First Post

[hoisinsauce]

A space to chat fandom! Anon!

Got a WIP you're excited about? Want to rave about your fave? Or is your fandom absolutely in love with a character who detracts from every scene they bumble into, and you need somewhere to vent? You're in the right place!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

I woke up in the middle of the night and then foolishly continued a novel I had started! I couldn't fall back asleep until I finished it. Sure enough, I'm exhausted today.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Ohhhhh man I empathise, nonny; at one point I had a rule for myself not to start writing/composing after 10pm because I would ALWAYS get into it and end up doing an all-nighter. But well done for finishing! What's it about?

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, sorry, I meant reading a novel.

I do have a failed nanowrimo project, but that's been ... let's say dormant ... for two plus months now. I think it about it occasionally but I haven't actually written anything in a while (mainly because I strongly have the impression that I need to read and watch some referenced media first, and I'm laaaazzzzzyyyy.)

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Ahahaha I'm a dweeb.

Ahhh, I'm in that position with a couple of fanfics. I wanted to try writing longer ones for a change, since normally if I don't finish it in an evening it never goes up... but I just daydreamed weeks' worth of work, meant to do some research (involved reading a book), and then got distracted... for over a year... (still haven't started the book!) I wanted it to be brilliant and put too much pressure on myself. xD I have actually had more luck finishing original novels, but they're much worse and idk what to do with them when they're done.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Tell me your secrets for finishing original novels!

The very features that make my project exciting to think about (interesting historical figures, relevance to modern culture debates, region-specific supernatural elements, personal meaning that verges on being a funhouse mirror autobio) make me seize up and decide I need to ~prepare more~ whenever I try to commit to putting words on page.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Honestly, I think just having written lots and lots of rubbish helps? xD So, I've finished 5 novels at this point, none of which I've tried seriously to publish (I think the last is publish*able*, but I wrote it around the time all the transactivism stuff went down, got demotivated, and didn't really feel like going near the publishing industry). The first was a godawful 250k word mess I wrote when I was around 15 (I wanted to be some kind of child prodigy novelist but I am very glad I realised my writing sucked before I sent it off anywhere). So once you do something like that, the only way is up. So... nanowrimo helped me 'finish' another one (also shit). The third one, I drafted in a couple of weeks over a holiday, since I could keep the energy going that long, then spent yearssss redrafting the second half. Going into that one, I wanted to write trashy popcorn-fiction, which took the pressure off. A woman I'd met on a fan forum (and who was a much better writer) was willing to beta-read, so that helped with motivation. In the end it still wasn't fit to publish anywhere, but I did put it up for free online for a while as a curio. The fourth, I wrote for my own amusement; it's 100k words of pure self-indulgent angsty melodrama and will hopefully never see the light of day, but I had a great time writing it and there are some fun lines. For the last one, which started out as a parody of chick-lit, I took an episodic approach; I'd write a chapter or two and then send them to a friend.

So it's a mix of having no standards and feeling like other people want to read it. xD And just writing a LOT. I've also written loads of fanfic over the years (and have discovered I much prefer writing fanfic, and I think my writing in my fanfic is objectively better). So knowing I have some truly terrible stuff out there does take the pressure off. And thennnnn I can say I have a process at this point, though I do mess around with it for each project. So I have draft files where I ramble around and throw all my half-formed thoughts onto the page and ask myself questions, and a file for things I cut, and again that takes some pressure off because I can try out a possibility and if I don't like it, I cut it but I don't lose it forever, Just In Case I want to use it later (I almost never do). :P So, I think it's about taking the pressure off at every stage. There's no sharp 'and now we write the novel!'; I (try to) keep a daily journal and when I'm working on a novel, I just write stuff in there, not fussing too much about punctuation or precise phrasing, breaking off to talk to myself etc, and then copy paste the novel bits into files called 'chapter-1', 'chapter-2' etc. Then I go back and fix them.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

That makes sense. I need to work on the "having no standards" part. My brain doesn't really light up with interest unless I think the idea is meaningful or novel in some way, but then the paralysis kicks in. I like the idea of letting daily journal-writing bleed into writing ... that is how I brainstormed a large chunk of the set-up ... hmmmmmm.

File under would-be-neat-if-I-got-around-to-it-but-let's-not-hold-our-breath.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Ayrt

Yeahhh, my "daydream voice" is very different to my "writing voice". The things I can get totally absorbed in are generally not the things that can make it to paper, I suppose because it's demotivating being unable to capture so much of it and it feels like just doing a low quality transcription of a much better work. So I think the way to get around that would be to build it up steadily over time and add layers, but I'm too impatient. My brain is interested in philosophy of science and cognition while my fic is like "someone has to pretend to be someone else, oh no!"

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Haha, yeah. I have deep thoughts about Friendship and Community and Inclusion and the Meaning of it all, but at the end of the day I have to write a dialogue scene between two characters, showing the state of their friendship, and that's hard.

Re: How's it going?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeahhh, if it helps at all I normally build anything on the symbolism side up over time, and I approach it kind of... clinically? Like, I start with the dialogue, then invent some kind of prop and add that in, tracking its journey as a metaphor over the course of the conversation (this is another thing easier in fanfic because characters tend to already have props associated with them)... but I do think of it in terms of 'props'. And I try to pick weird things so that it doesn't come across as too cliched (I daresay nobody past the age of 16 wants to read something with a teddybear as a metaphor for a child character, but you can make the child character obsessed with a household item or some random junk that was never intended as a toy and use that as a metaphor, and it feels a lot more natural imo). I think I write according to formulae that I had to consciously invent and then use automatically with practice. Though it's still really annoying when you don't really have a concrete mental image you're trying to convey, just a sense of motion or a feeling. Or a sound. :P