3, 11, 14, 51!
Hi, darling. Ready for your essay? 3: Describe the creative process of writing a chapter/fic
Deeply chaotic? I'm very fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, which I'm attempting to train myself out of with… limited success. So. Everything starts very stream-of-consciousness style with actual story bits mashed in between chunks of talking to myself. I do a lot of spinning things around, trying to figure out who's the best POV character, trying to figure out what the point of the story is. What's the emotional anchor, the causal chain, the internal/emotional build up... how to get X out of character Y in a way that hopefully reads authentic, what background can give me which path forward. I rarely have a full picture when I give in and start writing—I tend to see a first draft as telling myself the story, or figuring out what the story is. But i rarely complete a single draft at a time, because I'm realizing what does or doesn't work while writing, so it's messy. I have notes everywhere. Thousands of words just in the document, never mind whatever I end up writing by hand because sometimes the screen just feels like it’s making it harder to think. It's remarkably inefficient time-wise lmao. I'm trying to get better at taking the time to come up with a more solid outline, so Harm looks both more and less messy— I’ve got chapters already set up with that stream of consciousness style all the way to the end. I have two documents for the next chapter's notes, one set up like bullet points for the Main Things i want or need to have happen to expand on what's already happening or set up what comes next, and the other for the random more in depth moments, so now it's just cobbling those two things together in a way that hopefully doesn't suck. (And hoping I don't end up realizing halfway through that I fucked up somewhere lmao) I've also got handwritten pages keeping track of individual character bits like Character A's version of the first couple of chapters to make sure they read well while in Character B's pov. …one day I'll learn how to do this less. Insane. And possibly with more external plots because I really do focus so much on the internal everything that sometimes I get halfway through a fic and I'm like is there a story here at all outside of this guy's mental breakdowns.
11 Link your three favorite fics right now
I don't really do favorites; I'm in love with whatever I'm reading while I read it, so you get three random fics from my bookmarks lmao. I'll be nice and keep them all sskk for you
the metamorphosis of akutagawa ryuunosuke (or: how to house-train your vampire) by flipbookorigami
crazy little thing called love by lilreinie
unmistakable by isengard
14 how do you write emotional scenes? Do you ever feel what the characters feel? Do you draw from personal experiences?
I put a lot of effort into pinning down emotions. They're typically the thing I pay the most attention to. I try to be mindful of the character's core, how expressive or open they are, body language, and weave the emotions around that. I absolutely can, and tend to, feel the emotion I'm writing whilst writing it. It's part of why I walked away from that Delusion klk fic I mumble about randomly- the main character is in a very dark place, and I was writing it while also struggling, and it felt like drowning, so I had to table it for a bit. As for personal experiences/writing—I make connections. I think about how and why they're feeling a certain way, and I let them be messy. I've spent a lot of my own life untangling my emotional state and then further unspooling the threads that come with that state. It's partly why I describe emotional moments with physical links. The characters that focus on their breathing or feel like they've stepped outside themselves are because that's what I've done. The ones with tingling wrists are because that's one way anxiety manifests for me. The ones with a pulse choking them are because I've gotten angry enough for that to happen. Isn't that part of 'write what you know?' I know the feeling, even if the act it's connected to in fic isn't one I've done. It gives the moment and the character more depth, and the scene feels better.
51 What’s your total AO3 word count?
403,619
