The Writing Process
January 31st, 2014 12:58 pm(Kept meaning to post this and then getting distracted by people/assignments/whatever. Oops. Anyway, for the December posting meme- ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
degrees )
Talk about your writing process!
You mean besides that it's a mess? XD It's not so much a process as "Ver makes everything up as she goes along." Alright, well, I'll try and pull something together here.
When I get a bunny, regardless of whether it's something that was brought on by music or something else, usually it's just a small snippet of something. An idea for a part of a scene if I'm lucky, but usually I'm not and it's a line or two of dialogue. Unfortunately, what the bunny started out as gives no indication of how long it's going to end up being- "The Devil You Know," which is somewhere in the ballpark of 10k words and is my longest fic to date by FAR, started off in my head as just a scene of Hikaru and Akira seeing each other at a club. That's IT. Even the simple ones can grow completely out of control. The bunnies just start multiplying on their own, I don't know how they do that when there's only one of them to begin with. Apparently plot bunnies reproduce asexually? I don't know.
As far as actual writing goes, I tend to write things as they come to me, which is usually not in any coherent order. The initial bunny is somewhere in the middle? Okay fine, I guess I'm writing that first. The next bit is the end? Alrighty then. I don't generally use filler text, either, unless there's something important I'm intending on putting there that I may forget about later. I mostly work in Notepad, so what this means is that if you looked at a story I'm working on, you probably wouldn't know what was happening half the time. It's just a jumble of seemingly random paragraphs, large spaces, and some short dialogue sequences. (The large spaces typically mean that I'm making a separation between what comes before it and after it- there's a scene change, but I'm not done writing the previous scene yet.) It's kind of a mess, to be honest. Sometimes I work in yWriter and that makes it a bit easier as far as keeping the bits separated. I tend to use Notepad because regardless of what kind of machine I'm on, everything can open a txt file. Even my phone. :P I know at this point it's outlived its usefulness, because everything I use will also open ODT/RTF files, but ehhhhhh.
So basically, what ends up happening is I have to figure out how all the pieces I have fit together. This happens along the way, it's not like I write all the pieces and am then staring at it trying to get it to go together like a puzzle. It's like... I'm making a quilt, and I have some of the squares made up already and know where I want them, but I'm also making things as I go. Often, I find that scenes naturally go together without a lot of effort on my part, but every once in a while I have to kind of nudge things along in the right direction. You can usually tell when I do this. XD
Also, I reblogged something on Tumblr yesterday that really applies to this post.
(Oh yeah, if you have a question/topic/whatever for me, the original post is here!)
degrees )Talk about your writing process!
You mean besides that it's a mess? XD It's not so much a process as "Ver makes everything up as she goes along." Alright, well, I'll try and pull something together here.
When I get a bunny, regardless of whether it's something that was brought on by music or something else, usually it's just a small snippet of something. An idea for a part of a scene if I'm lucky, but usually I'm not and it's a line or two of dialogue. Unfortunately, what the bunny started out as gives no indication of how long it's going to end up being- "The Devil You Know," which is somewhere in the ballpark of 10k words and is my longest fic to date by FAR, started off in my head as just a scene of Hikaru and Akira seeing each other at a club. That's IT. Even the simple ones can grow completely out of control. The bunnies just start multiplying on their own, I don't know how they do that when there's only one of them to begin with. Apparently plot bunnies reproduce asexually? I don't know.
As far as actual writing goes, I tend to write things as they come to me, which is usually not in any coherent order. The initial bunny is somewhere in the middle? Okay fine, I guess I'm writing that first. The next bit is the end? Alrighty then. I don't generally use filler text, either, unless there's something important I'm intending on putting there that I may forget about later. I mostly work in Notepad, so what this means is that if you looked at a story I'm working on, you probably wouldn't know what was happening half the time. It's just a jumble of seemingly random paragraphs, large spaces, and some short dialogue sequences. (The large spaces typically mean that I'm making a separation between what comes before it and after it- there's a scene change, but I'm not done writing the previous scene yet.) It's kind of a mess, to be honest. Sometimes I work in yWriter and that makes it a bit easier as far as keeping the bits separated. I tend to use Notepad because regardless of what kind of machine I'm on, everything can open a txt file. Even my phone. :P I know at this point it's outlived its usefulness, because everything I use will also open ODT/RTF files, but ehhhhhh.
So basically, what ends up happening is I have to figure out how all the pieces I have fit together. This happens along the way, it's not like I write all the pieces and am then staring at it trying to get it to go together like a puzzle. It's like... I'm making a quilt, and I have some of the squares made up already and know where I want them, but I'm also making things as I go. Often, I find that scenes naturally go together without a lot of effort on my part, but every once in a while I have to kind of nudge things along in the right direction. You can usually tell when I do this. XD
Also, I reblogged something on Tumblr yesterday that really applies to this post.
(Oh yeah, if you have a question/topic/whatever for me, the original post is here!)
