Going on Instinct

Copied from my Wordpress - fimficwriter.

I just wanted to share a writing article I found by Katla Hower, which has a couple of points I feel are especially relevant to fanfiction.

The article on Katla’s blog, Brimming Heart, Empty Page talks about going off your instinct to figure out whether there’s something wrong with your writing. I’d recommend checking it out if you feel there’s something ‘not quite right’ with that story you’ve just written, because there are some great pointers.

One particular quote that stood out to me was this…

You have to know what you’re trying to say. You have to understand your story. If you don’t have a compass that works, you won’t know where north is. What’s the core of your story? What do you want to say? How do you want your character(s) to transform? What needs to happen for that to occur naturally?

This is something to keep in mind when you’re first planning your story. It’s all well and good saying “I want to write a story where X and Y fall in love!”, but you also have to consider the other factors. What has to change in your characters in order for them to fall in love? What kind of obstacles could make this happen naturally?

My first fanfiction story, Eyes On You, started out as a very simple premise. X is injured, Y has to take care of her, X has to put aside her pride and learn to trust Y, and in doing so, they open up to one another and fall in love.

That looks like a pretty brief plan, right? But if you look at it, it actually covers all of the points noted above. The core is the two falling in love. ‘What I want to say’ is that it’s okay to trust someone when you need help. My character transformation is Y learning this lesson, and coming to trust X. In order for this to happen naturally, they need to have some reason to be together for a certain length of time, and to work together – thus the injury.

And that’s all I needed to start writing a novel-length story. I never intended it to be novel-length, which brings me onto the second quote…

Story arcs can be planned (in fact a lot of writers do plan them; I’ve never had much luck), but they also have to develop in a natural way. It’s your job as the writer to provide obstacles that direct your characters and story to develop the way you want. It’s a careful balance between control and freedom.

Once you have your outline written (like the one I wrote above), you have the first bit of direction – the control – for your story. You have the main obstacle that’s going to start your characters down the path you’ve laid for them, but from there, it’s alright to loose up on the reins and let them take a bit of control.

If you’ve written a detailed plan for a scene to happen one way, but it feels more natural for your characters to act it out completely differently, then LET them. That’s your natural social instincts and knowledge of the characters telling you that ‘this is how it would really happen – this is how the characters would act’.

As writers, we often don’t give our first instincts enough credit. We second guess ourselves, say things like, “Oh no, I got carried away,” and end up scrapping that whole impulsive scene, in order to get ‘back on track’. But something I’ve found is that it’s okay to get carried away sometimes. It’s okay to let your instincts drive the story a little bit. At the end of the day, you’ll more than likely find that those instincts have given the story more realism.

Not to mention that it’s a heck of a lot of fun ;)

And you might even end up turning your two sentence outline into a huge, emotional, novel-length story. You’ve just got to have a little faith in your instincts.

Thanks to Katla for the helpful advice and for provoking some thought! If you haven’t already checked it out, find the article here!

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PS: I've been forgetting to copy this over, so I'm a few articles behind at the moment. It'll be easier to manage once I'm all caught up.