attackfish: Yshre girl wearing a kippah, text "Attackfish" (Default)
attackfish ([personal profile] attackfish) wrote2010-11-16 08:44 pm
Entry tags:

Ask the Author Meme

Ganked from [info]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!

Re: I haz a ?????

[identity profile] attackfish.livejournal.com 2010-11-17 04:13 am (UTC)(link)
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.