#please tell me about any clunkiness/weird sentence structure. i will try to fix it

[paintedrecs]

You're such a good author!! What are you thinking when you're writing? And what's your editing process? If you don't mind me asking!!

Ah, thank you!! I’m very often thinking “wow I am not a good author” while I’m writing, so it’s always nice to hear positive responses once the finished work is out there. :)

This ended up (unsurprisingly) long, so be aware there’s gonna be a Read More.

My editing process is very, very nitpicky. To begin with, I edit a LOT as I write, so those two questions share some answers. 

I considered posting a photo of a page I handwrote this week, but I don’t want to subject you to that. Suffice it to say that if I’m writing in pen, there’s a lot of scribbling and paragraphs that branch off into the margins and spiral around the edges of the page as I rework sentences and expand sections. Before I switched to writing almost exclusively on my computer, I used to use a mechanical pencil to make all that a little less messy. Still, though. Eraser shavings. Everywhere.

It seems like most of fandom swears by writing sprints, and I can’t do it. I either write in long, tireless stretches where I forget to move for hours, or I spend an hour writing a sentence, frowning thoughtfully at it, tweaking a few words, tilting my head to the side, changing it back, muttering, “No I don’t like that,” and shifting the structure until it fits with the rest of the story.

I spend a lot of time reading my own writing out loud, which is part of why I’m not usually that productive when I try to write in public. (Although once I’m in the zone, I’ll write on my phone as I walk to the grocery store, take the bus to work, etc. I probably still mutter to myself.) At this point, my poor neighbor has probably heard the entirety of all my fics in scattered bursts. I’ll read a single paragraph to myself six times in a row to make sure the pacing sounds right and the dialogue feels natural.

I’m a start-to-finish writer: if I write scenes out of order, they won’t work in the final version. With tide pulls, I wrote all this emotional, ultra angsty dialogue that I was expecting to stick into one of their final scenes, but by the time I got there, it didn’t fit. I initially tried to squeeze stuff around it to keep those lines intact, but it’s never a good idea to force your characters into something that they don’t naturally want to do over the course of the story. It rings false, and I think readers can generally tell.

That’s not to say that I don’t plan ahead or map out certain arcs or important scenes. I just don’t write them in their full form until I’ve reached that point. PDIW was much, much too long to plunge through without an outline; if I hadn’t marked down and organized all the emotional points I wanted to hit, I would’ve lost control over the scope of it. (Which is ridiculous to say when it’s over 200k, but it had the most detailed outline I’ve ever made for one of my stories.) 

Still, though, pieces moved around a lot. I’d push a scene into a later chapter when it turned out that Derek and Stiles needed to talk to each other more before getting to that exchange. Or a conversation that was meant to be between Derek and Laura ended up being between him and Cora instead, catching both of us by surprise. Laura was always Derek’s best friend and confidante, but he turned out to have a lot more in common with his younger sister than he’d ever realized. Of course I had to let that play out. 

There are a few sentences I desperately wanted to get into the final version, but they’re clumped at the bottom of my notes doc, along with all the other unused or deleted material. Sometimes you think a phrase sounds really, really pretty, but if your character doesn’t want to say it, that’s all there is to it. 

I don’t have a beta for my shorter fics, because by the time I’m done writing, I’ve probably spent more time editing than actually putting new words down on the page. (Unless they’re tumblr fics or notfics, in which case please forgive the fact that they’re wobbly; they’re just me having fun!) That doesn’t make the final product perfect by any means, but I don’t have a regular beta set up to read over my fics for me, and I don’t like bugging people unless it’s necessary.

For my longest fics, I tried to rope in at least 2-3 betas. It seems like most people in fandom just share their fic’s Google Drive link, sometimes while it’s still a WIP, and have their betas all work in the same doc. It may be annoying that I don’t do that…but I want to get separate, unbiased responses. If multiple people tell me to fix the same thing, it definitely needs more work. With that said, I’ve found that there actually doesn’t tend to be all that much overlap, because betas have different styles in much the same way that writers do.

The fandom dream (or any writer’s dream) is to have a set, longterm writer-beta relationship, because it really does involve a lot of trust and communication. One of my PDIW betas was the wonderful @bleep0bleep​ , who prodded tirelessly at all my pronouns and long paragraphs but also took the time to learn my style and where I most need/want help. (She also laughed at me when I had conversations with myself in the comments while figuring out how to fix passages that she’d told me weren’t working.) She and other betas found gaps that you simply can’t see for yourself after spending that long immersed in your own story. I ended up writing a few extra scenes and expanding some other areas, and the final version is absolutely better as a result.

If this was going to be a published work, I would’ve ideally set it aside for several months so I could come back to it with fresh eyes. My posting schedule for PDIW was already months behind what I’d originally planned, and I was super eager to share it, so I rushed right into the next stage. I also very much wanted to start posting on April 1, since that was Stiles’s birthday in the fic.

So I finished writing the final chapter, gave myself about a day to celebrate, then went right back to the first chapter and started editing. My betas got those pretty-much-completed chapters, and I took their edits and suggestions and transferred them back into my central doc. Then I started drafting the fic on AO3, editing each chapter one final time as I was posting. 

It was…tiring. I wrote the fic in about 7 months and edited the entire thing twice…almost three times?…in a little over a month. I’m going to give myself more leeway if I ever do that again. Thank goodness for my speed-reading betas, though.

I don’t know if any of that was the kind of information you were interested in hearing. Welcome to my writing world, I guess? It’s a little messy, but it has pretty intricate organization if you know what to look for.

As for what I’m thinking as I’m writing…that’s a complicated answer. Is it weird to say that I’m kind of not thinking anything? Writing is a craft, but it’s also a strangely instinctive part of myself that I tap into when it’s going well. I absolutely cannot write if I’m busy thinking about where a scene should go or whether anyone’s going to like reading it or if I even remember how to string words together. That’s the kind of thing that makes me slam right up against writer’s block. Or, if I do manage to get words down, they’re clunky and I’m never really satisfied with them.

When I sit down to write, I do my best to clear my mind out. I tap into my characters. If I’m writing from Derek’s POV, I’m seeing him - all his gestures, mannerisms, the actions he’s taking in a scene - but it’s more important to me that I’m feeling what he’s feeling. The same goes for Stiles, or anyone else whose eyes I’m trying to see through. I guess I’m an emotional writer? I want to feel things as I’m writing, and if I did it right, my readers should feel things, too. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Reading has always been an escape for me. When I’m wrapped up in a book, I lose touch with the world around me and slide into the pages, living alongside the characters. Writing’s the same way. It’s an indescribable, addictive feeling. 

When I finished PDIW, it almost felt like I’d lost a part of myself, because I was letting go of something I’d been living with and dreaming about and spending so much time getting to know.

I’m glad I got to share it, though. It’s a wrenching, terrifying process, but you all made it worthwhile. The final step of a story is its readers. Thank you for being amazing ones, and for letting me share my words with you.