4, 62 and 71 for the ask game! :3
Thanks for asking! Sorry it got a little long 🙈
4. Where do you find inspiration for new ideas?
All over the place, but most often tumblr posts, writing challenges (e.g., bingos or theme weeks), prompt lists, requests from friends or readers. Sometimes it's seeing someone mention they wished they saw more of something or that they'd never read a fic with x trope/point that might pique my interest. Other times it's just thinking about my favourite tropes and seeing what sort of fun situations I can create when combining one or more of those tropes with whatever character/pairing interests me the most.
Often things will snowball and one idea will end up leading to two or three others, usually because there are different ways I could choose to take an idea and I want to explore more than one of them (e.g., I have 3 different versions of a time travel idea that mostly diverged based on what point in time the time traveler went back to and whether or not the they would replace their previous self or if there would be two of them).
(Hint: anything I reblog on Tumblr that I tag 'what if' is something I think could inspire an idea or already has)
62. Thoughts on cliffhangers?
I like them! As a reader they can be super frustrating because I'll desperately want to know what comes next, but like in a good way? Like, it makes things interesting and does what it's meant to do; It piques my interest and leaves me wanting more. It gets me hyped for what comes next, thinking about the fic and hypothesizing about how things will go, and heightens the anticipation.
As a writer, I love writing cliffhangers! They're so fun, and I admit I often cackle a little imagining readers' reactions to the cliffhangers 🤭 Sometimes the cliffhangers are one of the first scenes I write.
Now, cliffhangers with no intention of anything ever coming after, that I don't like so much. I like cliffhangers when there's a next chapter or next episode or next book or next fic to look forward to that will eventually satisfy whatever the cliffhanger left hanging. Otherwise it just feels like an unsatisfying lack of resolution or loose ends.
71. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?
So, I have always been very much an outliner and I've only recently started trying to ease back on that. But the longer the fic, the more extensive all those things are.
The best example is my long-term Stetopher WIP, What Makes a Pack. I have a lot of posts about my process, trackers, outlines, timelines, etc. for this fic, since I anticipate it being over 300k and there's a lot to keep track of. So instead of getting into everything here, I'm going to link to some of my posts where I go into more detail:
This post about outlines, where I actually created a Google doc breaking down what my outlining process was at that stage, with various docs including a timeline one
Week 4 Fic Update, which is when I first created my scene tracker and also links some other posts with more background on the fic and its progress
This post, which I worked really hard on, completely breaks down/goes through the tracking spreadsheet I created for the fic (I am still obsessed with this spreadsheet)
Now, for shorter fics that are still long enough that I want to keep track of things, I typically do bullet points in something close to chronological order. For a lot of fics it's just bullet points of things that are going to happen, sometimes with a short explanation for why I made that decision. For fics with a more complicated background or that are a bit longer, the bullet points get split up into multiple sections, sometimes organized as definite/probably/need to figure out, other times it's split into sections like background details, actual plot points, and worldbuilding. And then within the draft itself I'll have a section/tab for notes I make as I go along, usually roughly organized in order of chapter.
Peter Hale's Wooing Woes is a good example of this, since it was an AU that I needed to keep track of a lot of background details. So in that case, I have an outline document that is split up like this:
Initial notes about the inspo for the fic
AU Background, which is split into the Hale pack background and the Beacon Hills pack background, in chronological order of how things happened pre-fic
Current Situations (school & living), where I keep track of who's living where, what school they're going to, notes about programs, who's paying for what, distances between schools and how that impacts the pack dynamics, etc.
Present-Day Plot, which goes into the actual plot of the fic, again in an approximate chronological order, with notes for why things happen the way they do, why certain characters think certain things, what's really motivating them even if they're saying something different, why this or that isn't being figured out, etc.
Send me 'Get to know your fic writer!' asks!
