#number one thing about pantsing that sucks is having to... use my brain

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

"always finish your writing session in the middle of a scene/chapter," I say. "it helps with momentum so then you don't have to start something brand new," I say. "great for people like me who hate starting things."

>>>> me literally not doing that

[crimeronan]

9, 10, 11, 22, 23

from this ask meme!

9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

i don’t often do drabbles, and when i do short pieces, it’s usually because i’m practicing keeping things short!  i have a habit of lengthening projects to astronomical proportions, which ends up sucking when i don’t have the mental bandwidth to complete them

i have to create a rough plot outline if i want to have a prayer of finishing a long fic - but rough can be ROUGH.  most importantly, i need to know the ending.  if i know the resolution i’m writing toward, i have a much easier time staying focused on the long haul.

i might be an anomaly here because i don’t really believe in intrinsically being one “type” of writer, re: the projects you take on, or how you plan them.  i tend toward complex longfic and pantsing in terms of my Instinct Brain, but i’ve learned that that doesn’t actually work for me in terms of Finishing Projects.  so instead of wishing i could plot or write shorter pieces, i’ve just practiced doing so until i’ve learned how!

10. How would you describe your writing process?

i churn out a bunch of shit on google docs.  i don’t reread, i don’t care if it’s good.  then, depending on how bad the draft is, i’ll either open up a new document in a window beside the current one, or i’ll open up the document on my phone.

i’ll use my computer to rewrite the entire draft from scratch, using my initial draft as a guideline, IF the initial draft is such a mess pacing-wise or prose-wise that line editing would be a nightmare.

but if i feel like i’ve paced everything correctly and said everything i want to say in roughly the manner i want to say it, i’ll use my phone to do line-by-line edits.  this is a very intensive process that takes several hours.  the smaller screen allows me to give greater weight to each individual sentence, and phone typing is slow enough to encode the prose into my brain kind of like taking longhand notes does.

95% of my process is editing the drivel i spew when i turn my edit brain off.

11. What do you envy in other writers?

i’m not sure!  i tend to take the approach of “i can learn anything i don’t know,” so when i see writers pulling off their work in a way i can’t, i try to study them instead of being envious.

i AM envious of writers who don’t have ADHD, because i would KILL to have the ability to focus when i want to.  but if i didn’t have ADHD, i also wouldn’t have developed my different ways of project planning to stay on task, so!

22. Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?

i do!  some i reread very rarely because i get a little embarrassed - there’s a lot of writing i’ve done when i was very ill, or that i wrote when i had different opinions / a less informed perspective than i do now, or that i put a lot of really earnest feelings into.

but usually when i reread my work, i come away from it like “damn, this is good as hell, i don’t know what i was worried about.”  if i spend long enough apart from my original fiction or my fanfic, then when i go back and reread it, i’m COMPLETELY divorced from the experience of writing it.  it feels like being a first-time reader gifted this story that just Happens to explore all my favorite tropes and characterizations!

that also helps me when i do notice flaws in my work.  most of my stories that are more than like six months old are pieces that i can find flaws in - i can easily identify ways i know how to execute the piece better now.  but since i’ve lost my writer-sensitivity to the piece, this doesn’t upset me.  it just makes me go “damn i’m so smart now.  nice”

23. What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

in terms of stories i probably won’t go back to, i wrote a novella when i was ten that was about a mermaid destined to save her people.  she lived at the bottom of the ocean and had never seen sunlight.  everyone was chemosynthetic and glowed.  but the magma crack supplying their energy went out, so the mermaid had to swim to the unknown surface and bring back solar energy for her people before they all died.

in terms of stories i AM still writing, there’s gabriel and naomi.  (and their son + his girlfriends, but gabriel and naomi are most significant.)  i developed both of them when i was about 12, when i thought scoring a negative number on the mary sue test (essentially “this person has literally no redeeming qualities and is an absolute monster”) was a sign of good development.  gabriel and naomi had a terrible fucking relationship that i wrote as a romance.  

when i got older, i realized how awful their relationship was.  so i started rewriting their narrative, emphasizing the toxicity and the abuse while de-emphasizing and deconstructing the romance.  i got into power imbalances, fucked-up behavior, male entitlement, insidious emotional abuse, the whole nine.  now it’s a psychological horror + empowerment story about naomi (who herself is honestly not a great person either) killing her shitbag husband.  sexy

[endowrites]

1, 3, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 25 for your writer ask meme! (feel no obligation to answer them all, there were just so many good questions!)

[Get to Know Your Author!]

1) is there a story you’re holding off on writing for some reason?

Probably my first novel project?? I’m honestly still terrified of not being a good enough writer to tackle it just in general. I talked it over with a critique partner a few months back and we both agreed that it would work better as a novelette or short story, so that’s definitely what I’m going to end up doing should I choose to pursue it further, but yeah. I dunno.

(For context, it was a story that took the red herring from the movie “Ex Machina”, where Domhnall Gleeson’s character cuts open his arm because he thinks he might be a robot, and actually ran with it. I really liked the idea, but my first draft was far too info-dumpy and I can’t stand that ;_;)

3) what order do you write in? front of book to back? chronological? favorite scenes first? something else?

I cannot write out of order. Not at all. It’s chronological or nothing for me. Part of it, I think, stems from the structure by which I operate just in general - the way I organize myself is very linear because my brain likes to go off on fractal-level tangents and I spiral down crazy rabbit holes that make me anxious and confused. I’ve got to keep things in order, and the best (and only, for the time being) way I’ve found to do that is to just stick with writing linearly. It sucks, because it means if I hit a snag it derails me for months sometimes, but I consider that a worthy consequence, considering the alternative.

10) write in silence or with background noise? with people or alone?

I write almost exclusively to the Skyrim Atmospheres track. I put it on repeat and just zone out for a few hours. I listened to it so much last year, in fact, that it was my number one played song on Spotify for 2017 and skewed all my damn listening stats. grumble grumble

As for writing around people - if I need to crank out some words and don’t have any serious blockage problems, I will typically go to Starbucks or something for a few hours because being around a bunch of faceless people actually helps me for some reason. But if I’m blocked, the only thing that works is locking myself in my apartment, taking my router, chucking it out the window, and forcing myself to suffer through it alone. 

11) what aspect of your writing do you think has most improved since you started writing?

Precision! I used to waffle on for thousands of words, saying in twenty pages what could have been said in two. Figuring out what needed to be said and what didn’t, as well as to what varying degrees each proverbial dial needed to be tweaked to, was a long, arduous, uphill battle that I’m still struggling with even now.

12) your weaknesses as an author

Plot. I can’t plot to save my damn life. I’m honestly a pantser - I tried outlining, but it didn’t work so well. Pantsing is fun in the moment, but the instant the first draft is done and I try to make something coherent out of it, it all just... crumbles. That, and I just don’t have many profound story ideas that are worthy of being written about, tbh. It’s why writing short stories and original fiction has been so difficult for me. 

Something that’s taken me a really long time to come to terms with is the fact that I just need to write, and not worry about originality or even coherence at first. I just need to write.

13) your strengths as an author

I’m honestly a terrible judge, but based on what I’ve gleaned from critique partners and beta readers over the years, my dialogue and sentence structure are pretty decent. Dialogue scenes are always the ones that I find easiest to write, and the fastest to write, so I guess that’s a good thing! It’s kinda meant that over the past few months, almost all of my writing projects have focused on conversation moreso than action, and also why my main Voltron fic right now is stuck because I was a ninny and wrote myself into a fight scene corner ._.

17) if you could give your fledgling author self any advice, what would it be?

Answered here!!

25) copy/paste a few sentences or a short paragraph that you’re particularly proud of

Oh man - there are a couple. I’ll limit myself to one from each of my main three WIPs right now.

Geartooth:

The castle is an open tomb, and Shiro is too friendly withthe dead to pull himself out.

Blonding (Final Draft):

The paperwork on Minato’s desk demanded diligence. The lists ofninja lining the book in his top drawer demanded understanding. The names inthe bingo book beneath it demanded blood. Those were emotions he was familiarwith, and they didn’t scare him in their familiarity.

But when he spun in his chair and looked out the otherdirection, the price of life lost its label. A village wasn’t another line in aspreadsheet. Children weren’t numbers.

He imagined Kushina, a bundle of blankets and warmth in herhands, cooing into the face of a baby that bore his face. There was no pricefor love. And yet here he was, the father to ten thousand children, and theyall seemed to look up at him like he knew the answers to every question.

Only a shadow could lead the shadowed.

‘You’ll do fine,’the portrait said again. Minato, for the life of him, hoped it was right.

Project Hubcap (my novel):

Gabriel narrowed her eyes. "You wouldn't dare."

"Oh, like you said you wouldn't dare touch myshit?" Marigold said, bending her knees and waving her hands back andforth like an off-duty circus performer. "'I wasn't touching anything,'"she mimicked, and Gabriel hissed. "'I was just looking around is all!Ignore the big blocky bulge in my back pocket; I'm just happy to seeyou!'"

"Alright, shut up!" Gabriel said. "You'vemade your point. Christ, you're even more of a bitch when you're drunk than youare normally."

"That's how it tends to work, sweetheart,"Marigold said, hiccoughing.