Ask the Author Meme

[attackfish]

Ganked from avocado_love.



I think it would be fun to talk about stories, but the usual memes are like, "What happens next?" "Tell me about Character A?" Which isn't so much talking about stories as it is writing more of a story. But you know how sometimes you read something and you're like, "I got ___ out of this story, I wonder if I have that right?" or "What on earth was ____ supposed to be?" and it's too awkward to ask the author? Now you could totally ask!

I've heard people say that writing is hard because you have to make decisions, but we never really talk about the decisions we make with stories or why we make them. We talk about plot bunnies, but not about how we actually turn them into a story.

And it seems like a lot more fun to do that than to do working.

So, if you wanted, ask me questions! (Or use this to ask your flist to ask you questions).

What were you trying to do [here]? Why did you decide to ____? This is what I thought about xyz, is that what you were going for? What made you write ____? Why did you decide to do this? And so on.


No limit on questions or amount of questions; feel free to ask anything you want about anything I've written!

Comments

I haz a ?????

[avocado-love.livejournal.com]

Okay, so is there any chance of a sequel ever to Quiet Shadowed Places? I know it was a charity fic, but it's still the best blind!Zuko I think I've read.

Also, what is your writing process like? Do you do notebooks and then transfer into type? I think you said once you write and then set it aside for later review. How long do you let it sit?

Re: I haz a ?????

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I've been drabbling fics in the same verse for memes, but I doubt I'll ever sit down unprompted and write a sequel. And if I do, it will probably be the fall out from Jet telling the Gaang about Zuko in Ba Sing Se, and how this all unfolds and leads to this AU's version of CoD. Of course, someone may just ask me that in a meme someday instead.

I used to write with notebooks and then transfer it, and then i got to college and learned to type fast. For me, writing tends to come in spurts, and I used to write by hand because it was faster. I like to edit as I go, and NaNo drives me crazy, but I also have an editing period later, after a few days, where I just look over everything and try to tweak it. When I'm writing my original fiction, and not posting chapter by chapter, I tend to write a chapter, sit on it for a few days, reread it, fix anything horrible, and then write the next chapter. After finishing a draft, I do more extensive edits.

When I work with betas, I send fics off to them in 700 word (comment sized) chunks without any real editing at all, and then we plot improvements from there.

Before I begin writing, (and I've done this with every fic but Ice Flows through) I write a relatively detailed outline with the internal logic of all the characters, the plot points I need to convey, and approximate length of each bit. The darker the fic, the more insane and cracky the outline. My Xenolith outline looks a lot like one of those fan parody/summary things of movies, actually.

[lavanyasix.livejournal.com]

Where'd "Whistling Up a Storm" come from?

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Oh God. The story of how this fic came to pass is really as much about me finding a new fandom as it is about the story itself, because they're so intertwined.

Well, I was listening to all of the dark rumblings about the whitewashing of the TLA movie, and I had never watched A:TLA before, but everybody talking about it was saying how much they loved the show, and that had awesome worldbuilding, and was a really well done epic fantasy not in a fake medieval Europe, which is something I'm always on the look out for, so I got the whole thing from Netflix and watched it in about two weeks. AND TWO WEEKS WAS JUST NOT ENOUGH!

So I had been in HP fandom for several years at that point, and it was my first fandom, and I had just sort of found myself there, instead of looking for it, and given how awesome this show was, I knew there had to be a fandom, so I set about hunting it down. First thing I found was a lot of Zutara and Avocado-love's rec list. Meanwhile, as I was familiarizing myself with the fandom, I was reading a lot about feminist history and the history of social movements, and the fact that frequently the first adopters of such movements aren't the young started noodling around in my brain. I started looking for the epic feminist revolution sure to follow Katara's departure from the North Pole, but the more I looked, the more I found there just wasn't much written about the Northern Water Tribe, and most of what was written about Pakku was either about him in the Order of the White Lotus, or romancing Kanna, most of the latter of which set my teeth on edge. The other thing that struck me from my reading was that a lot of the first adopters of social movements are people who have nothing to lose by fighting, no crumbs from the status quo ordained hierarchy to give up. So this marginal recent widow, Tuaq popped into my head. I made her heal during the battle, because most of the women in my family are nurses, so I know healing isn't all light and sunshine, and I wanted to show how healers had to be tough, brave people. She got the scars, because for some reason, women in fiction don't get to have battle scars even if they're warriors. At first "Whistling up a Storm" was just going to be about her getting Pakku to teach her, and then I remembered all of the girls cheering Katara on, and I started thinking about how Katara might have made a crack in the system, but she didn't do away with the system, and it was up to others in the Northern Water Tribe to widen the crack she made. Thus a passel of young girls, who all have their own reasons to want to learn to waterbend were born.

I also couldn't figure out why Kanna would take back Pakku who she had run across the world getting away from, and whose actions in following her might strike one as a wee bit obsessive. So I added in her grudging approval at the end as a way of showing they had something to build on.

It was also something really pretty happy and angst free I could write while recovering from really severe depression.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

As for the title, it wasn't just the old saying, but one of the meanings behind it. Part of the reason (north-western European) sailors thought women were such bad luck was that they were so ignorant and knew so little about sea custom that they might whistle up a storm. So rather than teaching women coming on a ship the way they would a man, they just tried to keep them off and were sullen to them when they had to have them there.

And the thought was that women would do this by accident. I think sometimes raising a storm does some good.