#posting this at 11:30 on a saturday so it can vanish into the ether

[myrrhmaidwrites]

Sunstruck Writing Wrap-Up

I think I’m going to start posting writing wrap ups here for my own benefit. Writing about writing is supposed to make you better at it, or something.

This fic was not only my longest ever, but it also ended up spanning 12 google docs, 6 Word files, 8 pages in Notion, and 100+ DMs. If you think my writing process could use some improved organization, well, you’re right.

Originally, Sunstruck was about Trevor writing the book. He had finished it, and the book was in some ways a love letter to Jamie, and a lot of their conversations revolved around what was in the book. (Have you read The Next Next One? Yeah.)

Anyway, that didn’t end up happening. Somewhere along the way I switched the story to Jamie’s POV and moved away from the book idea. I just couldn’t get it to fit. I don’t think I’ll write a sequel to this, but if I did, it would be Trevor POV and it would be about the book.

Now I’m going to talk a little about the writing process for this fic.

16k words isn’t that many for a lot of people. For me, it’s the longest thing I’ve ever written, and I think that deserves some note. Woo! May there be longer fics to come. Also I genuinely have no idea how people write novels, haha. Practice, I suppose.

Shortly before I started this fic, I did some reading about various approaches to the editing process. The method I ended up using, which worked well for me, was to basically just get some words down for the first draft (“shitty first draft), and then rewrite the whole draft based on that. This worked well for me because I was able to get the pure words down pretty well via writing sprints and typing on my phone in bed before I went to sleep.

Then came the rewriting. I took one scene, slapped it in a column on Notion, and used it as a guide to write a new version of that scene. No copy+paste allowed, but I could rewrite the original words if I did want to keep them. I almost never kept them exactly. The second version of scenes were almost always better than the first.

During this period is when the story feels most like a confusing mess that I have to muddle through. I have scenes missing that I don’t know I need, I have to rearrange things and delete things and realize that something I wrote won’t work anymore because I changed something earlier. I’m constantly re-outlining, adding notes to scenes, writing new bits and deleting them, etc.

To give you an idea of some of the things I changed in this stage, in an earlier version of the fic, Jamie said something really heartfelt for Trevor’s video and they cut most of it out for the public video. Trevor only sees it after the Ducks staff send him the full video, and their reunion/get together scene happens at home the day after the ceremony.

At another point, I really wanted to have that long distance/breakup/dark night of the soul moment that would require a big gesture from Jamie (flying across the country for Trevor or similar). In the end, I couldn’t get it to work, so we have the condensed crisis that starts during the sex scene. I’m not mad about that change, but I do sometimes wonder if I could have made that scene hit harder if the separation/downturn had been worse.

Anyway, after getting through this horrible muddled mess, there’s a third re-writing, where I have the scenes mostly in order and I go through and rewrite everything from beginning to end for a third time. This time around, there’s a lot more that stays the same. What’s nice about the earlier stages is that when I write something I don’t like so much, I don’t have to worry about it at the moment because there’s an incredibly low chance it’ll make it to the final fic.

After the third rewriting is when I like to loop in my beta reader. I usually try to have a couple of specific questions for them as they read. I think technically this is called alpha reading (and beta reading is just for spelling/grammar), but if I’m honest, I need this kind of help more.

Then I go about incorporating changes from my beta reader, which usually involves a major overhaul of 1-2 scenes, almost always the finale and another scene in the second half of the fic.

After that, I go through and re-read the fic in order and look for places where I need to make major additions. This typically includes descriptions of emotions or settings and additions to dialogue where characters get to the point of what they’re trying to say far more quickly than is realistic.

Finally, in the last couple of days before posting, I look at sentence structure and word choice. I tend to use the same sentence structures over and over in my writing as well as certain words. In this phase, I try to mix it up as much more and make the sentences and words sound interesting.

In the “adding” and “sentence structure” phases of this fic, I added about 5k words. Yep, the fic was only about 11.5k words before this. That means the fic my beta reader read, while kind of close to the finished version, is also hugely different from the fic up on ao3. It’s kind of crazy to think about.

Finally, I do one last read for typos, and the fic goes up.

There’s one thing about this fic experience (and others I’ve had) that I haven’t really gotten to talk about yet, though.

This fic was part of a big bang, and as a part of that, I worked with a hard deadline, and I also had an artist relying on me to be finished so we could post at the same time. Last year, I participated in an exchange that had a similar type of deadline.

Both times, I’ve had horrible insomnia for ~3 weeks leading up to the deadline. We’re talking 3+ weeks of not sleeping, sleeping extremely poorly, or not sleeping without pills. (And I’m talking sedatives here, not melatonin. God, I wish melatonin did something useful for me.)

It didn’t matter that I could have pushed the deadline back. It didn’t matter that I could have just dropped out. It didn’t matter that I was actually quite on top of this fic and not particularly concerned about finishing on time. My brain was not interested in sleeping.

Luckily, I got through it. Most of this week after posting the fic I slept just fine. But it does make me think about whether doing something like this is useful for me, or sustainable in the long run. I really love the community aspect of writing fic. I doubt that without doing a bigbang that my fics would have art made for them. I doubt I would have produced such a long fic so quickly without a deadline.

Maybe these are just things that I need to accept about myself. If I don’t want to cause myself weeks of insomnia (and I don’t because it fucking sucks), maybe I need to just accept that. Really what I need to do is probably talk to my therapist about this, but it’s hard.

Does this happen to anyone else? Just me? Okay.

To end this on a less depressing note, one final observation I want to mention is that after I choose one fic to concentrate on, my ideas for other fics tend to slow down, and then once that idea is close to wrapping, they tend to speed up again. Now I’m stuck in the middle of 4-5 fic ideas and I want to write all of them. Of course I don’t have the time, and I’m sure I’ll end up concentrating on just one or two eventually. But for now I have like five different gdocs that I want to keep open at all times. It makes me wish I didn’t have a job so I could just write. (Plus my two anons that I owe fics to…oops!)

If you read this far, thank you. Sometimes it’s nice to hear whispers in the void when you know you should expect silence.