Snowflake Challenge #8

[evandar]

Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.



The start of the creative writing process for me basically begins with a scene popping into my head. Even with challenges or exchanges, I don't start writing until I have at least one scene just. There. It doesn't have to have dialogue or anything, although it sometimes does. It's more like a GIF in my brain. And, usually, a question.

Like. When I wrote Falling, the scene that was stuck in my head was one from the movie: Pennywise turning to Bill in Niebolt Street and asking "am I not real enough for you?" It struck me (and it still does, tbh) that Pennywise sounds betrayed when it asks that. That then prompted the question of "why would it feel betrayed?" which then prompted the entire fic.

With fests and kink memes, I used to scroll through prompts until one of them delivered a picture into my brain. Now that I write more for exchanges, I'll pick a couple of interesting tags and try to create an image with those. Then a question. Then, the story.

If I'm writing for a fandom where I feel like I need a refresher on the canon, this is the point where I watch the movie/TV show or read the book/story. When I do that, I make notes on the characters that I'm using, take note of quotes and mannerisms, and pick suitable spin-off points.

Sometimes, I still write by hand. I do that if an idea strikes at work, because I don't want to have fanfic on work computers. If I'm writing by hand, I usually write using a varient of the Elder Futhark to hide what it is that I'm writing just in case someone tries to read over my shoulder. That's a habit that grew out of being a very paranoid, very bullied teenager, btw. I also write on my phone sometimes: this is usually if I'm working on something short while on public transport. I also used to write on my phone at work at my old job, since there was less immediate access to notebooks/paper.

Mostly, I write on my laptop. It's old, but it gets the job done. If I'm transcribing handwritten stuff, I usually edit it at the point I'm putting it onto the laptop and go from there. I'll keep the fandom wiki open while I'm writing, just in case there's anything I need to look up, as well as the challenge prompt if there is one, and I'll often keep rewatching/rereading as well.

Also, for all that my writing process starts with the inspiration brain GIF o' doom, I don't start writing at that point. It's usually not the end-point, either. It's a little treat at the mid-point.

I also tend to write other things around the main thing that I'm working on. This used to be a lot more noticeable when I was in Harry Potter fandom, when I used to hop between pairings like a lunatic, but I do still do it. If I'm working on something and I get stuck, I'll write a drabble or a short (usually plotless fluff) oneshot about the same pairing, just so I keep exploring their dynamics. The most recent time this happened was in last year's YGO Mini Bang: I was writing for a new (to me) pairing, and since the fic for the bang was in a historical setting, I found myself writing a bunch of short canon-period AUs as well.

Once I have a draft, I usually edit it myself. I used to have a beta, but she now acts more as a sounding board if there's an idea I get particularly stuck on. She's occasionally my go-to for medical research and has, for various unpublished fics (they won't ever be published because I'm no longer in Harry Potter fandom) told me what diseases you can catch from necrophilia and how long it would take an infant's skeleton to dissolve in acidic soil. Poor R, we were regarded with a lot of suspicion at the branch of Frankie & Benny's where the necrophilia conversation happened.

Anyway, yes. All mistakes are mine, currently.

If I'm writing a multichapter fic, I go back and reread what I've already posted. A lot. Especially since I take a long time to write them and I occasionally forget who I killed off in earlier chapters. I've started actually planning what goes into my chapters, as well. I'm a pantser by nature, and it used to be that if I talked about a fic too much or started laying out too many details then I'd never actually write it because my brain would look at the detailed plan and go "this is finished" and consider the whole thing done.

Now, I have a very barebones overarching plan for my current WiP, and then, when I get to the point where I'm about to sit down and write a new chapter, I write more detailed notes about settings and what's going to happen, etc. And when I say the main plan is barebones, I mean it. The plan for the last chapter I published was: 6. Horror (death toll rises, clownspouse porn, Georgie takes photos) (Bill & Georgie POV)

So, chapter number and title, what happens, and whose POV I'm writing in. Tadah ~

It only took my twenty years of writing fanfiction to figure out that if I'm going to create a plan for something, it needs to be that minimalistic.

Since this rambling is coming to an end, I will also say that if I'm working on a oneshot, I tend to finish the bulk of the writing in a single day. I very rarely take more than that to write a first draft. Does it help that most of my writing is relatively short oneshots? Absolutely. But I kind of need to do it in one go or else I find it very hard to pick back up and get going again. Can I? Yes, but I'm very easily distracted.

The last thing I want to talk about in regards to writing processes, is music. Or, rather, background noise, because music can be tricky. I find it a hundred times more difficult to write in silence. When I was in university, I preferred studying in coffee shops than in the library because of the ambient background noise. I'll listen to music over the background noise too, sometimes; I find it helpful to either have a playlist that I associate with a specific fandom or pairing (and yes, my Deezer playlists are probably something to be studied) or something which has a steady beat and where I can't understand the words. SKALD is good for that (Viking folk metal), as are Wardruna and Wolcensmen. Pomodoro techniques with ambient noise instead of music also work really well for me, but I have to be really careful if they have movie music in them because that sometimes snaps me out of the writing trance.



So, that's how I write things. I quite enjoyed writing for this challenge: it was nice to thing about how I do things and compare them to how I used to do it. There's been a lot of trial and error over the years.

I used to have to write analyses of my own writing for university (my BA is in English Lit and Creative Writing, and we had to do that for the CW part) and it used to make me want to die inside from how fucking pretentious the whole exercise was. They were never really accurate either, mostly because they talked about symbolism more than "I wrote this for a grade and I hate this teacher, so fuck it." But now I'm now kind of wondering what an analysis piece would look like for one of my fics. Huh. Let me know if you want to see one someday, I guess.

Comments

[kitarella_imagines]

A GIF in the brain. I can definitely relate to that, it happens to me all the time when thinking up fics! That's a good metaphor for it.

I've noticed that people either like silence or background noise when they write, it's a clear divide. I personally have to have silence, probably because my brain is so loud full of characters talking 😅

I agree, I like this challenge as it's showing how different everyone is from each other in writing processes.