Writing meme answers!
So! A couple of you guys answered my post for this meme, and then addiokira leaped in and requested ALL THE QUESTIONS, so I decided a separate post was in order. (Also, writing memes totally count towards my daily word count goal. It's long and analytical and will require thought! Hopefully!)
1. Of the fic you’ve written, of which are you most proud?
Oh geez, that's like asking a parent which kid they're most proud of (in other words, they quite possibly have a definite answer but it seems impolite to point one out. . . .)
I'm always super proud when I finish a longer fic, so part of my brain immediately leaps to my big bangs with this question. Steam was my first epic in a long time, and possibly the longest one I'd written to date (in my earlier days, I didn't track word counts, so I can't say for sure). And I love the way it spools out and comes together, for all that it still relies heavily on a few canny tricks (really, what fiction doesn't?). But my heart belongs to experimentation, and when it comes to experimenting with my prose, it always goes best when I do it in short form.
I have a lot of fun short form fics (if I do say so myself). I was pretty damn prolific in SPN for awhile there! And in BtVS before that! I have, like, seven tabs open of little fics I could be all "Ooo, I love this one" with for this question!
This is seriously not an easy question, here, people.
Okay. I will narrow it down to three. Series of fics. >.< In no particular order:
Death and Taxes trilogy (which spiritually should really also include Gone to Hell in a Handbook You want experimental? I wrote fic using some of the most boring forms of written communication known to human kind. There's a court opinion summary. IRS letter rulings. Government press releases. And an employee handbook. I turned these things into fiction that makes people laugh. (Well, assuming you guys weren't lying to me.) Are you kidding me? I mean, on paper there is NO WAY these things can work, and yet the very idea had me giggling like a particularly devious child the whole time I wrote them. For real.
Trail Magic I've long had a fascination with a) folklore, b) oral traditions, and c) the Appalachian Trail. This thing managed to combine all those and get people asking me if the folktale I made up for it was a real one. That's not too shabby. And I kind of fell in love with Misfit over the course of this fic (she is more than a little based on a memoir I read in college of a trail hiker who, looking back, I kind of fell in love with when I was reading her book). And, well, it's hard not to be proud when you're in love, ya know?
Dimensions and Verticals The little stick figure fic that could. The very height of my fannish fame. I will never, ever write another fanfic that gets the kind of response this little bit of nonsense received. It's astonishing.
2. Favorite tense
For me, tenses depend very much on the story. I've written in both past and present, and past comes much more naturally to me (you have no idea how often I've started a story in present and then had to go back and fix tenses where I switched halfway through a scene), but it's so so easy to fall into passive voice in the past tense, especially on scene establishers and early sentences, when it's most important to draw your reader right in. And that drives me nuts.
Past works best when it comes to longer format work. Anything over 1,000 words, really. Past pulls back on your tempo subtly, puts space between the reader and the events of the story, giving them room to breathe and acclimate themselves to a story, which is absolutely essential in a long format fic (you can totally drive a whole story along at a breakneck pace, but that doesn't mean you should). Present is best for short pieces, really tight work that doesn't have any extraneous bits and really wants to drive the tempo along. It brings out a sense of urgency to the whole scene that can be really effective when used properly, but it gets overused a lot by writers who don't entirely understand its purpose, and it can ring really false when the structure and the subject matter of the story don't support the tense choice.
Also, flashbacks in a present tense fic can get really super grammatically awkward really super quick and most writers in fanfiction do not have the skill to handle the tense shifts required in those situations. I include myself in that assessment. Tense is harder than you think, people. Make your tense choices responsibly! Do not present tense fic and drive!
So, er, I guess that means the answer is "past", then. To be more accurate, I'll say "past imperfect", but that's mostly because I like the way those words sound when put together.
3. Favorite POV
Hi! This is another subject I have many writerly opinions on that will probably lead me from going "oh, well, you know, they all have a purpose" into definitively declaring my favoritism! Let's get started, shall we?
Okay. There are three basic POVs in the English language: first, second, and third. First person, I find, works best for a particular type of narrator (my favorite type of narrator), the unreliable one. The first person singular perspective's very limitations -- that you are locked, for better or for worse, into one POV character, as though they were describing the scene and the events directly to you -- is its greatest asset. The first person POV can lie to you. You wanna pull a twist in a story? You wanna seriously go all Agatha Christie on your audience, play with their preconceptions, and then turn them over and shake them until the change falls out of their pockets? First person is your best bet. Hands down.
Now, it's also good for other things (otherwise using it for an unreliable narrator shakedown would be pretty ineffective pretty quickly). It establishes an intimacy with the reader. Hi, says the book. I'm going to talk to you, and I'm going to share my inner most thoughts with you, and we are going to be friends. Hell, we are going to be lovers. It's you and me against this world I'm telling you about, here, so I hope you'll have my back. First person offers you its hand and invites you along for the ride. It's the POV that will buy you a drink at the bar or invite you over for homemade soup. It just, you know, might dangle you out the window a little once you get there.
Second person. Second person doesn't invite an intimacy with the reader, it demands it. It sits you down, ties you to a chair, and forces itself upon you. Which totally came out creepy, but let's be honest here: second person is creepy. Second person is also, in my opinion, the least effective POV to use in fiction. It both creates a false intimacy with the reader and also denies its own individuality, usually resulting in a character lacking in fundamental depth. Second person is almost never used in a way that fully acknowledges its own limitations. I have only read one long work to date that has made effective use of the second person narrative, and that was by an old Italian master of prose. If you ask me, second person is only used as a POV in fandom because it's "fashionable", and it makes the story seem "edgy". These are the two worst reasons to make a choice as fundamental to the very nature of a story as point of view. It comes off as a cheap trick. And unless cheap tricks are what you're going for (and I will never deny anyone the chance to play with a good cheap trick or two, as long as they're aware that's what they're doing), you maybe shouldn't use it.
Third person, then. Well, okay, that's a little bit disingenuous, isn't it, because "third person" encompasses so many more POVs than either first or second person do. Because a third person perspective has a variable scope. It can be very very narrow, third person limited, focussed into one character's head and thoughts with only the slightest more distance between that character and the audience than is achieved with first person. It can be pulled back a little, to encompass two or three characters and their thoughts. It can be pulled back and then limited, encompassing the actions of two or three characters in multiple locations without getting into their heads and seeing their thoughts. It can go omniscient, hopping happily from head to head like its on a merry-go-round. All of these have their place. All of these are effective in their own way, and all of them can be used to strengthen a narrative.
I will, 9 times out of 9.1, use third person limited perspective. I like to get into one person's head and stay there, but fandom conventions are such that first person POV is frowned upon, for any number of reasons primarily to do with the POV characters so frequently coming from an outside source, resulting in the first person perspective, which seems to declare ownership over the character, coming across as false. It's generally accepted just fine for original characters within a fanfic, but not for a canon character. (I suspect, also, that there is a somewhat unspoken idea in fandom in general that first person POV belongs to the less skilled writer. I think this is at least partially an offshoot of the Mary Sue effect, though it may also be connected with how popular the POV is for young adult fiction in the professional marketplace, which can make the POV come across as "young". I have no real evidence to support these ideas, though. I could be entirely misreading it all.)
In my original fiction, I will happily swap back between first and third person depending on the story, and how much I want to distance my readers from the characters, as well as what sort of voice I want to use (first person is a far more casual voice, for instance). But I have only written one fic in recent memory from a first person perspective, and that only because I had a very specific reason for choosing it. Third person limited perspective is the default for me, providing a comfortable intimacy while still limiting the expectation for full disclosure from the reader. It's a good one to play around in, and structured properly, can lead to some really good character exploration, which, other than whump, is what draws me to fanfiction in the first place.
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
Humanity.
Possibly the biggest draw for me when it comes to supernatural/magic/otherworldly narratives (my favorite kinds!) is the way that those sorts of narratives allow us to explore what it means to be human, for how we interact with each other, how we interact with the world around us, with all our limitations and inconsistencies and great, astonishing leaps of genius.
I think humans are amazing. Also, really really horrifying. But that's part of what's amazing.
I like fallibility. I like limitations. I like characters who really screw up when they're trying their best to get everything right. I like characters who go up against insurmountable odds and say "fuck that, I'm surmounting this". I don't root for the vampires. I seldom root for the monsters. Give me the ordinary human schmuck thrown into the middle of the vampires and monsters (and aliens and cyborgs and time travelers and and and and and) every time.
I absolutely love it when the character gets their ass kicked into the floor, only inches -- inches -- from failure, and then they pull themselves up, make due with what crutches they have or can make, and turn that failure into a win.
It can be a complicated win. I'm down with complicated. People are fragile, when you come right down to it, and there is almost never any actual full, simple win in the world. But I'm a humanist. I'm maybe even an optimist. And I think that people, when it comes right down to it, can win.
I also really enjoy parody, satire, and absurdity, but those are actually kind of more genres than themes.
5. What inspires you to write?
Life.
Okay, so. My brain does not shut up. Like . . . ever. I find the idea of not thinking both thrilling and terrifying, which is why I don't tend to drink to excess. I can't actually imagine a situation in which I am unable to think. So to get any kind of peace and quiet in my brain, I had to learn at a very young age how to organize my thoughts into a coherent whole. And that whole, ever since I was little, has almost always been a story.
I tell myself stories to go to sleep. Otherwise, my brain would just cycle around on everything I didn't accomplish and have to accomplish and might not accomplish and every single conversation I've had over the course of my lifetime especially any conversation where I shoved my foot in my mouth (and those that didn't seem foot-in-mouth-y at the time but then my brain twists into something terrible because also it's possible my brain hates me?) and I'd never get any sleep at all.
It's only natural that those stories had to find their way out sometimes.
6. Thoughts on critique
I love it! I love a thoughtful, intelligent critique of my work. A good critique inspires me to write more, to write better, to keep working on honing my craft and keep branching out and experimenting. I thrive on good critiques. You can ask my betas. I tend to get a little scared of my writing, especially longer form writing, and it frequently takes a beta reader and a good critical analysis of it to get me back into the game after I've finished it and moved into the editing process.
Editing is scary, okay?
That said, I will not accept critique from everyone. I've received a lot of critique over the years that just makes me roll my eyes. If I don't respect the individual as a reader or a writer, than I can't respect them as a critic. I still appreciate that they took time out of their day to respond (no really, I even get excited by flames, something about my work drew their attention long enough and hard enough for them to take the time to write to me!), but I don't take what they say in any way to heart. I've been in this game long enough for the negative to flow right off me. It's one of the things I'm most proud of about myself as a writer.
7. Create a character on the spot... NOW!
What, are you kidding me?
Fine, okay. Let's see.
Meet Tina. Tina is not even remotely Scottish. In fact, if she were to ever trace her history back -- well, first of all, she'd fail, because she has no experience working in geneology and her mother's family was so gross that she and Tina disowned them years ago -- but if she had the tools necessary to trace her lineage, she'd find it mostly full of Russians, with a handful of Portuguese for spice. But she loves her some Scottish culture.
She doesn't actually know much of anything about Scottish culture. But she likes plaid, okay? Geez, get off her back. And they do things like show off their strength by throwing logs, right? And, come on, who doesn't love a man in a kilt? Or a woman in a kilt.
She just really likes plaid, okay?
When she grows up, she wants to be a fashion designer. She's actually technically grown up already, but her mom didn't have any money for fashion school, and sewing machines kind of intimidate her, so Tina's never actually managed to learn anything about fashion design or clothing construction. She works as a dispatcher at a cab company. But her boss there doesn't mind her keeping a sketchbook on hand at work, so she's always doodling new ideas for fun and funky outfits. She's really excited that argyle's been in for awhile.
Argyle is totally Scottish, okay? It's like the plaid of socks.
(Full disclosure: I did not make up Tina on the spot. She is a stuffed cat I made out of an assortment of various argyle socks that will eventually be for sale on my etsy site, once I get over the whole "I AM GOING TO FAIL AT THIS" thing and actually finish taking pictures of my stock. I've been writing up little blurby bio things on my sock animals to get myself revved up for actually opening the shop, and Tina's was a whole thing about how she's so proud of her argyle cat heritage in old Scotland -- even though she's not actually remotely Scottish.)
8. Is there a character you love writing for the most? The least? Why?
I find that once I get started writing a character, I end up loving them. I can hate a character's guts on the screen, but when I sit down to try to get into their head for a story, I really enjoy the process. I don't always end up loving the character, but it's a really good exercise in empathy (and sometimes sociopathy) and I find it really fascinating.
I always end up with a special affinity for characters I write a whole lot, so at the moment, though the show is not doing so well in my opinion, I'm still loving writing Dean. I've spent enough time in his head over the last several years that he's like an old friend, and I don't have to work very hard to get his voice going (which is not to say that I always get his voice right, 'caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaause yeah). I used to love writing Sam, but the way his character has been going in the last few years has been so frustrating to me that attempts to get into his headspace always end up being sort of epic rants of exposition trying to explain his actions in canon. Which while an interesting experiment for characterization, does not actually generally make great fiction. This is actually currently frustrating me quite a bit, as I'd like to do at least a good chunk of my current big bang from Sam's POV (in an alternate season 9, even), and I keep failing and getting to the actual scene when I start in on him.
And not managing to get to the action of a scene frustrates the heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell out of me.
9. A passage from a WIP
Pick a WIP, any WIP. . . .
Okay, I'm going to do two, here, because this was requested by both kasman and addiokira. One will be from a fannish work, one from something original.
For this year's spn_j2_bigbang, most likely: "So," he said, as he set the tray with toast and Sam's weak, froofy coffee on the nightstand. "Death echo lady was back last night."
Sam looked up. "Did she do anything different?"
"Dude," Dean said. "She's a death echo."
Sam shook his head, carefully spreading the jelly evenly over the entire surface of one of the slices of toast. "Then why are you bringing her up?"
Dean shrugged. "I don't know. Dead lady in my room. Sure, she's just an echo, but still. Dead lady."
"You're bored," Sam said.
"I think that's been pretty firmly established."
"No," Sam said, pushing himself even further upright. "I mean, you're really bored. You should get out of here. Go find a hunt or something."
"What, and just leave you here?"
"I'm fine, Dean."
Dean looked down at Sam's tray, then back up at Sam.
"Okay, I'm not fighting fit, yet, but I'm not going to keel over if I have to look after myself for a couple days. Besides, Kevin's here. It's not like I'll be alone."
"Kevin has barely left his little study room since we got back."
"So give him something to focus on other than the tablets," Sam said. "We can entertain each other, and you can stop going totally stir crazy."
"I'm not going stir crazy."
"You're obsessed with a death echo."
"I'm not obsessed!" Dean stood up and started for the door. Sam made a little squawk of protest.
"Dude, where are you going?"
"If you're so sick of me," Dean said, glancing back, "then I'll get out of your hair. Yell if you need anything."
"Dean!" Sam called. "Dean, come on, I wasn't -- goddammit, Dean!"
Dean groaned, running his hand over his hair. He wasn't obsessed. Two nights did not equal obsessed. And he totally wasn't going crazy, that was stupid. What, did Sam expect him to start typing "all work and no play" on some typewriter? Maybe show up one morning with an axe?
Like he'd ever go crazy when he had Sam to look after.
Obsessed.
Please.
*
At 3:20 AM, Dean stood in the doorway of the kitchen, all set to catch the death echo as she came through the wall from his room and track her properly.
Okay. Maybe he was a little obsessed.
And from an original piece, working title: Manic:Have you ever, while sitting around with a group of friends, tried to determine what sort of animal each person was? It could be based on anything, the shape of their face, the texture of their hair, a particular personality quirk or behavior. Maybe it's not anything you can name, just a general sense of each other, some underlying aura that just screams "orangutan". I don't mean spirit animals, though sometimes folks can get the two confused. I mean, if the world were populated by anthropomorphized animals who wear clothes and hang out in bars, what kind of animal would you be?
I was very, very good at this game. Denied of my post-shopping cafe transition, I turned instead to transforming every one I saw into something furry or scaled or feathered.
The cafe's assistant manager, an apple shaped woman with a disproportionately small head, was a turtle. She was working almost every time I came in, and I had her down to a T, from the flare of the collar on her company polo shirt to the upward tilt of her sharp chin. I don't mean she was slow, mind you, she worked very quickly and efficiently. Like a sea turtle, in her element she could glide, swinging with the currents of the little cafe like an aerialist at the circus. It was only her brief interludes on land that she was slow, that she showed her vulnerability.
There was a new barista that night, working the register, and I let myself sink into watching him work. He was a narrow fellow, and my first thought was "giraffe", but I've learned not to always trust those first instincts. First instincts are rarely actually accurate. They're more likely a trained response to any number of tropes and stereotypes that the world has dumped on you over the course of your lifetime. It takes more than being narrowly built and taller than the person next to you to be a giraffe, and a heavy person is only really a hippo if they can also live up to being the most dangerous animal in the entire Nile. Besides, this barista barely had a neck. There was something pointed about his face. From the front, his nose seemed pert, small and tidy, but when he turned his head, stepping away from the register to refill creamer canisters or rearrange the music selection between customers, you saw that it was actually quite long, sticking out from the center of his face like the long muzzle of a dog. A fox, I thought, or maybe a dachshund. The way he moved his hands at the register, though, how he seemed to flinch backward from customers when they approached, was far too skittish for a predatory animal. A rodent, then, twitchy and quick and at least a little bit adorable. He even almost had the teeth for it.
"Hare," I said, twirling my pencil over my sketchbook as I stared. "Not enough ears. A fox, maybe? Chased by dogs."
"What was that?"
I froze, just for a moment, feeling the small hairs on my hands prickle. (I've always been of the belief that I'm a hedgehog, personally: tiny, nocturnal, with sharp teeth and quills.) My eyes slid sideways before my head did, as I slowly took in the fact that someone else in the tiny little cafe had actually sat down.
He was a hound. I know I just said that you can't go on instinct with these things, but even later, I never wavered from the hounddog. One of the larger breeds, narrow in the hip but with a broad chest, the sort with wiry, scraggly hair and the serious, almost mournful expression that never quite goes away, even when they smile. He wore his hair in that fashionably careless way that always made you wonder if they were still saving up for a proper haircut. I got the impression, though I didn't look too carefully at first, that he was wearing a suit, badly. He had a cup of coffee in front of him, but no book or laptop or anything else to indicate why he'd stopped in the middle of this throughway.
There are customs for such situations as these, social graces that said you could blush gently and say "nothing" and turn your head, and the other person was obliged to let you wallow in your embarrassment without further comment. Alternately, you could stare the other person down, throw the embarrassment back at them, how dare they interrupt your clearly private train of thought.
I've never been good at either of these customs.
"The barista," I said, because accidentally falling into them is pretty much the only way I ever end up in a conversation with a stranger, and somewhere along the line, my brain decided to just roll with it and pretend I'm an extrovert. Maybe I'm actually a mimic octopus. "Would you say he's a hare or a fox?"
The man frowned, which didn't help the impression of hound like jowls, and looked from me over to the counter, where the barista in question was fumbling with a cup full of straws. "What?"
Extrovert-me rolled her eyes. "You know, if we were all in a children's book or a web comic or something."
His eyes flicked back over to me and he shifted, his body language slowly waking up, like I'd just offered to play fetch. I wondered if he circled his seat three times before he sat down. "Oh." I saw him switch his attention back to the barista, mind and imagination engaged. "Have you ever heard of a jeroba?"
I tipped my head, then shook it. "Is it a rodent?"
He nodded, shifting his chair a little to swing closer to me. I surprised myself by not inching further away. "A bit like a gerbil with kangaroo feet. I think they're mostly African."
I looked down at my notebook. "I don't know how to draw a jeroba."
I have a number of other works in progress just now, but these two are the ones at the forefront of my mind (and "Manic" is the one I've told addiokira the most about already).
10. What are your strengths in writing?
Voice. I've always excelled at character voice, be it in dialogue or narrative prose. Even as a teenager, in my early days writing fanfiction, my most common compliment was how I managed to make it sound right. I love to play with it, too, to work with rhythms and speech patterns to build suspense or comic timing. Voice is a lot about diction and word order and accents and dialects, sure, but at it's basic level, I've always felt it ultimately comes down to rhythm.
Which, not coincidentally, is one of my favorite parts of language.
This is, naturally, not to say that I always nail the voice in my works. Especially those that haven't had the eye of a good beta or editor. But voice is what comes most naturally to me as a writer, and I revel in it.
Okay, and after answering the next question, I realized this asks "strengths", plural, and I only answered with one, technically, while for weaknesses I came up with a bunch, so.
I'm quite good with humor. Most of my great influences when it comes to writing are/were humorists, so it's only fair that it's what I go to most often (also humor is one of my favorite defense mechanisms!). My favorite sort is absurdist humor, especially ala Douglas Adams (my first and greatest literary influence), though I'm not nearly on his level. I love to take an idea that most people would swear up and down could never work and making it into a full, coherent, and readable fic. I've also become better over the years at mixing this humor with pathos, leading to that "it's crack fic, but it's not JUST crack fic" reaction that I tend to get from readers. As the great roque_classique once quoted one of her writing instructors as saying, "it has to be both sad AND funny". Which, yes. That. I like to think I have at least a little bit of a handle on that concept.
I'm good at character complexity. This, I think, actually goes hand in hand with the voice thing, but it isn't actually exactly the same skill. I can make you love and hate a character in equal measure, which is a hell of a thing (see above, re: not always and sometimes this requires a beta/editor, I know, I know, I shouldn't disclaim myself, but betas/editors are really important and I don't want to downplay their contribution to my -- and any other writer's -- strengths). No one always likes another person, and equally no one should always like a character. People are complex, as I mentioned above, and I love their complexities and their hypocrises. I love exploring those in fiction.
I can be quite good at eking out exposition over the course of a longer story. This is usually accidental, but I do love when it works out.
I can write both full on goofy humor in one story and tremendous horror in another. I can write these two stories simultaneously.
I occasionally come up with truly gorgeous imagery. If I do say so myself. I'm pretty good at using that imagery to reflect the inner workings of my characters (it all comes back to characterization and voice, m'kay?).
And I'm not afraid to spend the time to figure out how what I'm talking about really works, but I also don't let myself get bogged down in research to the point where I stop progressing with the story entirely.
That last one is really hard, okay? I should get a medal.
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
Actually finishing things.
It's pretty well established on this journal that I don't finish WIPs if I post them as I go (Fanon Fodder being the great exception to this rule). This wasn't always true, I have a good bulk of finished WIPs under other screennames scattered around the 'net, but in the last ten years or so, I've managed to stall out on more WIPs than I can count. It's reached the point where I don't even pretend like I'll get it done -- there's a reason why Dean and Crowley's Big Adventure has never been crossposted to any other site. If I manage to finish it, I'll put it together all nice and post it around, but if not, I'd rather not disappoint anyone who doesn't already know my rep.
I also, from a grammatical standpoint, have difficulty with tense shifts, primarily from present to past, or from past to past perfect within a scene (those not-a-full-flashback moments when a character is thinking back on recent events, very useful for time shifts in larger works!). I've studied it all, and I used to know all the terms and the technical reasons for the shifts (which is more than a lot of native English speakers who grew up in the American public school system of the late 20th century!), but they don't come automatically to me all the time when I write, and I find myself frequently having to clean those sections up. Also, from a technical standpoint, there are certain homophones that I constantly mess up (break/brake is a big one, and lead/led, maisfeeka is my hero in this regard). My brain tends to get rather ahead of me when I'm writing -- I can type a good 90 words a minute with 90% accuracy, but have I mentioned that my brain DOESN'T SHUT UP? It also multitasks. I'm often three scenes ahead while I'm working out the best phrasing for what I'm typing up at any given moment -- so errors like these are rampant. As are run-on and overly complex sentences. I love me some mid-sentence asides! I am constantly having to pull back from putting asides within asides, and then I lose track of where the sentence was going to begin with and it all gets tangled up and the em-dashes are everywhere. It's crazy times.
Oh, and crowd scenes. Crowd scenes are hard. I had to specifically train myself on crowd scenes for my college thesis, and they're still super hard for me. Get more than two or three characters interacting in a scene and I can guarantee you one of them is probably out beating up a scarecrow in the background because I'm not using them properly. (Okay, I was going to make that a link to Bus Driver Stu Benedict beating up a scarecrow in the background of an episode of Adventures of Pete and Pete, but YouTube failed me. Go watch Pete and Pete. Perhaps you will learn to understand me better as a person.)
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)
addiokira asked this: "You have developed a new world for your latest story. Tell me one interesting detail that I might not necessarily catch on my first read-through."
I'm not sure if she meant it generally, like the "make up a new character RIGHT NOW" kind of thing, or meant one of my actual numerous WIPs -- I have a couple of them, as I mentioned! -- but we'll go with worlds I'm actually actively creating already and not one I'm trying to make up off the top of my head for a meme.
So she might be referring to my post-America DC fic, in which the city is a capitalist dystopia entirely made up of a giant tent market and neo-classical ruins, surrounded by a four story sea wall holding back the swollen Potomac. This isn't my latest story by any means, but it isn't entirely shelved, and it's a concept that tends to linger in the back of my head a lot even when I'm not actively working on it (also I have a map of DC on my wall over my bed that I scribble on with various colored sharpies as I work out the layout of the world).
It's not a fully fleshed out world, yet, so so far, most of the details are apparent enough in the story. It's not explicitly DC, but those familiar with the city should be able to work it out pretty easily. One thing that might not be instantly noticeable is that all of the names of all of the characters are taken from the streets and monuments around the National Mall (save one, who's working name so far is the name of a craft store). Most of them have been shortened, so the main character, who goes by Penny, is actually Independence, and her boyfriend, Consti, is Constitution. Society has progressed in such a way that most people don't have the context for these words that surround them, carved into stone, so they've been adopted instead as given names. The exception is the Smithsonites, a cultish community on the fringes of the Long Market, who obsessively study the structure of the old city and its history. They are the ones who built the wall in the first place, when they realized that the water levels were rising (there's a dig at climate change deniers in there that may or may not show up somewhat explicitly in the story itself), and they hoard objects they claim are valuable in the half-destroyed remains of the National Museum of Natural History. The folks on the Market aren't allowed into the old museums for the most part, but they've spotted bits of the old dinosaur skeletons through the windows from time to time, which have only added to the distrust they feel towards the cultists.
My other works in progress right now are mostly in modern times America. I do have a modern fairytale type story in which a grown woman goes back to the overgrown drainage ditch she played in as a child and finds a whole other world within, full of talking animals and the like. It's pretty bog-standard fairytale fare so far, but the animals included are all actually extant in the mid-Atlantic region, where the fic takes place. So instead of finding a dragon, she at one point encounters a giant cicada. . . .
This is an image I adore, but when I mention it to other people, they tend to look grossed out. Alas.
(If you meant some other story I am failing to think of right now, please let me know, and I shall try to answer it again!)
I am absolutely astonished this post didn't top the LJ character limit.
I like to talk about writing.
1. Of the fic you’ve written, of which are you most proud?
Oh geez, that's like asking a parent which kid they're most proud of (in other words, they quite possibly have a definite answer but it seems impolite to point one out. . . .)
I'm always super proud when I finish a longer fic, so part of my brain immediately leaps to my big bangs with this question. Steam was my first epic in a long time, and possibly the longest one I'd written to date (in my earlier days, I didn't track word counts, so I can't say for sure). And I love the way it spools out and comes together, for all that it still relies heavily on a few canny tricks (really, what fiction doesn't?). But my heart belongs to experimentation, and when it comes to experimenting with my prose, it always goes best when I do it in short form.
I have a lot of fun short form fics (if I do say so myself). I was pretty damn prolific in SPN for awhile there! And in BtVS before that! I have, like, seven tabs open of little fics I could be all "Ooo, I love this one" with for this question!
This is seriously not an easy question, here, people.
Okay. I will narrow it down to three. Series of fics. >.< In no particular order:
Death and Taxes trilogy (which spiritually should really also include Gone to Hell in a Handbook You want experimental? I wrote fic using some of the most boring forms of written communication known to human kind. There's a court opinion summary. IRS letter rulings. Government press releases. And an employee handbook. I turned these things into fiction that makes people laugh. (Well, assuming you guys weren't lying to me.) Are you kidding me? I mean, on paper there is NO WAY these things can work, and yet the very idea had me giggling like a particularly devious child the whole time I wrote them. For real.
Trail Magic I've long had a fascination with a) folklore, b) oral traditions, and c) the Appalachian Trail. This thing managed to combine all those and get people asking me if the folktale I made up for it was a real one. That's not too shabby. And I kind of fell in love with Misfit over the course of this fic (she is more than a little based on a memoir I read in college of a trail hiker who, looking back, I kind of fell in love with when I was reading her book). And, well, it's hard not to be proud when you're in love, ya know?
Dimensions and Verticals The little stick figure fic that could. The very height of my fannish fame. I will never, ever write another fanfic that gets the kind of response this little bit of nonsense received. It's astonishing.
2. Favorite tense
For me, tenses depend very much on the story. I've written in both past and present, and past comes much more naturally to me (you have no idea how often I've started a story in present and then had to go back and fix tenses where I switched halfway through a scene), but it's so so easy to fall into passive voice in the past tense, especially on scene establishers and early sentences, when it's most important to draw your reader right in. And that drives me nuts.
Past works best when it comes to longer format work. Anything over 1,000 words, really. Past pulls back on your tempo subtly, puts space between the reader and the events of the story, giving them room to breathe and acclimate themselves to a story, which is absolutely essential in a long format fic (you can totally drive a whole story along at a breakneck pace, but that doesn't mean you should). Present is best for short pieces, really tight work that doesn't have any extraneous bits and really wants to drive the tempo along. It brings out a sense of urgency to the whole scene that can be really effective when used properly, but it gets overused a lot by writers who don't entirely understand its purpose, and it can ring really false when the structure and the subject matter of the story don't support the tense choice.
Also, flashbacks in a present tense fic can get really super grammatically awkward really super quick and most writers in fanfiction do not have the skill to handle the tense shifts required in those situations. I include myself in that assessment. Tense is harder than you think, people. Make your tense choices responsibly! Do not present tense fic and drive!
So, er, I guess that means the answer is "past", then. To be more accurate, I'll say "past imperfect", but that's mostly because I like the way those words sound when put together.
3. Favorite POV
Hi! This is another subject I have many writerly opinions on that will probably lead me from going "oh, well, you know, they all have a purpose" into definitively declaring my favoritism! Let's get started, shall we?
Okay. There are three basic POVs in the English language: first, second, and third. First person, I find, works best for a particular type of narrator (my favorite type of narrator), the unreliable one. The first person singular perspective's very limitations -- that you are locked, for better or for worse, into one POV character, as though they were describing the scene and the events directly to you -- is its greatest asset. The first person POV can lie to you. You wanna pull a twist in a story? You wanna seriously go all Agatha Christie on your audience, play with their preconceptions, and then turn them over and shake them until the change falls out of their pockets? First person is your best bet. Hands down.
Now, it's also good for other things (otherwise using it for an unreliable narrator shakedown would be pretty ineffective pretty quickly). It establishes an intimacy with the reader. Hi, says the book. I'm going to talk to you, and I'm going to share my inner most thoughts with you, and we are going to be friends. Hell, we are going to be lovers. It's you and me against this world I'm telling you about, here, so I hope you'll have my back. First person offers you its hand and invites you along for the ride. It's the POV that will buy you a drink at the bar or invite you over for homemade soup. It just, you know, might dangle you out the window a little once you get there.
Second person. Second person doesn't invite an intimacy with the reader, it demands it. It sits you down, ties you to a chair, and forces itself upon you. Which totally came out creepy, but let's be honest here: second person is creepy. Second person is also, in my opinion, the least effective POV to use in fiction. It both creates a false intimacy with the reader and also denies its own individuality, usually resulting in a character lacking in fundamental depth. Second person is almost never used in a way that fully acknowledges its own limitations. I have only read one long work to date that has made effective use of the second person narrative, and that was by an old Italian master of prose. If you ask me, second person is only used as a POV in fandom because it's "fashionable", and it makes the story seem "edgy". These are the two worst reasons to make a choice as fundamental to the very nature of a story as point of view. It comes off as a cheap trick. And unless cheap tricks are what you're going for (and I will never deny anyone the chance to play with a good cheap trick or two, as long as they're aware that's what they're doing), you maybe shouldn't use it.
Third person, then. Well, okay, that's a little bit disingenuous, isn't it, because "third person" encompasses so many more POVs than either first or second person do. Because a third person perspective has a variable scope. It can be very very narrow, third person limited, focussed into one character's head and thoughts with only the slightest more distance between that character and the audience than is achieved with first person. It can be pulled back a little, to encompass two or three characters and their thoughts. It can be pulled back and then limited, encompassing the actions of two or three characters in multiple locations without getting into their heads and seeing their thoughts. It can go omniscient, hopping happily from head to head like its on a merry-go-round. All of these have their place. All of these are effective in their own way, and all of them can be used to strengthen a narrative.
I will, 9 times out of 9.1, use third person limited perspective. I like to get into one person's head and stay there, but fandom conventions are such that first person POV is frowned upon, for any number of reasons primarily to do with the POV characters so frequently coming from an outside source, resulting in the first person perspective, which seems to declare ownership over the character, coming across as false. It's generally accepted just fine for original characters within a fanfic, but not for a canon character. (I suspect, also, that there is a somewhat unspoken idea in fandom in general that first person POV belongs to the less skilled writer. I think this is at least partially an offshoot of the Mary Sue effect, though it may also be connected with how popular the POV is for young adult fiction in the professional marketplace, which can make the POV come across as "young". I have no real evidence to support these ideas, though. I could be entirely misreading it all.)
In my original fiction, I will happily swap back between first and third person depending on the story, and how much I want to distance my readers from the characters, as well as what sort of voice I want to use (first person is a far more casual voice, for instance). But I have only written one fic in recent memory from a first person perspective, and that only because I had a very specific reason for choosing it. Third person limited perspective is the default for me, providing a comfortable intimacy while still limiting the expectation for full disclosure from the reader. It's a good one to play around in, and structured properly, can lead to some really good character exploration, which, other than whump, is what draws me to fanfiction in the first place.
4. What are some themes you love writing about?
Humanity.
Possibly the biggest draw for me when it comes to supernatural/magic/otherworldly narratives (my favorite kinds!) is the way that those sorts of narratives allow us to explore what it means to be human, for how we interact with each other, how we interact with the world around us, with all our limitations and inconsistencies and great, astonishing leaps of genius.
I think humans are amazing. Also, really really horrifying. But that's part of what's amazing.
I like fallibility. I like limitations. I like characters who really screw up when they're trying their best to get everything right. I like characters who go up against insurmountable odds and say "fuck that, I'm surmounting this". I don't root for the vampires. I seldom root for the monsters. Give me the ordinary human schmuck thrown into the middle of the vampires and monsters (and aliens and cyborgs and time travelers and and and and and) every time.
I absolutely love it when the character gets their ass kicked into the floor, only inches -- inches -- from failure, and then they pull themselves up, make due with what crutches they have or can make, and turn that failure into a win.
It can be a complicated win. I'm down with complicated. People are fragile, when you come right down to it, and there is almost never any actual full, simple win in the world. But I'm a humanist. I'm maybe even an optimist. And I think that people, when it comes right down to it, can win.
I also really enjoy parody, satire, and absurdity, but those are actually kind of more genres than themes.
5. What inspires you to write?
Life.
Okay, so. My brain does not shut up. Like . . . ever. I find the idea of not thinking both thrilling and terrifying, which is why I don't tend to drink to excess. I can't actually imagine a situation in which I am unable to think. So to get any kind of peace and quiet in my brain, I had to learn at a very young age how to organize my thoughts into a coherent whole. And that whole, ever since I was little, has almost always been a story.
I tell myself stories to go to sleep. Otherwise, my brain would just cycle around on everything I didn't accomplish and have to accomplish and might not accomplish and every single conversation I've had over the course of my lifetime especially any conversation where I shoved my foot in my mouth (and those that didn't seem foot-in-mouth-y at the time but then my brain twists into something terrible because also it's possible my brain hates me?) and I'd never get any sleep at all.
It's only natural that those stories had to find their way out sometimes.
6. Thoughts on critique
I love it! I love a thoughtful, intelligent critique of my work. A good critique inspires me to write more, to write better, to keep working on honing my craft and keep branching out and experimenting. I thrive on good critiques. You can ask my betas. I tend to get a little scared of my writing, especially longer form writing, and it frequently takes a beta reader and a good critical analysis of it to get me back into the game after I've finished it and moved into the editing process.
Editing is scary, okay?
That said, I will not accept critique from everyone. I've received a lot of critique over the years that just makes me roll my eyes. If I don't respect the individual as a reader or a writer, than I can't respect them as a critic. I still appreciate that they took time out of their day to respond (no really, I even get excited by flames, something about my work drew their attention long enough and hard enough for them to take the time to write to me!), but I don't take what they say in any way to heart. I've been in this game long enough for the negative to flow right off me. It's one of the things I'm most proud of about myself as a writer.
7. Create a character on the spot... NOW!
What, are you kidding me?
Fine, okay. Let's see.
Meet Tina. Tina is not even remotely Scottish. In fact, if she were to ever trace her history back -- well, first of all, she'd fail, because she has no experience working in geneology and her mother's family was so gross that she and Tina disowned them years ago -- but if she had the tools necessary to trace her lineage, she'd find it mostly full of Russians, with a handful of Portuguese for spice. But she loves her some Scottish culture.
She doesn't actually know much of anything about Scottish culture. But she likes plaid, okay? Geez, get off her back. And they do things like show off their strength by throwing logs, right? And, come on, who doesn't love a man in a kilt? Or a woman in a kilt.
She just really likes plaid, okay?
When she grows up, she wants to be a fashion designer. She's actually technically grown up already, but her mom didn't have any money for fashion school, and sewing machines kind of intimidate her, so Tina's never actually managed to learn anything about fashion design or clothing construction. She works as a dispatcher at a cab company. But her boss there doesn't mind her keeping a sketchbook on hand at work, so she's always doodling new ideas for fun and funky outfits. She's really excited that argyle's been in for awhile.
Argyle is totally Scottish, okay? It's like the plaid of socks.
(Full disclosure: I did not make up Tina on the spot. She is a stuffed cat I made out of an assortment of various argyle socks that will eventually be for sale on my etsy site, once I get over the whole "I AM GOING TO FAIL AT THIS" thing and actually finish taking pictures of my stock. I've been writing up little blurby bio things on my sock animals to get myself revved up for actually opening the shop, and Tina's was a whole thing about how she's so proud of her argyle cat heritage in old Scotland -- even though she's not actually remotely Scottish.)
8. Is there a character you love writing for the most? The least? Why?
I find that once I get started writing a character, I end up loving them. I can hate a character's guts on the screen, but when I sit down to try to get into their head for a story, I really enjoy the process. I don't always end up loving the character, but it's a really good exercise in empathy (and sometimes sociopathy) and I find it really fascinating.
I always end up with a special affinity for characters I write a whole lot, so at the moment, though the show is not doing so well in my opinion, I'm still loving writing Dean. I've spent enough time in his head over the last several years that he's like an old friend, and I don't have to work very hard to get his voice going (which is not to say that I always get his voice right, 'caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaause yeah). I used to love writing Sam, but the way his character has been going in the last few years has been so frustrating to me that attempts to get into his headspace always end up being sort of epic rants of exposition trying to explain his actions in canon. Which while an interesting experiment for characterization, does not actually generally make great fiction. This is actually currently frustrating me quite a bit, as I'd like to do at least a good chunk of my current big bang from Sam's POV (in an alternate season 9, even), and I keep failing and getting to the actual scene when I start in on him.
And not managing to get to the action of a scene frustrates the heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell out of me.
9. A passage from a WIP
Pick a WIP, any WIP. . . .
Okay, I'm going to do two, here, because this was requested by both kasman and addiokira. One will be from a fannish work, one from something original.
For this year's spn_j2_bigbang, most likely: "So," he said, as he set the tray with toast and Sam's weak, froofy coffee on the nightstand. "Death echo lady was back last night."
Sam looked up. "Did she do anything different?"
"Dude," Dean said. "She's a death echo."
Sam shook his head, carefully spreading the jelly evenly over the entire surface of one of the slices of toast. "Then why are you bringing her up?"
Dean shrugged. "I don't know. Dead lady in my room. Sure, she's just an echo, but still. Dead lady."
"You're bored," Sam said.
"I think that's been pretty firmly established."
"No," Sam said, pushing himself even further upright. "I mean, you're really bored. You should get out of here. Go find a hunt or something."
"What, and just leave you here?"
"I'm fine, Dean."
Dean looked down at Sam's tray, then back up at Sam.
"Okay, I'm not fighting fit, yet, but I'm not going to keel over if I have to look after myself for a couple days. Besides, Kevin's here. It's not like I'll be alone."
"Kevin has barely left his little study room since we got back."
"So give him something to focus on other than the tablets," Sam said. "We can entertain each other, and you can stop going totally stir crazy."
"I'm not going stir crazy."
"You're obsessed with a death echo."
"I'm not obsessed!" Dean stood up and started for the door. Sam made a little squawk of protest.
"Dude, where are you going?"
"If you're so sick of me," Dean said, glancing back, "then I'll get out of your hair. Yell if you need anything."
"Dean!" Sam called. "Dean, come on, I wasn't -- goddammit, Dean!"
Dean groaned, running his hand over his hair. He wasn't obsessed. Two nights did not equal obsessed. And he totally wasn't going crazy, that was stupid. What, did Sam expect him to start typing "all work and no play" on some typewriter? Maybe show up one morning with an axe?
Like he'd ever go crazy when he had Sam to look after.
Obsessed.
Please.
*
At 3:20 AM, Dean stood in the doorway of the kitchen, all set to catch the death echo as she came through the wall from his room and track her properly.
Okay. Maybe he was a little obsessed.
And from an original piece, working title: Manic:Have you ever, while sitting around with a group of friends, tried to determine what sort of animal each person was? It could be based on anything, the shape of their face, the texture of their hair, a particular personality quirk or behavior. Maybe it's not anything you can name, just a general sense of each other, some underlying aura that just screams "orangutan". I don't mean spirit animals, though sometimes folks can get the two confused. I mean, if the world were populated by anthropomorphized animals who wear clothes and hang out in bars, what kind of animal would you be?
I was very, very good at this game. Denied of my post-shopping cafe transition, I turned instead to transforming every one I saw into something furry or scaled or feathered.
The cafe's assistant manager, an apple shaped woman with a disproportionately small head, was a turtle. She was working almost every time I came in, and I had her down to a T, from the flare of the collar on her company polo shirt to the upward tilt of her sharp chin. I don't mean she was slow, mind you, she worked very quickly and efficiently. Like a sea turtle, in her element she could glide, swinging with the currents of the little cafe like an aerialist at the circus. It was only her brief interludes on land that she was slow, that she showed her vulnerability.
There was a new barista that night, working the register, and I let myself sink into watching him work. He was a narrow fellow, and my first thought was "giraffe", but I've learned not to always trust those first instincts. First instincts are rarely actually accurate. They're more likely a trained response to any number of tropes and stereotypes that the world has dumped on you over the course of your lifetime. It takes more than being narrowly built and taller than the person next to you to be a giraffe, and a heavy person is only really a hippo if they can also live up to being the most dangerous animal in the entire Nile. Besides, this barista barely had a neck. There was something pointed about his face. From the front, his nose seemed pert, small and tidy, but when he turned his head, stepping away from the register to refill creamer canisters or rearrange the music selection between customers, you saw that it was actually quite long, sticking out from the center of his face like the long muzzle of a dog. A fox, I thought, or maybe a dachshund. The way he moved his hands at the register, though, how he seemed to flinch backward from customers when they approached, was far too skittish for a predatory animal. A rodent, then, twitchy and quick and at least a little bit adorable. He even almost had the teeth for it.
"Hare," I said, twirling my pencil over my sketchbook as I stared. "Not enough ears. A fox, maybe? Chased by dogs."
"What was that?"
I froze, just for a moment, feeling the small hairs on my hands prickle. (I've always been of the belief that I'm a hedgehog, personally: tiny, nocturnal, with sharp teeth and quills.) My eyes slid sideways before my head did, as I slowly took in the fact that someone else in the tiny little cafe had actually sat down.
He was a hound. I know I just said that you can't go on instinct with these things, but even later, I never wavered from the hounddog. One of the larger breeds, narrow in the hip but with a broad chest, the sort with wiry, scraggly hair and the serious, almost mournful expression that never quite goes away, even when they smile. He wore his hair in that fashionably careless way that always made you wonder if they were still saving up for a proper haircut. I got the impression, though I didn't look too carefully at first, that he was wearing a suit, badly. He had a cup of coffee in front of him, but no book or laptop or anything else to indicate why he'd stopped in the middle of this throughway.
There are customs for such situations as these, social graces that said you could blush gently and say "nothing" and turn your head, and the other person was obliged to let you wallow in your embarrassment without further comment. Alternately, you could stare the other person down, throw the embarrassment back at them, how dare they interrupt your clearly private train of thought.
I've never been good at either of these customs.
"The barista," I said, because accidentally falling into them is pretty much the only way I ever end up in a conversation with a stranger, and somewhere along the line, my brain decided to just roll with it and pretend I'm an extrovert. Maybe I'm actually a mimic octopus. "Would you say he's a hare or a fox?"
The man frowned, which didn't help the impression of hound like jowls, and looked from me over to the counter, where the barista in question was fumbling with a cup full of straws. "What?"
Extrovert-me rolled her eyes. "You know, if we were all in a children's book or a web comic or something."
His eyes flicked back over to me and he shifted, his body language slowly waking up, like I'd just offered to play fetch. I wondered if he circled his seat three times before he sat down. "Oh." I saw him switch his attention back to the barista, mind and imagination engaged. "Have you ever heard of a jeroba?"
I tipped my head, then shook it. "Is it a rodent?"
He nodded, shifting his chair a little to swing closer to me. I surprised myself by not inching further away. "A bit like a gerbil with kangaroo feet. I think they're mostly African."
I looked down at my notebook. "I don't know how to draw a jeroba."
I have a number of other works in progress just now, but these two are the ones at the forefront of my mind (and "Manic" is the one I've told addiokira the most about already).
10. What are your strengths in writing?
Voice. I've always excelled at character voice, be it in dialogue or narrative prose. Even as a teenager, in my early days writing fanfiction, my most common compliment was how I managed to make it sound right. I love to play with it, too, to work with rhythms and speech patterns to build suspense or comic timing. Voice is a lot about diction and word order and accents and dialects, sure, but at it's basic level, I've always felt it ultimately comes down to rhythm.
Which, not coincidentally, is one of my favorite parts of language.
This is, naturally, not to say that I always nail the voice in my works. Especially those that haven't had the eye of a good beta or editor. But voice is what comes most naturally to me as a writer, and I revel in it.
Okay, and after answering the next question, I realized this asks "strengths", plural, and I only answered with one, technically, while for weaknesses I came up with a bunch, so.
I'm quite good with humor. Most of my great influences when it comes to writing are/were humorists, so it's only fair that it's what I go to most often (also humor is one of my favorite defense mechanisms!). My favorite sort is absurdist humor, especially ala Douglas Adams (my first and greatest literary influence), though I'm not nearly on his level. I love to take an idea that most people would swear up and down could never work and making it into a full, coherent, and readable fic. I've also become better over the years at mixing this humor with pathos, leading to that "it's crack fic, but it's not JUST crack fic" reaction that I tend to get from readers. As the great roque_classique once quoted one of her writing instructors as saying, "it has to be both sad AND funny". Which, yes. That. I like to think I have at least a little bit of a handle on that concept.
I'm good at character complexity. This, I think, actually goes hand in hand with the voice thing, but it isn't actually exactly the same skill. I can make you love and hate a character in equal measure, which is a hell of a thing (see above, re: not always and sometimes this requires a beta/editor, I know, I know, I shouldn't disclaim myself, but betas/editors are really important and I don't want to downplay their contribution to my -- and any other writer's -- strengths). No one always likes another person, and equally no one should always like a character. People are complex, as I mentioned above, and I love their complexities and their hypocrises. I love exploring those in fiction.
I can be quite good at eking out exposition over the course of a longer story. This is usually accidental, but I do love when it works out.
I can write both full on goofy humor in one story and tremendous horror in another. I can write these two stories simultaneously.
I occasionally come up with truly gorgeous imagery. If I do say so myself. I'm pretty good at using that imagery to reflect the inner workings of my characters (it all comes back to characterization and voice, m'kay?).
And I'm not afraid to spend the time to figure out how what I'm talking about really works, but I also don't let myself get bogged down in research to the point where I stop progressing with the story entirely.
That last one is really hard, okay? I should get a medal.
11. What are your weaknesses in writing?
Actually finishing things.
It's pretty well established on this journal that I don't finish WIPs if I post them as I go (Fanon Fodder being the great exception to this rule). This wasn't always true, I have a good bulk of finished WIPs under other screennames scattered around the 'net, but in the last ten years or so, I've managed to stall out on more WIPs than I can count. It's reached the point where I don't even pretend like I'll get it done -- there's a reason why Dean and Crowley's Big Adventure has never been crossposted to any other site. If I manage to finish it, I'll put it together all nice and post it around, but if not, I'd rather not disappoint anyone who doesn't already know my rep.
I also, from a grammatical standpoint, have difficulty with tense shifts, primarily from present to past, or from past to past perfect within a scene (those not-a-full-flashback moments when a character is thinking back on recent events, very useful for time shifts in larger works!). I've studied it all, and I used to know all the terms and the technical reasons for the shifts (which is more than a lot of native English speakers who grew up in the American public school system of the late 20th century!), but they don't come automatically to me all the time when I write, and I find myself frequently having to clean those sections up. Also, from a technical standpoint, there are certain homophones that I constantly mess up (break/brake is a big one, and lead/led, maisfeeka is my hero in this regard). My brain tends to get rather ahead of me when I'm writing -- I can type a good 90 words a minute with 90% accuracy, but have I mentioned that my brain DOESN'T SHUT UP? It also multitasks. I'm often three scenes ahead while I'm working out the best phrasing for what I'm typing up at any given moment -- so errors like these are rampant. As are run-on and overly complex sentences. I love me some mid-sentence asides! I am constantly having to pull back from putting asides within asides, and then I lose track of where the sentence was going to begin with and it all gets tangled up and the em-dashes are everywhere. It's crazy times.
Oh, and crowd scenes. Crowd scenes are hard. I had to specifically train myself on crowd scenes for my college thesis, and they're still super hard for me. Get more than two or three characters interacting in a scene and I can guarantee you one of them is probably out beating up a scarecrow in the background because I'm not using them properly. (Okay, I was going to make that a link to Bus Driver Stu Benedict beating up a scarecrow in the background of an episode of Adventures of Pete and Pete, but YouTube failed me. Go watch Pete and Pete. Perhaps you will learn to understand me better as a person.)
12. Anything else that you want to know... (otherwise known as Fill in the Blank)
addiokira asked this: "You have developed a new world for your latest story. Tell me one interesting detail that I might not necessarily catch on my first read-through."
I'm not sure if she meant it generally, like the "make up a new character RIGHT NOW" kind of thing, or meant one of my actual numerous WIPs -- I have a couple of them, as I mentioned! -- but we'll go with worlds I'm actually actively creating already and not one I'm trying to make up off the top of my head for a meme.
So she might be referring to my post-America DC fic, in which the city is a capitalist dystopia entirely made up of a giant tent market and neo-classical ruins, surrounded by a four story sea wall holding back the swollen Potomac. This isn't my latest story by any means, but it isn't entirely shelved, and it's a concept that tends to linger in the back of my head a lot even when I'm not actively working on it (also I have a map of DC on my wall over my bed that I scribble on with various colored sharpies as I work out the layout of the world).
It's not a fully fleshed out world, yet, so so far, most of the details are apparent enough in the story. It's not explicitly DC, but those familiar with the city should be able to work it out pretty easily. One thing that might not be instantly noticeable is that all of the names of all of the characters are taken from the streets and monuments around the National Mall (save one, who's working name so far is the name of a craft store). Most of them have been shortened, so the main character, who goes by Penny, is actually Independence, and her boyfriend, Consti, is Constitution. Society has progressed in such a way that most people don't have the context for these words that surround them, carved into stone, so they've been adopted instead as given names. The exception is the Smithsonites, a cultish community on the fringes of the Long Market, who obsessively study the structure of the old city and its history. They are the ones who built the wall in the first place, when they realized that the water levels were rising (there's a dig at climate change deniers in there that may or may not show up somewhat explicitly in the story itself), and they hoard objects they claim are valuable in the half-destroyed remains of the National Museum of Natural History. The folks on the Market aren't allowed into the old museums for the most part, but they've spotted bits of the old dinosaur skeletons through the windows from time to time, which have only added to the distrust they feel towards the cultists.
My other works in progress right now are mostly in modern times America. I do have a modern fairytale type story in which a grown woman goes back to the overgrown drainage ditch she played in as a child and finds a whole other world within, full of talking animals and the like. It's pretty bog-standard fairytale fare so far, but the animals included are all actually extant in the mid-Atlantic region, where the fic takes place. So instead of finding a dragon, she at one point encounters a giant cicada. . . .
This is an image I adore, but when I mention it to other people, they tend to look grossed out. Alas.
(If you meant some other story I am failing to think of right now, please let me know, and I shall try to answer it again!)
I am absolutely astonished this post didn't top the LJ character limit.
I like to talk about writing.