Fannish Things & Thoughts

[vanillalime]

Just an update on where my head is at these days.

1. Oz

Yeah, my love for this show isn’t going away any time soon. I envision myself participating in Oz Magi 2032, even if I have to fulfill my own wish. Heh.

The current Oz drabble tree reminded me that the very first Oz fic I wrote was for a drabble tree, back in February 2013. So this month is

Comments

[the_emu]

All my encouragement and advice is 100% selfish.

Both my potential stories beckon to me, but any time I sit down and poke at them, nothing happens. And the one I reeeeaaally like, 'cos it's just the coolest idea everrrrrr, would be as much work as Someone Like You.

Ah, yes, back in the day I was known for my economy of words, would you believe? For hanging back and letting the atmosphere and the silences do all the work... Stories that felt long but were only 4000 words...

I *mostly* write in order. I need some strong but not exact ideas of where the story is going. If I had a detailed outline, I'd never get through, and I can't just jump past a big chunk and get to the good stuff, because then I'll never come back. Both of those for the same reasons: partly because the story needs to be unfolding for me to be enjoying it, partly because what the characters do needs to be based on what happened to them yesterday - and for depth, it needs to be based on the details of what happened yesterday, which don't exist if you haven't written them. But sometimes there are scenes I'm seriously not in the mood for, or need more research, or I just can't figure out how to get the guys into a situation, and then I'll leave some notes of what has to happen and and come back to it.

I think if I were to write the important scenes first, I'd never be interested in the smaller scenes. But also, I don't think it's good to think of them as lesser. Inevitably there will be particularly major turning points that you're excited about, but every scene needs to be a turning point, really. They're not just cooking dinner: Toby is exploring Elliot's home for the first time just as he's starting to think of Elliot as not being Chris, and Elliot is pushing himself past his gay panic to flirt, and their relationship is changing shape to something more domestic, and Chris is rising as a set of assumptions in Elliot's mind to raise the tension for the readers who know that will be a disaster, and we dig in on Toby's drug-past that Elliot learned about last week... And all of those things need to come out of the previous scenes, and feed into the next few scenes. And yes, you can build in a lot of that in later drafts, but it's much easier if you're writing in order, y'know? Or at least have some pretty solid notes for the bits you're missing. If you think of it as filler between the big scenes, it will read that way.

I think that's where plenty of writers go wrong with sex scenes. They write them in because we all want the characters to have sex. But if the sex doesn't have all those threads running through it, tying it to what happened in the last few scenes and the next few, it feels like filler. And filler sex isn't nearly as sexy as Elliot's first intentional groping and his first time looking foward to some proper gay action and what it is about Elliot that made this domestic scene and Toby's behaviour here make him comfortable.

I would like to teach everyone to write exactly the sort of pornography that I want to read.

Anyway.

And sometimes there's a scrap of future dialogue that comes to me which is just what I want, or where I want the story to go, and I'll never turn that down, but it's never a whole scene. I'm very dialogue-driven, these days. Plenty of my drafts are just pages of dialogue with 'ADD BLOCKING' notes all over them.

[vanillalime]

All my encouragement and advice is 100% selfish.

Well, half my motivation behind Oz Daily was hoping other people would write fic based upon the pics I was posting, so yeah, I get it. :D

And the one I reeeeaaally like, 'cos it's just the coolest idea everrrrrr, would be as much work as Someone Like You.

Okay, now you're just torturing me. O_O

What you say about writing in order makes a lot of sense and helps confirm that that route is probably the better way to go. I guess it's worked for me so far, so I should stick with what I'm comfortable doing.

I'm very dialogue-driven, these days. Plenty of my drafts are just pages of dialogue with 'ADD BLOCKING' notes all over them.

I think one of the reasons why I underestimate my stories' lengths is that most of my fic tends to be heavy on dialogue and not particularly atmospheric. The scenario in my head might play out in a thousand words, but when I actually type it up as people talking to one another in a realistic manner, a lot more words are necessary. And writing out just the dialogue first sounds like a good idea, one that I should probably try! For every story I write, I have to go back and do word searches for variations of "slowly/quickly, turned/looked/smiled" because I overuse them, which I might not do if I'm adding them all in at once later.

I would like to teach everyone to write exactly the sort of pornography that I want to read.

I would happily take that class! Sign me up!

[the_emu]

I get around the excess of adverbs and repetitive small movements by making sure the characters are always doing something. Why do you think Toby did so much cooking? A kitchen is seven hundred different ways to paint a mood or avoid answering or slam a cupboard door that don't require the stock words.

Hm, I wonder if turning it into a class would get me more porn...