how not to flail and fail at fanfiction: XII · 11:11am Dec 12th, 2014
You know, I've got plenty of good advice on how writing should happen - I don't have a way to index these (yet - I could do it manually but I'm lazy) so this might be XI or XIII, but I think it's about right.
The thing is, I find I'm very bad at taking my own advice. So this time, friends, passersby and random click junkies, how about any of you tell me:
Just how do you write?
What do you do right when you write, what do you do wrong? What do you think you should (or should not) do? How do you keep track of all your characters, or plan your scenes, sections or chapters?
I want to know!
There are plenty of writers better than me on this site (there are a few with far more followers that have written that one story which attracted undue attention, too, but those people need not apply. Pandering so hard your name might as well be Sing Sing isn't difficult) and I'm hoping a few of them would deign to tell me their secrets...
If not, general Q&A works too!
All I know is from the other side of fimfiction, Side of readers. There is a lot of it. But it won't help you.
The one bit advice I've ever read that seems to genuinely work is to at least try writing a thousand words a day.
Practice makes perfect, and if you do that it does work out to 365 000 words a year...
Ain't the most glamorous of advice, but so far it has worked for me.
Yeeeah, sorry to disappoint you, Middy, but I basically just write out my premise and then push the whole thing down the hill and hope it both survives the trip and accidentally ends up somewhere interesting
I imagine the story as though it were a show or a play, then transcribe what happens. Well, I imagine some scenes thusly, then I have to bridge them. I'm honestly not too sure about the strengths and weaknesses of the technique; it's just how I do it.
Also, if you go to your blog management page (the one you get to by clicking "Blogs" in your user menu) you can use Find to find specific blog titles. It seems to have all of them on the same page. Very handy feature.
Because I'm an entirely visual-brained person, my writing process first consists of seeing my story as a movie in my head, complete with camera angles, shot blocking/timing, soundtrack, lighting, set design, costume design, and everything else down to character voice inflection.
I then just push through the chore of describing this in a way that will get similar imagery into the reader's head.
In terms of plot, and world, and characters; The basic structure for that pops into my head in a single flash. Most refinements consist of reordering certain scenes, or adjusting their tone. I essentially never deviate from, or modify, the overall plot once I have it down.
I organize my writing by keeping Google Drive document chains; roughly 20,000 words per document (more than that seems to lag unduly) and I just chain them by linking them to both the next, and previous documents at the end.
I write whenever I have time, but because I'm not a morning person, I find my brain is best primed to write in the evening. When I write, I don't devote a lot of work to nailing perfect grammar and punctuation. Some would say that's 'doing it wrong,' but if my beta readers didn't catch it the first pass through, it doesn't really seem like a big enough issue to me to matter.
As for what I do right? I've been told I do both dialogue, and world building very well. Part of that I think was learning not to over-describe my world in giant lumps of exposition text. My secret to getting around that tendency is to spread out the description and salt it through the narrative, so it never has a chance to coalesce into an overly winded blob.
What should you do? Enjoy what you're writing about. What should you not do? Never decide to write a certain story, or change the way you write a story, because someone else told you that you should. I've been told I should lay off writing about Gryphons before, and to that I say 'feck off.' I always do better when I write about that which I enjoy. So I write about that which I enjoy.
Your mileage may vary on all of this, and I think that lots of the way we writers go about writing is unique to us. It stems from our individual situations, and personalities.