Writing
It is apparently a trend to write a post of how and why we are writing stories again... so, here I go.
I never was much of a writer of long things - I would write short stories and drabbles and fanfictions and poems, but whenever I tried a longer plot I invariably killed it. 10 years ago, when I was 16 or 17, I found what I thought was a story, an epic story. I spent years on the worldbuilding, the geography, the politics. I wrote scenes here and there but failed to connect them. The story grew and expanded, I gained a ton of insight into who the characters were and how they related and why. I decided to sit down and actually write it, I decided I was going to do Nano in the same year Charis was writing Celia, and I talked out the plot and wrote out an outline and I tried to write it - just write as many words as I could all at once and polish it later, and I stopped with 30k words because I had lost the story and what I did have was basically non-salvageable and horrible and somewhere in the process the part of my soul that writes died. I went through a period of depression and then I started getting involved in RPs and writing little fanfic drabbles but that was all - nothing that required the creativity to come entirely from me or needed sustained effort, and I didn't have to write them when it felt like work.
I went to Dragon*Con last year and we went to one of Elizabeth Moon's talks and as she was talking about her writing style (she just steers the boat, her subconscious fuels it and doesn't take kindly to her interfering directly) I realized that it's what my writing style is. For years I tried to follow writing advice that doesn't apply to me.
It was just recently, though, that I realized I was still missing the piece of my soul that is a writer and I wanted to get it back, which meant I had to start writing again. I was at first bewildered about how to do this - I haven't tried beginning a new story since before the Phoenix Story took hold of me and was at a loss as to where stories/characters/plots come from or how to find one. It took some thinking to realize that when I was younger I would write by hand, in notebooks. So, I got a notebook and I sat down and a story came out. After each scene I type it up & revise it as I type. It's been working, though I keep being distracted by life (health issues, the Olympics, what have you).
I've got roughly 6k words written and I know, very vaguely, what happens in the next scene and vaguely what the shape of the story is (it's a Tam Lin retelling, which was Not Obvious to me when I started though Charis & Jenn saw it right away), though the precise plot is entirely out of my conscious grasp, and it's exciting.
So, anyway, this is MY "writing again" post.
I never was much of a writer of long things - I would write short stories and drabbles and fanfictions and poems, but whenever I tried a longer plot I invariably killed it. 10 years ago, when I was 16 or 17, I found what I thought was a story, an epic story. I spent years on the worldbuilding, the geography, the politics. I wrote scenes here and there but failed to connect them. The story grew and expanded, I gained a ton of insight into who the characters were and how they related and why. I decided to sit down and actually write it, I decided I was going to do Nano in the same year Charis was writing Celia, and I talked out the plot and wrote out an outline and I tried to write it - just write as many words as I could all at once and polish it later, and I stopped with 30k words because I had lost the story and what I did have was basically non-salvageable and horrible and somewhere in the process the part of my soul that writes died. I went through a period of depression and then I started getting involved in RPs and writing little fanfic drabbles but that was all - nothing that required the creativity to come entirely from me or needed sustained effort, and I didn't have to write them when it felt like work.
I went to Dragon*Con last year and we went to one of Elizabeth Moon's talks and as she was talking about her writing style (she just steers the boat, her subconscious fuels it and doesn't take kindly to her interfering directly) I realized that it's what my writing style is. For years I tried to follow writing advice that doesn't apply to me.
It was just recently, though, that I realized I was still missing the piece of my soul that is a writer and I wanted to get it back, which meant I had to start writing again. I was at first bewildered about how to do this - I haven't tried beginning a new story since before the Phoenix Story took hold of me and was at a loss as to where stories/characters/plots come from or how to find one. It took some thinking to realize that when I was younger I would write by hand, in notebooks. So, I got a notebook and I sat down and a story came out. After each scene I type it up & revise it as I type. It's been working, though I keep being distracted by life (health issues, the Olympics, what have you).
I've got roughly 6k words written and I know, very vaguely, what happens in the next scene and vaguely what the shape of the story is (it's a Tam Lin retelling, which was Not Obvious to me when I started though Charis & Jenn saw it right away), though the precise plot is entirely out of my conscious grasp, and it's exciting.
So, anyway, this is MY "writing again" post.