimes doing them lets out the pressure and I don't feel the need to actually write the story anymore.
What's this manga about?
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That's definitely another drawback of outlining for me as well. I either feel no urge to write if I've outlined, or the outline shows me how little I truly know about the story and I get discouraged.
In short, the manga I dreamed of involved a piece of the moon falling from the sky to become human, and other humans, who were trapped in the bodies of crows, working to pair the moon up with his soulmate on earth so that they could all be freed. It's a pretty interesting concept, and I'd like to flesh it out
once Death Note stops occupying my brain.From:
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Wow, I just realized that I'm commenting on an entry several years back... Sorry to be a lurker! :3
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