Talking Meme: Writing Process!
Crooked_Halo asked me about my writing process!
I don't tend to write on the spur of the moment, which is sometimes a problem--that is, I don't tend to think, "Oh, that would be a great story" and immediately sit down and write it while my emotion is high. I have a file of story ideas and they can sit there for literal years before I get to them (I think I planned and researched this wrestling AU for two or three years before I even started writing it). That means that sometimes the inspiration and emotion can drain out of an idea if I'm not careful, or canon can move so far past the idea that it doesn't make sense anymore (I had a story planned where Clark was the avatar of the Flamebird entity and Bruce the avatar of the Nightwing entity, but the reboot happened and the concept of Nightwing and Flamebird as Kryptonian gods with human avatars disappeared and it just became too much hassle to do the info dumping in the story to make up for that). On the plus side, it means I tend to write stories that I'm committed to on an intellectual level in addition to an emotional level, which I hope leads to stronger stories.
Usually once I decide what I'm going to write next I sit down and talk it over with my husband to see what he thinks might work and where it might go. He's really the "plot-maker" and if a story has a lot of plot you can be pretty certain he had a hand in it. This is the stage I'm at right now about a story I want to write with Bruce asking Clark to help out training a superpowered Damian--it's a great idea, but it has to be more than a few scenes, there have to be changes in the Clark/Bruce relationship brought about by the situation, and I'm not sure what those will be yet.
Once I've got the plot hammered out in tandem with my husband, I sit down and write it--my favorite part, but it's pretty mundane. I'm a very linear writer, so I just plod ahead doggedly until I reach the end. At some point, I generally have a crisis where I can't think of a good title and I threaten to junk the whole story because I hate having boring titles. Both of my long series right now have basically I-can't-think-of-anything-else-ah-screw-it titles, alas.
Once I'm done, my husband gives it a beta look, fixing (I hope!) any spelling/grammar errors, finding places where the action isn't clear, most recently pissing me off by informing me that Sindarin lacks the proper phonemes to make a convincing word that sounds like "cheetah." ("FINE OKAY I'LL MAKE IT A DWARVISH WORD ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?")
For posting...lately I've been posting almost as I'm done, which just reveals that time has been tight for me recently. There've been times in the past when I had a backlog of six or seven chapters waiting to be posted.... *sighs* I try very hard not to let more than twenty days go by without an update in my series, and so far I have never failed at that, but it's been a scramble the last six months or so! I've never written two long series simultaneously, and I underestimated how much of an energy drain it would be to keep both of them going at a reasonable pace. They've each got another twenty chapters or more to go, though, so there's no respite in sight anytime soon. Fortunately, I love them both and they're really different so they give me a lot of variety in writing, but I miss having time to write one-shots!
I don't tend to write on the spur of the moment, which is sometimes a problem--that is, I don't tend to think, "Oh, that would be a great story" and immediately sit down and write it while my emotion is high. I have a file of story ideas and they can sit there for literal years before I get to them (I think I planned and researched this wrestling AU for two or three years before I even started writing it). That means that sometimes the inspiration and emotion can drain out of an idea if I'm not careful, or canon can move so far past the idea that it doesn't make sense anymore (I had a story planned where Clark was the avatar of the Flamebird entity and Bruce the avatar of the Nightwing entity, but the reboot happened and the concept of Nightwing and Flamebird as Kryptonian gods with human avatars disappeared and it just became too much hassle to do the info dumping in the story to make up for that). On the plus side, it means I tend to write stories that I'm committed to on an intellectual level in addition to an emotional level, which I hope leads to stronger stories.
Usually once I decide what I'm going to write next I sit down and talk it over with my husband to see what he thinks might work and where it might go. He's really the "plot-maker" and if a story has a lot of plot you can be pretty certain he had a hand in it. This is the stage I'm at right now about a story I want to write with Bruce asking Clark to help out training a superpowered Damian--it's a great idea, but it has to be more than a few scenes, there have to be changes in the Clark/Bruce relationship brought about by the situation, and I'm not sure what those will be yet.
Once I've got the plot hammered out in tandem with my husband, I sit down and write it--my favorite part, but it's pretty mundane. I'm a very linear writer, so I just plod ahead doggedly until I reach the end. At some point, I generally have a crisis where I can't think of a good title and I threaten to junk the whole story because I hate having boring titles. Both of my long series right now have basically I-can't-think-of-anything-else-ah-screw-it titles, alas.
Once I'm done, my husband gives it a beta look, fixing (I hope!) any spelling/grammar errors, finding places where the action isn't clear, most recently pissing me off by informing me that Sindarin lacks the proper phonemes to make a convincing word that sounds like "cheetah." ("FINE OKAY I'LL MAKE IT A DWARVISH WORD ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?")
For posting...lately I've been posting almost as I'm done, which just reveals that time has been tight for me recently. There've been times in the past when I had a backlog of six or seven chapters waiting to be posted.... *sighs* I try very hard not to let more than twenty days go by without an update in my series, and so far I have never failed at that, but it's been a scramble the last six months or so! I've never written two long series simultaneously, and I underestimated how much of an energy drain it would be to keep both of them going at a reasonable pace. They've each got another twenty chapters or more to go, though, so there's no respite in sight anytime soon. Fortunately, I love them both and they're really different so they give me a lot of variety in writing, but I miss having time to write one-shots!