shadowscast

Writing scenes with lots of characters

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 16:31:15 GMT

Just a little musing about my writing process, after finishing writing my first Umbrella Academy fic.

This won't be spoilery for The Umbrella Academy, beyond what you'd get from a Season 1 trailer. Also not spoilery for my fic! But I'll cut anyway, just in case.

( Read more... )

comments

The joy of surprising a reader

Thu, 29 Aug 2019 20:55:09 GMT

As I've mentioned previously in this space, over the summer I wrote a fanfic novel which I knew all along would have hardly any readers, since it's in a small, obscure, old, dead fandom.

But, delightfully, I have a fannish friend who read it, and last night I got to talk to her about it. (Squee!)

The thing that really, really delighted me was that I got to find out that a surprise that I had carefully built into the text worked on her! :-D

I mean, you know how it is when you're trying to surprise your reader with something, but also trying to leave enough hints lying around so that when the reveal happens, the reader will say "Oh my gosh, I should have guessed that!"

Anyway, I had one of those. And it worked! And I am so happy. Hooray!

comments

Five reasons that writing fanfic is fun (for me)

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 01:26:00 GMT

So, as previously mentioned in this space: I didn't write anything for nearly five years, and then I wrote 300K words of Once a Thief fic in a white heat over the course of five months. And then I got to the end of the story that I wanted to tell (for now?), and now I'm sitting here looking around and wondering ... what next?

I mean, the world's my oyster. I have a computer, fingers, and a brain. All I need to do is start wiggling my fingers over the keyboard again and I could be writing anything.

There is a certain temptation to try throwing a bit of time and energy into writing something original. (I don't love the term "original" fiction, used in contrast to "fanfic," by the way—does anybody know of a term that feels less loaded?) Way back before I discovered fanfic, I did write original stories, and that was fun too. I might try it again someday. But original fiction has one huge disadvantage (seen as an advantage by many!) which is that it is, in principal, publishable. So even if I started out saying "Oh gosh, I'm just going to write this for fun, and maybe show it to my husband and my three closest friends and then stick it in a drawer," I know myself well enough to admit that there's a very good chance that I would quickly start to wonder if I could produce something that I could sell. Because, validation, right? And fame, fortune! (Ha.) But then writing stops being a fun hobby, and starts being work. And I already have a full-time job that I love, so I don't want more work—I just want a fun hobby!

So anyway, right now I want to reflect on some of the things that make writing fanfic, specifically, fun. ( Read more... )

comments

I wrote another novel. Whee! Now what?

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 03:15:22 GMT

I have just finished, and posted to AO3, the novel-length Once A Thief fanfic that I've been working on since the start of the summer. It's the fifth instalment in the series that I've been working on since February, when I leapt back into writing after a half-decade hiatus.

So, since February: I have written five stories, totalling 300K words, all in a tiny, obscure, dead fandom. I did it because my muse grabbed me by the throat and wouldn't let me go until I was done.

And now? I think I'm done. At the end of the fifth story, I'm pretty happy with the places where I'm leaving the characters. The kernel of the idea for the fifth story had been with me since 2006, so I feel really good about finally making it happen. But with that out of the way, I don't think I have any more stories I need to tell about them.

I had a lot of fun writing these stories, and letting these characters live in my head again. Sometimes I stop and contemplate the fact that I've just spent most of my spare time for the past five months writing two novels and three novellas that almost nobody is going to read. But then I remind myself that if I hadn't been doing that, I probably would've been building a giant melon farm in Minecraft. Or something else equally fun and pointless. The point is that it was fun. And I'm really pleased with how the stories turned out.

And now I have to figure out what to do next!

Right now I have no idea what to write next. And I'm not going to push myself to come up with something right away. I think it would be good to take a little break from writing. Not a five year break, for sure, but maybe a month? Enough to get caught up on my reading at least; I'm backlogged, with a pile of to-read novels sitting on a shelf in my bedroom.

I might also write some more posts about writing, in order to examine some of my thoughts about what was fun about the experience I just had, what's appealing to me about writing fanfic in general, what kinds of fanfic I might want to write next, or maybe a contemplation of the siren song of original fiction.

I just ... wow. I really don't have any idea what I want to write next!

PS: I suppose I should link the completed fic, just for the record.

Having A Baby Changes Everything
Fandom: Once A Thief
Rating: Mature
Length: 100K words
Summary: The agents must guard and care for a toddler, while dealing with the fallout from a particularly brutal mission.
(The fifth and probably last-ever instalment in my Enough Time series. More detailed tags and warnings are available over at AO3 if you click the link.)

PPS: Thanks again, yourlibrarian, for going on this journey with me, and being the beta reader of my dreams!

comments

Thoughts about writing: ordered lists of names

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 18:25:53 GMT

Since I started writing again a few months ago, after a half-decade break, I've been thinking on and off about aspects of the writing process, and what it is that makes writing fun. And, well, there are lots of things that make writing fun!

One thing I've really been enjoying is the intellectual stimulation of it. Writing fiction is sort of like solving a giant, multi-layered puzzle. There's the puzzle of how to make the overarching plot work. The puzzle of how to make each character's individual journey make sense. The challenge of keeping track of who knows what (and when), including the reader.

And then there's a bunch of fine-grained detail puzzles: such as how to avoid using the word "said" so often that it becomes jarring, while also not going into distracting contortions to avoid it. (One of my semi-pet peeves as a reader is when an author has a long dialog between two characters and, in order to avoid too much "A said, B said" repetition, the author just gives us the speech, with no narration. Which is fine unless the back-and-forth exchange lasts long enough that I lose track of who's saying what, and have to go back to the start of the dialog and start counting quotation marks. This happens to me even when reading professionally published fiction. Maybe other people aren't as bad at keeping track of who's talking as I am?)

Anyway, a fine-grained detail that I've been thinking about in my recent writing is how to handle the ordering of a list of names. This falls under "things that are fun about writing" because it's a decision that has to be made, and puzzling through decisions about writing is, like I said, fun.

The list-of-names issue comes up whenever either a character or the narration need to identify several characters by name, at once. So maybe the narration says "Spike and Xander got in the elevator". But would it be better to say "Xander and Spike got in the elevator"? A decision must be made!

I'm thinking about this a lot right now because I'm writing a series of fics which are built around a trio: Mac, Vic and Li Ann. Or Li Ann, Vic and Mac? Or Vic, Li Ann and Mac?

I'm a mathematician, so I can tell you with confidence: there are only two ways to order a list of two names, but there are six ways to order a list of three names.

So every time the three agents all must be referred to (if it's a moment when it makes sense to say their names, rather than simply "the three agents"), I have to decide what order to put them in.

If it's another character referring to them, then I think about how that character thinks about them, and how well they know each of them. In real life, I've noticed, folks have a tendency to put the person they're most familiar with first on the list. So you might refer to a couple as "Susan and Trish" if you've known Susan since forever and you met Trish through her; but Trish's brother calls them "Trish and Susan."

In a recent story, I had an original character who got to know Li Ann, Mac and Vic in that order, so he tended to refer to them in that order. Except, at a certain point in the story, he was spending a lot of time with Mac, so then he started thinking of them as Mac, Li Ann and Vic. A reader probably (hopefully?) wouldn't stop to notice that or think about it, but hopefully it provides a subtle clue about the development of the relationships between the characters.

But then there's another thing to keep in mind too, which is how each ordering flows. I would argue that in most contexts, "Spike and Xander" is a better order than "Xander and Spike", because of the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. "Spike and Xander" is a nice, neat trochaic dimeter, and it flows very naturally in spoken English. "Xander and Spike," stressed-unstressed-unstressed-stressed, slams into a wall at the end. (Though of course that's just looking at it in isolation; depending on the surrounding sentence, it could turn out to be perfectly fine!)

For my three secret agents, I really don't like putting Li Ann's name first, because I find the resulting pattern of unstressed-stressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed very stumbly. So in the above-mentioned case of the character who got to know Li Ann first, the ordering-by-rhythm came into conflict with ordering-by-familiarity. That's what really brought this whole issue to the front of my mind. And in that case, I decided that ordering-by-familiarity was more important, because of the characterization implications.

So in conclusion ... thinking deeply about things and making decisions about writing is fun! Gosh, I missed this.

comments

Asexuality, part 2: Putting an asexual character in my fic for the first time

Mon, 27 May 2019 04:31:31 GMT

So, having come out as asexual in my previous post, I want to talk about the experience of putting an explicitly asexual character in my fic for the first time.

But actually before that, I think I need to talk a little bit about the experience of writing fics about sexual characters, as an asexual writer. ( Read more... )

comments

Fandom of one?

Mon, 14 Apr 2014 03:19:23 GMT

Today, gloriously, I had much of an afternoon and evening free, and I decided to spend it writing fic.

I wrote 2700 words of a Once A Thief fic. (Mac/Vic/Li Ann threesome, if you're wondering. Shaping up to be long and plotty and angsty, in the way my fics tend to.)

It was very satisfying. Once A Thief was my first fandom, the one I imprinted on. (See this post for details.) As a fandom, though, it is utterly, totally dead. Rigor mortis set in many years ago. So, supposing I finish this fic, it's not entirely clear that anyone but me will want to read it.

The way I'm feeling now, though, is that I'll finish it anyway. (We'll see how it goes, as my time and energy wax and wane!)

Hm. I guess I'm just posting to say: I think I have now clearly established that I write for an audience of me. When there turn out to be other people who want to read my work too, that's a super extra ice cream bonus!

PS: If by some weird chance anybody sees this post who would be interested in the story, do let me know! It would be encouraging.

PPS: People following my story Gently Down the Stream, do not fear. The last chapters are complete, and will be posted on schedule next Friday.

comments

like water when you're thirsty

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:18:45 GMT

Oh wow you guys, I just spent about three hours this afternoon writing fanfic. I went to a coffee shop and opened up my netbook and Spike and Xander came to life in my head, and I wrote. It was great. I've missed this so much.

The last-edited date on the file was June 15th, but I know it's been longer than that since I actually wrote, because I remember I just did a few line edits the last time I had the file open. I think the last time I did any real writing was in mid-April. Gah.

Writing is so hard, sometimes. You know what I'm talking about. Like slogging up a muddy hill in the pouring rain wearing a big wool sweater. But today it was more like taking a running start and sliding down the muddy hill, shrieking gleefully the whole time.

Except not with actual shrieking. My fellow coffee-shop patrons probably would've objected.

Anyway. Hooray for vacation!

comments