#ooc: its a true story. these questions were in my drafts for MONTHS

[reindeer-dad]

Tantrum: How does your muse deal with tantrums? In public?

That one Parent's Day ask meme posted a looong time ago. RIP.

Long ago, Rudy used to give into Dess's grocery store tantrums everytime----

Yeah, sure. I'm not complaining. Go for it!

Thanks for saving my breath (typing?)

YES. PLEASE.

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

4, 5, 8, 13, 34? :3c

HELLO THANKS FOR ASKING!!

Referencing this post.

4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral?

Full disclosure: I saw this question and promptly forgot every word I’ve ever known. What my brain came up with on the reboot was, “Honestly…~~feral~~ makes me lose my shit. You know shit’s about to get Real when somebody’s described as feral, and I’m always love feral characters.”

5. Do you have any writing superstitions? What are they and why are they 100% true?

I don’t know if this counts as a Superstition or just a Neuroticism, but: The color’s gotta Match. Holy heck, does the color gotta match. I draft by hand in ink, and I change pen colors for different projects, in different notebooks, and they all have to at least kind of coordinate with each other, or else words stall out. Color Family is enough when it comes to notebook/pen combos, but if I try to change ink mid-project to a Slightly Different Hue, mid-drafting stream, Disaster Strikes.

For instance: When I was writing my superheroes stuff, I ran out of pens, and thought I ordered the Correct Refills, but the refills were Very Slightly Darker than the turquoise I was using, and it threw off my NaNo writing mojo for literally sixteen hours (until I got The Proper Pens). I had an existential crisis about it, at the time. It was bad.

Perhaps closer to counting as a superstition: I also must Begin A New Project With A New Month. I can’t just. Start a new project, whenever. I have to time it right, or Disaster. I don’t make the rules (I wish I made the rules).

8. If you had to write an entire story without either action or dialogue, which would you choose and how would it go?

Okay, so THIS is a wild question because, depending on how you interpret it, I have…technically…done both, in the same book? The one I just finished, actually: the whole novella is framed as a conversation in a café, so the only Actual Real Time Action is one character walking in and sitting down (and then facial expressions and one (1) notable coffee-out-nose incident), BUT the whole thing Is (one side of a) Dialogue.

On the flip side: there no dialogue-indicating quotation marks until almost 11k in, and by that point the narrator has told the story twice in its entirety. And: I didn’t do No Dialogue intentionally in the first drafting? Since it happened on accident, it couldn’t have been hard, right?

If I had to Pick One Intentionally, though, I’d probably go with No Dialogue to see if I could do it? Since I already loopholed my way into No Action. Dialogue is fun and relatively easy for me to write, usually, so it’d be a good Challenge Mode to try to Not. (…hm. BRB, making vague general notes for a Future NaNo, because it sounds like fun…..)

13. What is a subject matter that is incredibly difficult for you write about? What is easy?

Difficult: POLITICS/government lol. I don’t understand it IRL and I have a hell of a time trying to translate it into fiction (which is…an Issue, for, say. Secondary World SFF. And, uh. Guess what I have several ideas for, stuck in the worldbuilding stage…).

Easy:  Catch me adding SCIENCE to, like. Everything I write (even if it’s OOC for my narrator to know about). For instance: Birds? Feathers? Flight?? Love that shit, so anywhere it can go in, in it goes. Even if I don’t have the immediate knowledge to pull it off convincingly, I love learning about it, so I absolutely go down the research rabbit hole.

34. Thoughts on the Oxford comma, Go:

Mandatory. Seriously, if in general punctuation’s major purpose in life is CLARITY, whymst the fucketh wouldn’t you use an Oxford comma?? Why would only the FIRST item in your list get one? And commas are legitimately cute! So smol, and they have TAILS! What’s not adorable about that?

I also personally do my Best to increase the world’s total (properly-used) comma population at, like, literally every turn, in hopes that some of them will escape containment into the greater ecosystem and interbreed with native populations to increase species abundance.

Viva la Oxford comma!!

Thanks for the ask, friend!!

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Hi! I just started reading your fan-fiction, "Adrenaline Rush" and I have to say it is VERY good. I have a question if you don't mind answering it. I am writing fan-fiction of my own and I have been pushing it off for months because I don't know where to start. For this, what was your writing process? Example: Did you write your plot first or did you write as you went to each chapter?

Hi, anon! Thanks for your very kind note and interest in Adrenaline Rush! The story has its issues/tangles, but it��s definitely been a fun and personally meaningful project for me to try writing. It means a lot to hear that you’re enjoying it! And that’s very exciting that you want to start writing as well. :)

Each writer will be different in terms of their creative process, so a part of your question involves learning more about yourself as a creator too! It’s good to know how your brain likes to work and what environment helps it hum along, which may or may not align with what works for me.

Honestly, AR’s design and development has been haphazard. For me, AR all started because I was unable to attend a nearby drag racing competition in 2018, and those races had been a pretty big staple in my life. At the same time, my head was full of Voltron shenanigans because I’d just recently joined the fandom. I was walking the family puppy when it hit me that Blue Lion, Red Lion, etc. would be good names for Top Fuel machines. I was so excited at the concept of exploring drag racing in a fic. It gave me a “race” to look forward to, along with all the drama and adrenaline that came with it. In that moment, I had enough excitement in my brain to convert the Potential Energy of my idea into the real Kinetic Energy of writing/typing.

If you have the energy but are not sure how to “start” your story, then you might consider what it means to set aside the opening or even the assumed first chapter for now. What scene/image/dialogue in your head do you really want to write right now? What happens if you just…start there, and then work backwards or forwards? Sometimes you have to get a feel for the medium you’re working with before you can really start molding the scenes and imagery into something fully formed. My first “scene” I wrote for AR was definitely not the opening one. The first story lines I wrote involved Lotor smoking a cigarette on a pro stock motorcycle, lol. I built around that image, as well as the image of a determined Allura sitting in Blue Lion, preparing to race. The desire to bring these characters and their racing machines to life really helped me hammer out that first chapter in a blur of a few days, where I puzzle-pieced scenes together. 

Other activities that can help you start a story is to look at how other authors start their stories. For example, do they start with a question, or a conversation, or a description of scenery? Do they start at the very beginning of a plot, or in the middle of action and catch you up on the details later? What kind of opening in other people’s stories most engages you? What happens to your story if you start with one element over another? What kinds of plots and story structures make you feel most engaged when you read them? What happens when you try to emulate those things? (Just questions to munch on here.)

I think it also helps to ask yourself why you want to write this story. Do you just want to explore an aesthetic that makes you feel good? Do you have a deep need to explore a certain kind of character or world? Are you hoping to get a catharsis of some kind? Is it a couple of things at once? Are you wanting to write a massive epic or just a short drabble to convey a moment in time? If you know “why” you are doing something, that can help you to know what kind of scenes to write—and what the story’s goal or vibe should be. Silly plot holes and clunky dialogue and some OOCness can be forgiven, especially in fanfic, which is a labor of love anyway—but if your story radically changes its tune or plot and no longer addresses the “why” that made you so excited in the first place, then that can alienate even you from it. Once you know what you want out of your story, then you can start plotting out all the different ways you could potentially achieve that goal. This feeds directly into the types of scenes that appear in a first chapter.

Before I started writing any actual scenes for AR, I did try to feel out more of the story by writing a promotional blurb. Like, if this were a book jacket or a Goodreads summary, what would that enticing blurb potentially look like? What was this story going to be about, aside from Lotor and Allura being pretty while they race machines, lol? I had some people in a discord who were kind enough to let me “pitch” a blurb at them to see if it would be of interest. This was my original pitch, which isn’t terribly different from the story summary as it appears on AO3 today:

The discord members were very encouraging, and so that gave me the push I needed to start writing story content, beginning with the images of Lotor smoking on his bike and Allura preparing to qualify. This tactic might not be for everyone just starting out, but writing a short promotional blurb/story summary can help you identify some initial parameters in terms of characters/conflict/setting. Having those basic parameters can then further target the types of images, dialogue, and scenes that make logical sense for introducing your story.  

If you need more structure than just free-form writing or building off an image in your head, you can definitely use an outline to help you identify scenes or images that you’d like to try working on. While AR did not start off with an outline, it does have a plot outline now to help ensure I don’t drop something important. So I started bulleting ideas, trying to stretch out the story summary to its natural/logical end point.

An outline can help you write linearly if clear, concrete structure resonates with your brain. It can give you an opportunity to “preview” how a chapter opening can affect future events before you even write them, if you’re worried about where free-form-writing can take you. If you want to use an outline, it doesn’t even have to be all that elaborate. It can just be bullet points or explanatory sentences, or pieces of dialogue. It can be notes on a poster arranged in a spider web design. It can be a collection of gifs on your computer that signify the emotions you want to simulate in the story—it can be literally anything, and it can evolve too.

Paradoxically, writing an outline has also helped me move away from having to write individual chapters in a linear fashion, which is sometimes hard for me to do over a long course of time. So readers on AO3 might experience AR as a linear story, but I have dozens of pages of future scenes or bits of dialogue that I felt inspired to write over the last few years. Like, one major scene appearing in the most recent chapter 9, which published here in January 2021—it’s been written since July of 2019, lol. Using an outline to tackle a story can empower you to follow your bliss in a nonlinear fashion. For example, sometimes I’m more in a mood to write racing, and other times, I’m more emotionally invested in writing AR’s background drama or romance. If I halfway know where I’m going based on my outline, I can switch gears to write what I immediately want to write, and then I can later sew scenes and dialogue together later in a fairly smooth fashion.The concept of writing a chapter straight from start to finish just doesn’t have to constrain me with this method, and that’s critical for me. I understand having to trudge through writer’s block for a particular scene, but I like to minimize that pain as much as possible. And sometimes moving beyond that point can remove the writer’s block entirely.

Admittedly, the original outline I wrote for AR doesn’t match 1:1 to what’s currently written. As I started actually writing out scenes correlating to those bullet points on my outline, things changed. The space between bullet point 1 and bullet point 2 expanded with additional scenes, and those additions changed the details in the original bullet point 2. So my outline has gone through several tweaks as well.

This is the “organic” slop that can occur between your true written product and your initial assumptions for where the story should go. There are going to be plot milestones that you likely have to hit in order to achieve your end-goal/correct vibe with the story, but it’s totally okay to let your characters have a voice in how they get there. You might start an outline or a story assuming Road Trip A through the city is the best way to get to the end or achieve a certain vibe, but as your characters grow in your head, they might decide for themselves that Road Trip B through the mountains is the best way to the end. Once you set a story in motion, it’s no longer just you driving it. Your characters should drive the story too. Allowing them to do that will keep you emotionally invested and interested in the story. Sometimes, your characters will even write for you if you don’t know what to write. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I’m in control of AR—I suppose I’m the navigator with a map sitting in the passenger seat, but I know I’m not the one holding the wheel, LOL.

And while we all do hope to create something quality that we’re immensely proud of, I do think it’s important to keep G.K. Chesterton’s thought in mind: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” In other words, the desire to create something immediately perfect with minimal effort can keep you from doing anything at all. It’s better to accept a messy first draft and to know you may have to revise later, than to sit in fear and end up writing nothing. And sometimes, your brain needs physical content to react to before you feel you’ve found the best option. Like, just getting content down to start with can change your whole perspective. You can revise and mold things as you get a better feel for what you want to convey. There’s always draft 2 for structural changes. Or draft 3 or 4 for polishing and getting a satisfying first sentence down. There’s no pressure to crank out a Pulitzer Prize Winner on a first draft or even after you publish something to a fanfic archive. This is fanfic. It’s supposed to be fun, at the end of the day. Let yourself enjoy the process of messy creation. Let your characters help you out. Don’t be afraid to revise or try out a few different things get to the vibe/end you really want. To do is to know.

If you’re still not confident in yourself or your abilities to make a critical design decision, you can always engage a beta reader or have someone listen to your ideas. Talking things out loud or reading your work out loud to yourself can help you process creative decisions in a new way! There’s also a significant difference between typing on a computer or writing things down on paper. Typing on a computer can take away the fear of permanence, while writing things down on paper can slow you down and make you experience each word more fully.

So I guess to wrap all of this up: I have a pretty fluid process, and I’m more worried about not creating at all than I am about screwing it up. Even a screwed-up work can teach you something and help you get somewhere better next time. And if you had fun making it, then maybe it wasn’t a screw-up at all! I really encourage you to soul-search on what gives you joy or excitement regarding this fic idea you have, and to hold on tight to that joy as you begin translating images in your head or outlining plot points, or something in between.

I hope something from this response helps you! <3