the writing questions meme

[dragonlady7]

Seen in about three or four places in rapid succession on my friends-list. :) (I hope someone actually asks me or I'll feel even more a twit than I already do. *blushes*)

Ask me one question - any one - about my writing, then post this in your LJ so I can satisfy my curiosity about yours...


In other news, had not realized kkatowll was quite such an LotR fan (but not fanfic fan, too bad)-- I mean, I've only known her what, twelve years? Pff-- and have just had a very stimulating 2-hour argument about whether Éomer knew that Théodred had been killed at the Fords of Isen before he departed on his midnight ride to the borders of Fangorn to kill Ugluk's band and (indirectly) rescue Merry and Pippin.

(Tolkien explicitly does not specify. I swear to you. I've looked it up. All over. He SAYS that he doesn't say. But, I won't get into it. It is possible he knew; it is also plausible he didn't. I'm not saying, here, which I believe.)

Ahhh.... dorks. Dorks are the best.

Comments

[gyen-gaoltosing.livejournal.com]

Ask me one question - any one - about my writing, then post this in your LJ so I can satisfy my curiosity about yours...

What made you want to write a story set in 922 A.D. Wales? Was there something specific that set your imagination in motion, or did you eventually settle there over time?

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I've got Irish and Norwegian relatives, so it's an area that's always been of some interest. I also have an iron-clad kink for pre-Renaissance history, the earlier the better. (For Bronze Age it borders on a fetish. Mm, ungh, someday I'm going to write Bronze Age Britain.)

But what really set me off was reading a lovely little mystery by Ellis Peters called The Summer of the Danes. She does the Brother Cadfael mysteries, set in 1100s Shrewsbury (on the Welsh border). This one featured a political brouhaha in Wales wherein a deposed nobleman came back with a Dublin Norse mercenary band to cause trouble. And I thought... Dublin Norse? Wait a minute, and looked it up. Oh yes. By that era they were under Irish domination, but retained their own cultural identity.

The book repeatedly mentioned how much contact there had been over the years between the Welsh and the nearby Irish Vikings, and I got thinking about it, and once I found out all the crazy shit that went down in the early 10th C., I had my story.

Because the other novel I'd been working on for eight or nine months by then was hundreds of thousands of words long and the plot still wasn't defined enough and I was simply pouring words into a giant gap, and I knew if I just kept going I'd never finish. None of my novels were finish-able. I thought, if I do research, I can confine this one to just a few drafts. So i admit, i was being timid.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

Eh, it's only been 10 years. I'll give you another two before you must know everything about me. :)

A question about your writing. How do you find the (time/energy/discipline/whatever) to sit down and write even when the story seems to you to be boring and dull?

Alternatively, here's a funny question: do you remember the long fiction class? What's your favorite memory of that? Mine is trying to cross the creek and falling in. Hee hee. :)

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

#1: I write what I want to read. It sounds vain to say that I just like to read my stories, but it's not that I think I'm such a great writer and want to bask in my own genius, it's just that I write stories because I want to know how they end and want to know how they go all along. There is nothing more frustrating for me than reading something I wrote a while ago, getting really into it, and then stopping short because it ends. ARGH.
So even if the story is growing boring and dull by anyone else's standards, I still want to know what happens. If I've already sketched it out then it's less compelling, the desire to write it, but it's still there because I'm such a rotten outliner that I know there's got to be a lot more to it.
My complaints that a story is growing boring and dull are a recent realization, now that I write for an audience as well. When I started writing I never let anyone read what I wrote, and I was just getting out of that mindset when you knew me in Long Fiction. I still didn't really write for other people: it was private.
Now I have found the joys of having some sort of audience and I'm totally addicted. Which means I have begun to notice when something I'm writing is appealing only to me. And then it appeals much less strongly to me, when i realize I'm going on about something that others won't enjoy. And when i don't know how to bring it back so that it's an enjoyable tale on its own merits rather than being a happy excuse for me to roll around in fantasy and spend time with these characters I like... Well, then it's really hard to write. And it tends to be put aside in favor of something easier that behaves itself better.

#2: Man, I hardly remember Long Fiction. i remember being so amused by you trying to cross the creek, but also being rather embarrassed that you were trying in the first place (i was like that, at that age). I also remember some of the God-awful crap I read out loud. (Wince.) But at least I wasn't writing yet another coming of age lesbian novel, so I was at least in there for variety.
I also remember Mrs. Carroll couldn't pronounce my character's names no matter how often I explained. I wrote the mispronounciation into another character's mouth, later, and it proved a good detail. Write what you know, I guess.

I don't have any really vivid memories of that class, though. A lot of my memories of Emma are really hazy. I sometimes think something's wrong with my memory...

[tehta.livejournal.com]

I don't think there is anything conceited about writing for oneself! Where else are we going to find the stories we really want to read? I also think that things that appeal to the writer will, once polished, appeal to others.

Anyway, I am intrigued by the fact that you don't know how your stories will end. I always know where mine are going--I write them down more to capture a certain mood. And to get down dialogue that amuses me for future enjoyment.

The question I really want to ask is how you manage to write so much so quickly, but I expect this has no good answer. How about "What is the aspect type of writing that scares you most?"

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

How I manage to write so much so quickly actually has a couple of answers.
1) I started my first novel in 1991 so I've had a lot of practice at getting stuff down on paper; it does get easier with practice, and by practice I mean I counted over a million words of fiction last year. (I was unemployed last year, for pretty much the whole thing, so, that's a lot of time to spend writing a lot.)
2) I can type 84 wpm at 99% accuracy (that is also huge; so many writers are held back by slow typing speeds and it makes me want to type it for them so they can, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, finish... the... STORY! [doesn't work as well without the visual of johnny depp with pinprick pupils and an American flag on his head shrieking at Dr. Gonzo])
3) I have always done assignments at the last possible minute and so have become practiced at skating by on the first draft, which means getting it down right the first time or not at all (which has been terrible for my editing)
4) My job provides a lot of social stimulation and requires no staring at a computer so I come home stimulated and computer-hungry. (Cubicle, writing all day: killed productivity.)

I'm not quite sure what you meant by the other question, but I'll go with 'aspect'...

What is the aspect of writing that scares me most?

Hmm...
Commitment, perhaps. I am made very nervous by committing to a plotline, committing to a deadline, committing to a characterization. It's all, organic and freeflowing and hippie shit like that, and nailing it down as one must is very nerve-wracking.

I am also terrified of having it read by a not-necessarily sympathetic audience. My mom's expressed some interest in the Novel, but... there's smut in there. What do I do? Write a draft just for her without the smut? Oh Lord, that one's been giving me continual butterflies since mid-November when she asked what I was up to and I, the fool, told her. Y'all understand about the writing and about the smut. My mom, not so much. And the rest of the world? Oh lord, the rest of the world.

And to go on at length about myself, I will also admit that I am terrified to discover that despite writing being my One Talent Above All Else, I may well not actually be... a genius at it. I may just be... competent. It's a terrifying prospect, to lose one's cherished illusions. Fortunately, there aren't many objective standards to be graded by, so i can still cling to my belief that I'm Special. :D (Subbing to publishers: means death of illusion. But the draft isn't complete yet, so... Not yet.)

[tehta.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I meant 'aspect.' Don't know what happened.

Yes, the whole genius vs competence (vs incompetence) thing is scary. Fortunately, in my case the lack of genius is all too apparent. For example in my writing habits:

I type slowly (weird four finger touch-typing), but I never feel like this is what's holding me back when I write: I still have to pause every sentence or clause to make sure I know how it fits into my Grand Plan, go look in my thesaurus to see if another word might fit better, close my eyes and commune with my POV char... When I write quickly (well, quickly for me: I can get down maybe 2000 words in an hour) what comes out is so crappy and redundant and cliche-ridden I need to rewrite it from scratch anyway. I am really astonished by the idea that some people might compose fiction at typing speed. Wow. That's a real talent.

I tell myself that, as long as I like the finished product, it's okay to have to work harder than other people, but it's still dispiriting.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Additional research I did provides a couple of things that your analysis there doesn't seem to cover:

1) A rider reached Edoras late afternoon on the 27th with the news of Theodred's death and the imminent invasion of the Westfold.
2) Eomer was not at Edoras. Eomer was "in the Eastfold", presumably at his father's base of Aldburg, which is not on any of Tolkien's maps. It was at least 6 hours' ride from Edoras, by all possible best guesses. (6 hours nonstop on a fast horse.)
3) Eomer departed at midnight on the 27th from his unspecified location.

Kat's argument was that he left at such a strange hour because he'd heard about Theodred and 'went off half-cocked'.

All Tolkien says is that he got the news of the Orc incursion around that time-- implying that he left immediately because he thought the danger so grave from these Mordor Orcs. (but that implication may be influenced by my own beliefs about the character.)

This, by the way, is an awesome resource: Travel Routes and Times in Arda (http://www.theoriginalseries.com/traveltimes.htm), compiled by a customs analyst, an endurance horseback rider, and another horsewoman.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I am not sure if LoTR specifies. When I did all my research to settle the argument sometime last year (someone dismissed a story I'd written as an "unworkable alternate universe" because how could Eomer not have known since two days had passed, which prompted me to speculate (http://www.bridget.kelly.name/fanficepic/AU.html) on how news would have travelled instantaneously in Middle-earth) I used both the LoTR books (I have them bound in one volume, so...), and the used paperback copy of Unfinished Tales I found on a bookseller's table by Washington Square Park in Manhattan. And I'm a terrible researcher, so I'm not sure what information comes from where. Some of my info, you may not have access to. So I'm not correcting you per se, I'm adding to what knowledge you have. I'm just not sure about citing my sources, which is shameful given that I have pretensions to being an academic.