(3/4)…is there another another sort of
Jun. 16th, 2016 01:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1YtZNUz:
I’m just gonna pick this one to respond to, sorry I left this hanging so long.
#1 I’m super jealous sometimes of the oneshot writers. I really am. or the ones that can do loosely-connected shorts. That is such an art form. I manage them occasionally but it’s inevitably buried in the midst of 100k words of backstory. But ugh. To be Cool, and on like every rec list, that would be so neat. These breezy and sweet, slick, tautly-written oneshots of manageable size. I devour them and ruminate over them in bitter jealousy. Poetic language and glossy-sweet porn and all. I love that the fandoms I’m in lend themselves so well to the artform. I can’t do them. I try. And then suddenly, PLOT. I actually feel sort of bad because the artist who inspired Home Out In The Wind thought she was getting herself into something like that, and instead I vomited a 75k first installment of an epic all over her poor self. (For some reason I can’t tag her from the ask-answer window so uh. Maybe I’ll manage to edit to fix that.)
more on writing process and other points brought up in this excellent series of asks: (I am sitting at my computer for the first time in several days, so, that’s why the explosion here)
#2 continuity and plotting errors in mega-fics: Ugh. Home out in the Wind was actually an experiment in having beta-readers at all, and the answer is, in the pros column, it is awesome and people notice the glaring problems that make your story convey the opposite message from what you intended, which is amazingly useful, and in the cons column, it requires me to be pretty organized up-front and have, y’know, several weeks of lead time between finishing and posting, and also! also. I am kind of a fragile piece of shit who is unfairly unreceptive to criticism, and so it is extremely hard for me to absorb some things– and I can’t predict what ahead of time, so it’s perfectly likely that I will decide that I Must Die On The Hill Of This Comma, which is kind of rude to my poor betas who didn’t sign up for psychological drama. (I think I’ve controlled myself pretty well, but I am riddled with insecurities about such things.)
So at the moment I’m flying free and beta-less again; darling s-leary (again it won’t let me tag, alas) was good enough to cast a discerning eye over Can’t Go Home but I’ve since expanded the story by… I don’t know how much. Probably close to 30%, maybe more. My natural way of working is very seat-of-pants. Which means I sort of can’t really have a beta, which makes me sad, because writing can be very, very lonely. I throw ideas back and forth with people sometimes and I love that, but I’m just– sort of not very good at communicating, it turns out. Sometimes I get jealous of the people who can collaborate on stories, it seems to me like that would be so rewarding, but at this point I have no idea whether I could even successfully do it, or if I would either ghost on the project and leave a collab hanging, or take over and control-freak it and be all five years old about Getting My Way.
It’s sort of… a quantum state, and I’d rather leave it uncollapsed in my head than learn these uncomfortable truths about myself, maybe.
#3 The satisfying nature of Mega Epics, though– well, I pretty transparently write to escape reality, wherein I am a sort of awkward lumpy human-ish object that isn’t very good at many things and doesn’t fit in well to anything. The more immersive the writing is, the more thorough the escape. But it’s not even deliberate like that– I don’t even mean to do what I do, mostly. Once in a very great while, I will find myself at loose ends, and I will sit and think about a project, and I will cast about a little– should I have an action plot? should I try to make these two characters (or more) kiss? Should there be dragons? – but once I’ve done the basic framework idea of it, it takes off and I usually don’t mean for it to be such a big thing at all.
Can’t Go Home is kind of bloating like that, but I had left room for it. Finn’s story had been very glossed-over, just sort of shoehorned in as mentions of greater things, the idea being to break up the main Poe and Rey storyline for pacing purposes, and make him stand in for the Resistance being up to all kinds of things in the meantime because they had to be for the main plot to work. But I didn’t explain Teeny at all, she just kind of appeared and was there and not mentioned; there was no Bolt, there was no conspiracy, I just sort of hand-waved that there were defectors from the First Order and I didn’t address why. And I felt like that was enough and the story was coherent! Looking back, I can’t imagine how I did– but looking forward, well, I just don’t know how I’m going to tie it all in. (And yes. There’s a terribly-written, for-my-eyes-only, really crappy side-story that’s about 10k long and is all Hux’s POV on these defectors, and I literally only wrote it because I couldn’t just outline what it was about, because I am absolutely fucking pathetic at outlining. Kylo’s in it too, and it’s kind of hilarious, and I doubt I’ll polish it, but it exists, because the first draft just had them being Pointlessly Evil and that makes for a very, very flimsy plot. [“aha! 34, scary, shows up and cackles at things, and Finn bravely shoots at him and they narrowly escape!” “But why was 34, scary there at all? What could he possibly gain from being shot at?” “uh. Well um. I mean. He’s scary, isn’t he? And 34. That’s what we know. Doesn’t he die offscreen?” “… Yes but why.” “Because he’s eeeeevil!” “… and likes getting shot at?” “I don’t know, evil people are into all kinds of sick shit!” “I don’t know, man. That’s kind of… not a plot.” “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” “bro, this is a dialogue with yourself, don’t be an idiot.” Do I call myself bro in my inner monologue? Sometimes, is the answer.] And as I said, I doubt I’ll even be able to make it publishable, but for the curious, yes, it does incorporate The Spectrum Of Bad Ideas into Home-verse canon.)
#4 Fandom on Tumblr IS sort of distant and weird, and there are a lot of things where it’s just– impossible to respond? You really have no option but to lurk? Replies coming back has helped enormously, though– I’m using the site far, far far more than I ever did before, and I have more of a relationship with more people, in that I can tell their usernames apart now and remember who I spoke to before a little better!
I’m just gonna pick this one to respond to, sorry I left this hanging so long.
#1 I’m super jealous sometimes of the oneshot writers. I really am. or the ones that can do loosely-connected shorts. That is such an art form. I manage them occasionally but it’s inevitably buried in the midst of 100k words of backstory. But ugh. To be Cool, and on like every rec list, that would be so neat. These breezy and sweet, slick, tautly-written oneshots of manageable size. I devour them and ruminate over them in bitter jealousy. Poetic language and glossy-sweet porn and all. I love that the fandoms I’m in lend themselves so well to the artform. I can’t do them. I try. And then suddenly, PLOT. I actually feel sort of bad because the artist who inspired Home Out In The Wind thought she was getting herself into something like that, and instead I vomited a 75k first installment of an epic all over her poor self. (For some reason I can’t tag her from the ask-answer window so uh. Maybe I’ll manage to edit to fix that.)
more on writing process and other points brought up in this excellent series of asks: (I am sitting at my computer for the first time in several days, so, that’s why the explosion here)
#2 continuity and plotting errors in mega-fics: Ugh. Home out in the Wind was actually an experiment in having beta-readers at all, and the answer is, in the pros column, it is awesome and people notice the glaring problems that make your story convey the opposite message from what you intended, which is amazingly useful, and in the cons column, it requires me to be pretty organized up-front and have, y’know, several weeks of lead time between finishing and posting, and also! also. I am kind of a fragile piece of shit who is unfairly unreceptive to criticism, and so it is extremely hard for me to absorb some things– and I can’t predict what ahead of time, so it’s perfectly likely that I will decide that I Must Die On The Hill Of This Comma, which is kind of rude to my poor betas who didn’t sign up for psychological drama. (I think I’ve controlled myself pretty well, but I am riddled with insecurities about such things.)
So at the moment I’m flying free and beta-less again; darling s-leary (again it won’t let me tag, alas) was good enough to cast a discerning eye over Can’t Go Home but I’ve since expanded the story by… I don’t know how much. Probably close to 30%, maybe more. My natural way of working is very seat-of-pants. Which means I sort of can’t really have a beta, which makes me sad, because writing can be very, very lonely. I throw ideas back and forth with people sometimes and I love that, but I’m just– sort of not very good at communicating, it turns out. Sometimes I get jealous of the people who can collaborate on stories, it seems to me like that would be so rewarding, but at this point I have no idea whether I could even successfully do it, or if I would either ghost on the project and leave a collab hanging, or take over and control-freak it and be all five years old about Getting My Way.
It’s sort of… a quantum state, and I’d rather leave it uncollapsed in my head than learn these uncomfortable truths about myself, maybe.
#3 The satisfying nature of Mega Epics, though– well, I pretty transparently write to escape reality, wherein I am a sort of awkward lumpy human-ish object that isn’t very good at many things and doesn’t fit in well to anything. The more immersive the writing is, the more thorough the escape. But it’s not even deliberate like that– I don’t even mean to do what I do, mostly. Once in a very great while, I will find myself at loose ends, and I will sit and think about a project, and I will cast about a little– should I have an action plot? should I try to make these two characters (or more) kiss? Should there be dragons? – but once I’ve done the basic framework idea of it, it takes off and I usually don’t mean for it to be such a big thing at all.
Can’t Go Home is kind of bloating like that, but I had left room for it. Finn’s story had been very glossed-over, just sort of shoehorned in as mentions of greater things, the idea being to break up the main Poe and Rey storyline for pacing purposes, and make him stand in for the Resistance being up to all kinds of things in the meantime because they had to be for the main plot to work. But I didn’t explain Teeny at all, she just kind of appeared and was there and not mentioned; there was no Bolt, there was no conspiracy, I just sort of hand-waved that there were defectors from the First Order and I didn’t address why. And I felt like that was enough and the story was coherent! Looking back, I can’t imagine how I did– but looking forward, well, I just don’t know how I’m going to tie it all in. (And yes. There’s a terribly-written, for-my-eyes-only, really crappy side-story that’s about 10k long and is all Hux’s POV on these defectors, and I literally only wrote it because I couldn’t just outline what it was about, because I am absolutely fucking pathetic at outlining. Kylo’s in it too, and it’s kind of hilarious, and I doubt I’ll polish it, but it exists, because the first draft just had them being Pointlessly Evil and that makes for a very, very flimsy plot. [“aha! 34, scary, shows up and cackles at things, and Finn bravely shoots at him and they narrowly escape!” “But why was 34, scary there at all? What could he possibly gain from being shot at?” “uh. Well um. I mean. He’s scary, isn’t he? And 34. That’s what we know. Doesn’t he die offscreen?” “… Yes but why.” “Because he’s eeeeevil!” “… and likes getting shot at?” “I don’t know, evil people are into all kinds of sick shit!” “I don’t know, man. That’s kind of… not a plot.” “DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” “bro, this is a dialogue with yourself, don’t be an idiot.” Do I call myself bro in my inner monologue? Sometimes, is the answer.] And as I said, I doubt I’ll even be able to make it publishable, but for the curious, yes, it does incorporate The Spectrum Of Bad Ideas into Home-verse canon.)
#4 Fandom on Tumblr IS sort of distant and weird, and there are a lot of things where it’s just– impossible to respond? You really have no option but to lurk? Replies coming back has helped enormously, though– I’m using the site far, far far more than I ever did before, and I have more of a relationship with more people, in that I can tell their usernames apart now and remember who I spoke to before a little better!
