3W4DW memery roundup, pt. 1: qs 1-10
So yeah, that daily meme I (vaguely) mentioned doing for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth was 
jjhunter's May Writing Meme: 31 days (and an eventual 6000 words, ahahaha) of writerly navelgazing! AWESOME.
(Original plan had been to just post links to the original posts, but since I realized that I'd need to either a) split it into several link roundups (which... would be kinda pointless and halfway purpose-defeating), since only part of the posts have served their three DW-exclusive weeks yet or b) wait till the 21st to post the whole linkspam at once (which, YEAH, THAT'S SOMETHING I'M CAPABLE OF *snerfk*), I figured I might as well repost the lot instead.)
Roundups 2 & 3 in respectively ~ 10 and 20 days, but for now, here's the first ten questions:
Day 1: Why do you write?
To expand on my answer in the Writers subscription meme: because I keep getting this stuff in my head and it's not going to stop bugging me until I get it out. Or ignore it for long enough that it finally gives up in frustration and stomps off, hahaha. And because I'm not really happy when I'm not writing. It's frankly an essential requirement to me leading a fulfilled life. (Which, considering my frequent bouts of not managing to write for months/a whole year, is a bit of a rum deal. XD;)
It's honestly a bit bizarre that my One Essential Thing is writing, though, seeing as I really, really don't have a natural aptitude for words. (Pls see: my past years and years of uphill struggle with the things, haa.) What does and always has come naturally to me, though, is stories. It's just that the damn bastards, 99.9% of the time, turn up as images -- full-on, sensurround movies most of the time, in fact -- and then I'm left there flailing for words to translate them into prose with, ARGH. (This is why I tend towards either way too little or utterly excessive detail, ahaha.)
Tl;dr: it makes me happy (in spite of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, snerk), my characters make me happy, and how the hell else am I gonna get them to shut up. XD
Day 2: What piece of writing are you most proud of?
"Proud of" probably isn't strictly the accurate term, here, since the majority of potential candidates are in the crappy first draft stage, haha. ("Fond of", now, that's another story!) If we're going by bits that I've actually posted (the very very few that they are), though, I'd say it's this one -- I may not be entirely happy with all the word choices (and the title sucks, ahaha), but even after all this time, I still love it, it still has the perfect punch. Even if no one but mayyybe the tiny handful of people I plotspoilered way back in the day have a clue what said punch even is. XD;
And actually, come to it, probably the piece I'm most proud of out of the as yet unposted stuff is the super-short closing to part one of Dis, as much as it's still all clunky prose and imperfect word choices, purely because it loops so perfectly back into the opening. <3 And I still just love that whole structural conceit.
Day 3: How often do you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Say, certain locations, beverages, background music, times of day, target word counts, etc.?
Oh god, there is neither rhyme nor reason to my writing frequency. Sometimes I write several times a week; sometimes I barely manage to force out one chunk of text a week. Sometimes I go months without a single bit of prose produced. (Which is something I really need to break myself of -- letting myself fall into the sucking, self-perpetuating swamp of Not Even Trying -- but I've now gone a good decade without finding any way that will actually work, so who knows if I ever will. XD;)
I used to have a lot more writing rituals, but I've shed almost all of them by now -- I've found that taking the mystique out of the act of writing has helped me just get to it a lot more easily. The only really notable one is that I do most of my writing at night, but that's only because that's how I function, creatively. (I can tell you this sucks to hell and back when I have a regular morning wake-up call. XD;)
I also tend to really, really want a cup of coffee at hand (or occasionally booze, as a change of pace), which is not hugely practical either since my body really can't handle large quantities of caffeine anymore*, and a single mug is far too easily gone before I've written more than a few sentences. XD;
Hmmm, and I suppose I can't claim not to do wordcount goals, strictly speaking, since I am doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge this year. I mean, technically I don't use wordcount goals when I write, because it's not a motivator that's ever worked for me -- I can only write as much as I get, and when I stop getting material to write, a wordcount target is gonna do fuck-all to change that, snerk -- but, y'know, there's that. Nonetheless.
(Of course, more often than not I end up filling my 250 words with blogging, so I don't know how much it should count, either way. *snerk*)
*) and okay, there's decaf, but a) that shit is expensive, particularly when you're talking espresso roasts, which means I don't want to go through a jar too fast, and b) large quantities of decaf doesn't agree any better with my stomach lining than non-decaf does, since it's not the caffeine that makes it curl up and cry. XD; (Gratuitous side note: regular coffee it can't hack at all anymore, which is why I'm espresso-only these days.)
Day 4: How much of the story do you know before you start writing it? Do you use outlines?
I prefer to have at least the broad strokes of the plot sketched out before I start in, so I at least know roughly where I'm going at any given time, but the thing I need, in order to be able to start writing, is a concrete hook -- a sufficiently vivid image, snippets of dialogue, lines of narrative.
I sort of outline? I mean, I'll more or less invariably do a super-rough plot synopsis for any new story, generally just a handful of paragraphs, but the more detailed outlining tends to happen once I'm already working on the story: partially to keep track of what I've already got that's waiting to be written, that's in the works, that's done* (aka YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY SPREADSHEETS, snerk); partially to better see the gaps, which helps me find things to fill them up with. (I go into this a tiny bit in this old post at /mytho. Sort of. XD;)
*) my writingbrain has never heard of the concept of "linear", is all I'm saying ahaha
Day 5: What tools do you use to write? Audio recordings, pen and paper, computer software, other methods, some mixture thereof?
The default is a barebones text editor -- a habit I picked up from writing things to be posted to mailing lists/in html/to lj. While I was writing on a Windows box I'd favour EditPad Lite (<3 <3), but since getting this sweet baby:
[Acer Aspire One 8.9" netbook, running a lightweight Linux distro; answers to the name of Lila <333333]
for my main writing machine, it's the inevitably less awesome native textpad app.
For when I don't have Lila at hand -- or I'm too tired to sit upright to write, haha -- I've got my full-qwerty-keypad smartphone (which I got to replace my poor beloved Palm pda when it died last year). I resort to pen and notepad/loose bits of paper only when no other option is available these days, because I am INCREDIBLY lazy about typing shit in. XD;
Day 6: How do you come up with names and story titles?
My Unnecessarily Lengthy Process For Naming [Main] Characters:
Step 1: Trawl through enormous name lists and collect candidates that sound kind of right for the character.
Step 2: Spend the next week filing away at candidate list, dropping a few Not Quite Right ones on every pass, until I've shaved it down to my final options.
(Step 2b, optional: Realize none of the initial candidates are in fact The Right One; return to step 1. XD;)
Step 3: Sit on the final options for another week, mulling them over until The One Right Name finally solidifies.
Step 4: MASSIVE CELEBRATION!
(Step 5, optional: Spend yet the next week vacillating over whether The Right Name really was the right name after all. XD; (I usually get over that, though. *snerk*))
And okay, when I say "a week", that is sometimes an exaggeration -- I have gone through the process in a couple of days, too -- but then sometimes, IT REALLY REALLY ISN'T. *refrains heroically from mentioning A Certain Character who took a bloody month to find a name for because he gets snitty about the fact that I still keep bringing that up, ahaha*
(And then sometimes, they just walk in and introduce themselves by name right off the bat. Well, okay, so that's happened once, but still. XD)
Titles: oh god, honestly. BANE OF MY LIFE. Pls see how I STILL haven't settled on the Proper Title for Dis, which is why the only name it ever gets referred to by is "Dis". XD; Okay, shit, let me make a run through my semi-recently titled story projects to see what I can figure out. XD;
[gets distracted for 20 minutes looking for alternatives to an old title I just realized is rife with skeevy cultural appropriation issues, ahaha]
Hmm, well, my main title types seem to be:
-single word that encapsulates the major abstract concept that runs through the plot
-essentially straight descriptive of setting or major player in the plot
-plays on common phrases, sayings or the like (often old ones) that evoke key elements of the story
Sometimes finding one of the above things that works as the title of a given story goes quickly, but more often than not it is an almighty chore, and takes several forevers. XD; (DID I MENTION BANE OF MY LIFE.) Which is why half of my back-burner projects go by extremely half-assed working titles only, hahaha.
Day 7: Do you use beta reader(s)? If so, what do you look for in a beta reader? What specialties would your ideal beta have?
It's "no" only because I haven't had a whole lot of reason to seek any out as yet -- what with the taking RIDICULOUS FOREVERS to finish stuff, and the extreme non-linearity of my writing order, it would be pretty pointless to run any finished segments through the beta process, since I might well have to completely rewrite earlier things after filling in gaps in the narrative. (It's very not just once that I've looked at an older bit of something and gone, "oh, hey, those bits of exposition are now COMPLETELY REDUNDANT since I wrote this newer, preceding bit", ahaha. And that's just the easy to fix issue!)
I suspect the thing I could really use, once I get there, would be a big-picture beta, though, because I am very prone to being blinded by the trees, so to speak. (Let's just say I suck at spotting plot holes in movies/tv shows too, haha.)
Day 8: What kind of support, if any, do you get for your writing?
(Subtitle: craaaaap, I really do need to get on with soliciting new alpha readers. XD;)
Uh, right now? None, really. XD; This because I've fallen out of regular communication with all my previous alpha readers, and I'm too bloody socially lazy to have made the effort to pick up new ones. *loses at life*
And to qualify, since that also neatly answers the question as far as what I've had in the past goes: when I'm the one defining it, "alpha reader" = any poor, patient soul who's willing to put up with having my half-assed, frequently stopping-in-the-middle drafts shoved under their nose*, and will hopefully make encouraging noises at me over them. (Critique is for later in the process, after I've come down from the writing high and have done a few edit passes on my own. I am a FRAGILE FLOWER when I've just finished** writing something. *snerk*) So, y'know, essentially it's a cheerleader position, heh. It tends to spur me on creatively when I have someone I can be excited at about my stuff, so having alphas has always been useful to me.
*) because I'm just saying, I have an OVERWHELMING need to show anything I've just written to someone, especially if it's something I'm excited about. (I tend to refer to this as my "LOOK AT THIS THING I JUST FINGERPAINTED LOOK LOOK" syndrome, snicker.)
**) for uh some values of "finished", you know. XD;
Day 9: Do you share your writing publicly or keep it private? Have you or would you like to be published?
Depends on the story. Some things I'll cheerfully slap up online as soon as they're in presentable shape (~*theoretically*~ anyway, snerk), but the ones that feel more marketable I'll be more inclined to sit on.
As for publishing: it used to be my goal, absolutely, back when I was still mainly cranking out independent short stories, but it stopped being quite so important when I started in on those two Main Projects (tm) of mine. Purely for the reason that I'm way too close to them to have any interest at all in putting them up for traditional publication -- it'd feel like trying to sell a family member, frankly. XD; I do still have a measure of interest in potentially being published -- see the whole "things that feel more marketable" bit above and assuming I'm allowed to write something else ever again, ahaha -- although these days, I'm thinking more along the lines of small press e-publishing, just because that model is more attractive to me by this point.
Day 10: What's your biggest source of writer's envy?
Oh god, so easy -- wordcount and constancy. Because that's what nearly every potential skill-based envy I might develop stems from: the fact that I just don't write enough to grow into any of those skillsets myself at anything other than a glacial pace. (Which is why, despite the fact that I've technically been writing for 20 years at this point, I'm honestly not even at intermediate yet. XD; I'm getting good at seeing the micro-level stuff, but the advanced, big-picture story structure stuff is still a long way away for me. Mostly because getting there would require regularly finishing stories, cough.)
Questions #11-20
jjhunter's May Writing Meme: 31 days (and an eventual 6000 words, ahahaha) of writerly navelgazing! AWESOME.
(Original plan had been to just post links to the original posts, but since I realized that I'd need to either a) split it into several link roundups (which... would be kinda pointless and halfway purpose-defeating), since only part of the posts have served their three DW-exclusive weeks yet or b) wait till the 21st to post the whole linkspam at once (which, YEAH, THAT'S SOMETHING I'M CAPABLE OF *snerfk*), I figured I might as well repost the lot instead.)
Roundups 2 & 3 in respectively ~ 10 and 20 days, but for now, here's the first ten questions:
Day 1: Why do you write?
To expand on my answer in the Writers subscription meme: because I keep getting this stuff in my head and it's not going to stop bugging me until I get it out. Or ignore it for long enough that it finally gives up in frustration and stomps off, hahaha. And because I'm not really happy when I'm not writing. It's frankly an essential requirement to me leading a fulfilled life. (Which, considering my frequent bouts of not managing to write for months/a whole year, is a bit of a rum deal. XD;)
It's honestly a bit bizarre that my One Essential Thing is writing, though, seeing as I really, really don't have a natural aptitude for words. (Pls see: my past years and years of uphill struggle with the things, haa.) What does and always has come naturally to me, though, is stories. It's just that the damn bastards, 99.9% of the time, turn up as images -- full-on, sensurround movies most of the time, in fact -- and then I'm left there flailing for words to translate them into prose with, ARGH. (This is why I tend towards either way too little or utterly excessive detail, ahaha.)
Tl;dr: it makes me happy (in spite of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, snerk), my characters make me happy, and how the hell else am I gonna get them to shut up. XD
Day 2: What piece of writing are you most proud of?
"Proud of" probably isn't strictly the accurate term, here, since the majority of potential candidates are in the crappy first draft stage, haha. ("Fond of", now, that's another story!) If we're going by bits that I've actually posted (the very very few that they are), though, I'd say it's this one -- I may not be entirely happy with all the word choices (and the title sucks, ahaha), but even after all this time, I still love it, it still has the perfect punch. Even if no one but mayyybe the tiny handful of people I plotspoilered way back in the day have a clue what said punch even is. XD;
And actually, come to it, probably the piece I'm most proud of out of the as yet unposted stuff is the super-short closing to part one of Dis, as much as it's still all clunky prose and imperfect word choices, purely because it loops so perfectly back into the opening. <3 And I still just love that whole structural conceit.
Day 3: How often do you write? Do you have any writing rituals? Say, certain locations, beverages, background music, times of day, target word counts, etc.?
Oh god, there is neither rhyme nor reason to my writing frequency. Sometimes I write several times a week; sometimes I barely manage to force out one chunk of text a week. Sometimes I go months without a single bit of prose produced. (Which is something I really need to break myself of -- letting myself fall into the sucking, self-perpetuating swamp of Not Even Trying -- but I've now gone a good decade without finding any way that will actually work, so who knows if I ever will. XD;)
I used to have a lot more writing rituals, but I've shed almost all of them by now -- I've found that taking the mystique out of the act of writing has helped me just get to it a lot more easily. The only really notable one is that I do most of my writing at night, but that's only because that's how I function, creatively. (I can tell you this sucks to hell and back when I have a regular morning wake-up call. XD;)
I also tend to really, really want a cup of coffee at hand (or occasionally booze, as a change of pace), which is not hugely practical either since my body really can't handle large quantities of caffeine anymore*, and a single mug is far too easily gone before I've written more than a few sentences. XD;
Hmmm, and I suppose I can't claim not to do wordcount goals, strictly speaking, since I am doing the 250 Words a Day Challenge this year. I mean, technically I don't use wordcount goals when I write, because it's not a motivator that's ever worked for me -- I can only write as much as I get, and when I stop getting material to write, a wordcount target is gonna do fuck-all to change that, snerk -- but, y'know, there's that. Nonetheless.
(Of course, more often than not I end up filling my 250 words with blogging, so I don't know how much it should count, either way. *snerk*)
*) and okay, there's decaf, but a) that shit is expensive, particularly when you're talking espresso roasts, which means I don't want to go through a jar too fast, and b) large quantities of decaf doesn't agree any better with my stomach lining than non-decaf does, since it's not the caffeine that makes it curl up and cry. XD; (Gratuitous side note: regular coffee it can't hack at all anymore, which is why I'm espresso-only these days.)
Day 4: How much of the story do you know before you start writing it? Do you use outlines?
I prefer to have at least the broad strokes of the plot sketched out before I start in, so I at least know roughly where I'm going at any given time, but the thing I need, in order to be able to start writing, is a concrete hook -- a sufficiently vivid image, snippets of dialogue, lines of narrative.
I sort of outline? I mean, I'll more or less invariably do a super-rough plot synopsis for any new story, generally just a handful of paragraphs, but the more detailed outlining tends to happen once I'm already working on the story: partially to keep track of what I've already got that's waiting to be written, that's in the works, that's done* (aka YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MANY SPREADSHEETS, snerk); partially to better see the gaps, which helps me find things to fill them up with. (I go into this a tiny bit in this old post at /mytho. Sort of. XD;)
*) my writingbrain has never heard of the concept of "linear", is all I'm saying ahaha
Day 5: What tools do you use to write? Audio recordings, pen and paper, computer software, other methods, some mixture thereof?
The default is a barebones text editor -- a habit I picked up from writing things to be posted to mailing lists/in html/to lj. While I was writing on a Windows box I'd favour EditPad Lite (<3 <3), but since getting this sweet baby:
[Acer Aspire One 8.9" netbook, running a lightweight Linux distro; answers to the name of Lila <333333]
for my main writing machine, it's the inevitably less awesome native textpad app.
For when I don't have Lila at hand -- or I'm too tired to sit upright to write, haha -- I've got my full-qwerty-keypad smartphone (which I got to replace my poor beloved Palm pda when it died last year). I resort to pen and notepad/loose bits of paper only when no other option is available these days, because I am INCREDIBLY lazy about typing shit in. XD;
Day 6: How do you come up with names and story titles?
My Unnecessarily Lengthy Process For Naming [Main] Characters:
Step 1: Trawl through enormous name lists and collect candidates that sound kind of right for the character.
Step 2: Spend the next week filing away at candidate list, dropping a few Not Quite Right ones on every pass, until I've shaved it down to my final options.
(Step 2b, optional: Realize none of the initial candidates are in fact The Right One; return to step 1. XD;)
Step 3: Sit on the final options for another week, mulling them over until The One Right Name finally solidifies.
Step 4: MASSIVE CELEBRATION!
(Step 5, optional: Spend yet the next week vacillating over whether The Right Name really was the right name after all. XD; (I usually get over that, though. *snerk*))
And okay, when I say "a week", that is sometimes an exaggeration -- I have gone through the process in a couple of days, too -- but then sometimes, IT REALLY REALLY ISN'T. *refrains heroically from mentioning A Certain Character who took a bloody month to find a name for because he gets snitty about the fact that I still keep bringing that up, ahaha*
(And then sometimes, they just walk in and introduce themselves by name right off the bat. Well, okay, so that's happened once, but still. XD)
Titles: oh god, honestly. BANE OF MY LIFE. Pls see how I STILL haven't settled on the Proper Title for Dis, which is why the only name it ever gets referred to by is "Dis". XD; Okay, shit, let me make a run through my semi-recently titled story projects to see what I can figure out. XD;
[gets distracted for 20 minutes looking for alternatives to an old title I just realized is rife with skeevy cultural appropriation issues, ahaha]
Hmm, well, my main title types seem to be:
-single word that encapsulates the major abstract concept that runs through the plot
-essentially straight descriptive of setting or major player in the plot
-plays on common phrases, sayings or the like (often old ones) that evoke key elements of the story
Sometimes finding one of the above things that works as the title of a given story goes quickly, but more often than not it is an almighty chore, and takes several forevers. XD; (DID I MENTION BANE OF MY LIFE.) Which is why half of my back-burner projects go by extremely half-assed working titles only, hahaha.
Day 7: Do you use beta reader(s)? If so, what do you look for in a beta reader? What specialties would your ideal beta have?
It's "no" only because I haven't had a whole lot of reason to seek any out as yet -- what with the taking RIDICULOUS FOREVERS to finish stuff, and the extreme non-linearity of my writing order, it would be pretty pointless to run any finished segments through the beta process, since I might well have to completely rewrite earlier things after filling in gaps in the narrative. (It's very not just once that I've looked at an older bit of something and gone, "oh, hey, those bits of exposition are now COMPLETELY REDUNDANT since I wrote this newer, preceding bit", ahaha. And that's just the easy to fix issue!)
I suspect the thing I could really use, once I get there, would be a big-picture beta, though, because I am very prone to being blinded by the trees, so to speak. (Let's just say I suck at spotting plot holes in movies/tv shows too, haha.)
Day 8: What kind of support, if any, do you get for your writing?
(Subtitle: craaaaap, I really do need to get on with soliciting new alpha readers. XD;)
Uh, right now? None, really. XD; This because I've fallen out of regular communication with all my previous alpha readers, and I'm too bloody socially lazy to have made the effort to pick up new ones. *loses at life*
And to qualify, since that also neatly answers the question as far as what I've had in the past goes: when I'm the one defining it, "alpha reader" = any poor, patient soul who's willing to put up with having my half-assed, frequently stopping-in-the-middle drafts shoved under their nose*, and will hopefully make encouraging noises at me over them. (Critique is for later in the process, after I've come down from the writing high and have done a few edit passes on my own. I am a FRAGILE FLOWER when I've just finished** writing something. *snerk*) So, y'know, essentially it's a cheerleader position, heh. It tends to spur me on creatively when I have someone I can be excited at about my stuff, so having alphas has always been useful to me.
*) because I'm just saying, I have an OVERWHELMING need to show anything I've just written to someone, especially if it's something I'm excited about. (I tend to refer to this as my "LOOK AT THIS THING I JUST FINGERPAINTED LOOK LOOK" syndrome, snicker.)
**) for uh some values of "finished", you know. XD;
Day 9: Do you share your writing publicly or keep it private? Have you or would you like to be published?
Depends on the story. Some things I'll cheerfully slap up online as soon as they're in presentable shape (~*theoretically*~ anyway, snerk), but the ones that feel more marketable I'll be more inclined to sit on.
As for publishing: it used to be my goal, absolutely, back when I was still mainly cranking out independent short stories, but it stopped being quite so important when I started in on those two Main Projects (tm) of mine. Purely for the reason that I'm way too close to them to have any interest at all in putting them up for traditional publication -- it'd feel like trying to sell a family member, frankly. XD; I do still have a measure of interest in potentially being published -- see the whole "things that feel more marketable" bit above and assuming I'm allowed to write something else ever again, ahaha -- although these days, I'm thinking more along the lines of small press e-publishing, just because that model is more attractive to me by this point.
Day 10: What's your biggest source of writer's envy?
Oh god, so easy -- wordcount and constancy. Because that's what nearly every potential skill-based envy I might develop stems from: the fact that I just don't write enough to grow into any of those skillsets myself at anything other than a glacial pace. (Which is why, despite the fact that I've technically been writing for 20 years at this point, I'm honestly not even at intermediate yet. XD; I'm getting good at seeing the micro-level stuff, but the advanced, big-picture story structure stuff is still a long way away for me. Mostly because getting there would require regularly finishing stories, cough.)
Questions #11-20