The writers' survey
Aug. 28th, 2002 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resonantFrom ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flambeau. I don't know if this is going to be at all interesting to read, but it was incredibly interesting to write.
Do ideas come in little tiny pinpricks and then get expanded, or do they start great big and scopy and then get refined?
Pinpricks -- nearly always verbal ones. I usually get a word or a phrase (often the title or the first line), and when I tug on it, I discover that it's pulling lots of things in after it.
Why do you choose to write in the tenses you do (present tense, or first person POV, or third person) and how do you choose particular styles for particular stories?
Usually if a story seems to be telling itself to me in a particular tense, I'll roll with it unless I have a good reason to do otherwise -- but almost all of my stories come to me in past tense.
I used present tense as an organizational device in "Adorned" (present-day scenes in present tense, flashback scenes in past tense), and I'm still of two minds about how well that worked. And "Left" and "Juncture" both came to me in present tense, which I think worked pretty well, probably because both of them take place entirely during the last few minutes of a single sex act.
Unlike tense, point of view is something I experiment with quite often. It's not uncommon for me to begin a story in one point of view and then have to rewrite it in another. Usually it comes down to figuring out which character needs to be ignorant at any given moment, and writing that section in his point of view.
I default to third person. Nearly all my first-person stories have been written as self-challenges -- just to see if I could. (The best example of that is "A Fine and Private Place," where I wanted to see if it was possible to write detailed, explicit sex in Fraser first-person without resorting to either labored euphemisms, out-of-character slang, or an unpleasantly clinical tone.)
A first-person story that was not written as a challenge was "Loving North," which was so very Ray-interior (and required so very much ignorance on Ray's part) that it pretty much demanded to be written in first.
Do you have music that inspires your writing? (That you listen to while writing, or certain songs that remind you of certain characters.)
I don't listen to music when I'm writing if I can avoid it. I'm very ear-oriented, and sound is incredibly distracting to me.
While I'm working a story out in my brain, though, I'll sometimes choose some story-specific music to listen to in the car just to keep my head in the right place. I worked on "The Teeth of the Hydra" for six months, and during that period, I listened only to period music -- Squeeze, Pete Townshend, the English Beat, Gang of Four, early Elvis Costello, etc. I really like most of that music (though I never warmed up to David Bowie and most of the Ramones), but I was happy when the story was finished and I could get some variety into my musical life.
Right now I'm immersed in Oysterband, trying to hatch a song story forgiglet.
How do you brainstorm what comes next in a story?
Relationship stories sometimes require brainstorming in chat to generate ideas, but usually once I start writing, each occurrence has a sort of a string hanging from it, and when I pull the string, the next occurrence is attached to it.
Plot stories often require more help than that. Again I usually turn to people I meet in chat, often with a specific problem: "So I need a crime, and I need it to be tattoo-related, and I need it to be icky but non-fatal, and ... help!"
What do you do when you hit a road block?
Usually several nights' worth of chat brainstorming do the trick. There's a reason I hang out with smart people.
Or I do research on some fairly small point in the story, not because it's important for that small part to be exactly right, but because the research often turns up something that strikes sparks off something else, and then I can get revved up again.
If a song inspired the story, sometimes I'll take details out of the song, or out of another song by the same artist or from the same time period. The scene in "Hydra" where Stella is taking bubble baths and walking around in her underpants came right out of Squeeze's "Now Is That Love." ("You won't get dressed, you walk about ... the teasing glances push me out...") And that wasn't just a fleshing-out detail, either; it generated "She wouldn't give him anything, but she loved for him to take it," which is a pretty critical explanation of their marriage and divorce.
How often do you end up deleting a whole bunch of already-written stuff, and how hard is it to let that stuff go?
I write all my first drafts in longhand, and a big part of the progression to second-draft status is the part where I look at four pages of handwritten stuff and say, "I'm not typing all that" and start crossing out lines. I'd say I probably delete almost half of every first draft. ("Hydra" is, what, 140K in the final version? I threw away enough to make a novella.)
Sex scenes are even worse -- if I delete half of the non-sex that I write, I delete about three-quarters of the sex. I tend to write in button-by-button detail, and often I don't know what's at stake in the sex scene until the entire story is finished. Then at that point I can go back and delete everything that doesn't pull you through toward where I want you to go.
I'm also prone to write things that I think are part of the story, but that turn out later to be just me noodling around trying to get a feel for the characters and the situation.
What if you really, really want to include something but part of you is saying it's not right for that particular story?
I might try it in a different point of view, or at a different place in the narrative. But most of the time I just toss it. Or save it on the outside chance that it might grow up to be a different story. I have a folder full of outtakes, but I don't think I've ever actually done anything with any of them.
Do you take notes longhand, and if so, when?
Gratuitous lifestyle detail: I have a fulltime job and a preschooler. So I don't have a lot of time to concentrate. The spouse and I have firmly established "parenting days off" -- he gets Sunday afternoons, I get Saturday mornings.
So on Saturday morning I usually sneak out of the house before anyone else is awake, and I go and sit in a cushy chair in the mystery section of Barnes & Noble and write my stories in a little spiral notebook with a mechanical pencil.
I do have a laptop now, but I find that I can only use it at a certain stage in the process; if I try to get into the computer too early, it blocks me. I write the first draft in longhand, type it, then go to the computer at the stage where I'm filling in holes, rearranging the order of things, and polishing the language.
Do you use challenges by other people to inspire you?
Not often; I think "Juncture" is the only story I've ever written specifically in response to a challenge. I do get ideas from conversations with people, though.
Do you do anything in particular to get you into the right mindset to write a certain character or characters?
Watch eps, sometimes. Look at pictures. Discuss the character with others.
Which characters are easiest for you to write, and WHY?
I find it very easy to write Ray Kowalski. I have no idea why. He's very different from me.
I'm finding Hermione Granger so easy to write that the hardest thing is preventing her from taking over my story (in which she plays only a minor role).
Which ones are hardest, and again, WHY?
Benton Fraser, in spite of being superficially similar to me, is really hard to get inside. He clearly has an interior life -- I mean, it's not like trying to write Draco Malfoy, which is basically a matter of creating an original character -- but I find it very hard to access his motives sometimes. Part of the difficulty is that he himself seems to be either ignorant of or suspicious of his emotional drives most of the time.
Which characters are most like you emotionally?
I'm like the quiet, repressed, introverted ones -- Fraser, Jim Ellison -- except that they're heroes and I'm a lazy slob.
How often do you feel like what you're writing is fulfilling some emotional need - ie, when you're writing comfort, is it because you often feel that you don't get it IRL?
This doesn't work for me at all. If I don't have access to an emotion in real life, I don't have access to it in writing, either.
I have been known to mentally block out a sex scene to get myself in the mood for the real thing, though.
What about writing smut - do you find it easy, difficult?
Very, very easy. So easy that it takes discipline to prevent myself from writing it first and then losing interest in the rest of the story. (Wham, bam, post it, ma'am.)
What kinds of smut are easiest for you to write, and WHY?
I don't do well with fade to black, even where the story needs it. There's a scene at the end of "American Way" that ends in mid-stroke with Ray saying, "It was you I wanted all along --" and it was incredibly difficult to make myself stop there, instead of going on to the last sigh. (I said toliviapenn, "You don't think it's a problem that I stop in the middle?" and she said, "It's not like there's no other sex in the story, Res.")
Also, I've noticed, in reading smut, that most writers default to a certain pitch of excitement. (Compare an Aristide story, where the level of arousal and connection is so high that it almost reads as terror, to a Speranza story, where there's room for more playfulness and awkwardness.)
I don't know how to describe my own position on the intense-o-meter, but I know it's very difficult to write either above that or below it. That's a problem in stories with more than one sex scene, because obviously you want something to be developing, which means that they can't be at the very peak of excitement first time out.
Which of your stories is your favorite and WHY? Least favorite?
"Broadway Hotel." No question. Best thing I've ever written.
Most of my Sentinel stories are very obviously apprentice work, and I detest "Light."
"Too Sweet" is deeply flawed --wax_jism did an on-list review of it that made me want to rend my garments that she wasn't one of the people who read it before it was published -- but I've tried to fix it and I can't seem to do it. There's also a problem with "Amends," the way it starts out so dark and flips over to light in about one paragraph -- I can't seem to sustain any mood but cheerful.
Which of your titles do you like the most/least, and why?
"Light" is boring, "Midnight Oil" is kind of cutesy, and "Too Sweet" reads like one of those pre-emptive apologies ("Don't say I didn't warn you!"), but other than that I like them all.
I never did come up with a decent title for my Shanghai Noon story, but then again, I never posted the story, so what the hell.
How do you choose titles for your stories?
The title is almost always part of that initial FedEx from the Muse -- in fact, a lot of the time it's the only thing in the box.
"Transfigurations," the HP in progress, started out as "Erised" (which even at the time was doomed to be a fandom cliche) and then gradually outgrew its working title.
I think the working title of "Left" was "Warm," which is way too obvious.
Do you write differently with a cowriter than you do alone? Is it easier or harder?
The only story I've co-written was "Nuance," and that was also the first plotty story I ever wrote, so it's hard to distinguish one from the other. It was pretty easy, but it took a long time, and I was constantly surprised at how we never encountered a problem that could be fixed by making the story shorter. But that's generally been true of my longer plotty solo stories.
Do you write original fic differently from fanfic (if you write it at all)?
I'm just starting work on my first-ever original story. So I have no idea.
When I write original characters, I find it difficult to work with someone whose voice I haven't heard. So often I'll arbitrarily choose the voice of someone I know, or of another TV or movie character, just so that I can hear the character talk in my head. (Amanda Jackson in "Hydra" has the voice of my college roommate, and Bev Constantine has the voice of my favorite cousin.)
For series and long works, do you decide a goal in advance to stop at or are they open ended? If you do choose a goal, how often do you stick to it?
Except with PWPs, I rarely know at the outset whether a story is going to be short or long.
Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to decide where I'm going, so I'll be able to tell when I get there, because even in a plotty story I often succeed in getting the characters into bed and then feel like, "Yup, OK, I'm done now." I don't like that sex-solves-everything thing when other people do it, and I don't like it when I do it, but sometimes it's difficult not to.
How do you deal with character plinkage?
If the plot wants to go one way and the characters want to go another way, I follow the characters. Occasionally they lead me on a long detour which later has to be deleted, but if I try to push them in a direction they don't want to go, it never works.
When a scene feels forced, what are the first few tricks you try to fix it?
I close my eyes and listen. And then I write down whatever the characters say, whether it seems relevant or not.
Or else I go to Ces orjulad (who are the best first-draft brainstormers I know) and say, "What am I doing wrong?" The answer is usually, "You're trying to make a character figure out exactly what he feels and then describe it in great detail, when in reality that character would probably mumble, 'Uh, I dunno,' and go drink a beer."
Are most of your fixes deletions or additions?
Depends on the point in the process.
Between first draft and second draft, the fixes are almost always deletions. After that, there's a phase of additions (to make backstory more explicit, fill holes in the plot, explain things that I understand but haven't managed to get down on the page). And then at the cleanup phase I'm deleting again, but on a word-by-word level rather than whole paragraphs at a go.
How long does it usually take you to write a story? How many revisions do you go through?
"Juncture" took an hour. (I timed it with a kitchen timer.) "The Teeth of the Hydra" took six months, and that's not counting the time I spent brainstorming and doing research and just walking around with a blank look on my face humming "Bang a Gong" to myself.
I'd say I usually spend a month or so thinking and brainstorming about a story, and then a couple of months actually working on it. I usually have three or four stories going at any given time.
Do you use beta readers?
Oh, yes. You could even say I use beta thinkers, since so much of what I do depends on brainstorming with the people I meet in chat.
(Buffyverse specific) How do you name your demons?
I've never written Buffyverse. To judge from the transcripts, you could get a pretty workable name out of the obituaries.
flambeau. I don't know if this is going to be at all interesting to read, but it was incredibly interesting to write. Do ideas come in little tiny pinpricks and then get expanded, or do they start great big and scopy and then get refined?
Pinpricks -- nearly always verbal ones. I usually get a word or a phrase (often the title or the first line), and when I tug on it, I discover that it's pulling lots of things in after it.
Why do you choose to write in the tenses you do (present tense, or first person POV, or third person) and how do you choose particular styles for particular stories?
Usually if a story seems to be telling itself to me in a particular tense, I'll roll with it unless I have a good reason to do otherwise -- but almost all of my stories come to me in past tense.
I used present tense as an organizational device in "Adorned" (present-day scenes in present tense, flashback scenes in past tense), and I'm still of two minds about how well that worked. And "Left" and "Juncture" both came to me in present tense, which I think worked pretty well, probably because both of them take place entirely during the last few minutes of a single sex act.
Unlike tense, point of view is something I experiment with quite often. It's not uncommon for me to begin a story in one point of view and then have to rewrite it in another. Usually it comes down to figuring out which character needs to be ignorant at any given moment, and writing that section in his point of view.
I default to third person. Nearly all my first-person stories have been written as self-challenges -- just to see if I could. (The best example of that is "A Fine and Private Place," where I wanted to see if it was possible to write detailed, explicit sex in Fraser first-person without resorting to either labored euphemisms, out-of-character slang, or an unpleasantly clinical tone.)
A first-person story that was not written as a challenge was "Loving North," which was so very Ray-interior (and required so very much ignorance on Ray's part) that it pretty much demanded to be written in first.
Do you have music that inspires your writing? (That you listen to while writing, or certain songs that remind you of certain characters.)
I don't listen to music when I'm writing if I can avoid it. I'm very ear-oriented, and sound is incredibly distracting to me.
While I'm working a story out in my brain, though, I'll sometimes choose some story-specific music to listen to in the car just to keep my head in the right place. I worked on "The Teeth of the Hydra" for six months, and during that period, I listened only to period music -- Squeeze, Pete Townshend, the English Beat, Gang of Four, early Elvis Costello, etc. I really like most of that music (though I never warmed up to David Bowie and most of the Ramones), but I was happy when the story was finished and I could get some variety into my musical life.
Right now I'm immersed in Oysterband, trying to hatch a song story for
giglet.How do you brainstorm what comes next in a story?
Relationship stories sometimes require brainstorming in chat to generate ideas, but usually once I start writing, each occurrence has a sort of a string hanging from it, and when I pull the string, the next occurrence is attached to it.
Plot stories often require more help than that. Again I usually turn to people I meet in chat, often with a specific problem: "So I need a crime, and I need it to be tattoo-related, and I need it to be icky but non-fatal, and ... help!"
What do you do when you hit a road block?
Usually several nights' worth of chat brainstorming do the trick. There's a reason I hang out with smart people.
Or I do research on some fairly small point in the story, not because it's important for that small part to be exactly right, but because the research often turns up something that strikes sparks off something else, and then I can get revved up again.
If a song inspired the story, sometimes I'll take details out of the song, or out of another song by the same artist or from the same time period. The scene in "Hydra" where Stella is taking bubble baths and walking around in her underpants came right out of Squeeze's "Now Is That Love." ("You won't get dressed, you walk about ... the teasing glances push me out...") And that wasn't just a fleshing-out detail, either; it generated "She wouldn't give him anything, but she loved for him to take it," which is a pretty critical explanation of their marriage and divorce.
How often do you end up deleting a whole bunch of already-written stuff, and how hard is it to let that stuff go?
I write all my first drafts in longhand, and a big part of the progression to second-draft status is the part where I look at four pages of handwritten stuff and say, "I'm not typing all that" and start crossing out lines. I'd say I probably delete almost half of every first draft. ("Hydra" is, what, 140K in the final version? I threw away enough to make a novella.)
Sex scenes are even worse -- if I delete half of the non-sex that I write, I delete about three-quarters of the sex. I tend to write in button-by-button detail, and often I don't know what's at stake in the sex scene until the entire story is finished. Then at that point I can go back and delete everything that doesn't pull you through toward where I want you to go.
I'm also prone to write things that I think are part of the story, but that turn out later to be just me noodling around trying to get a feel for the characters and the situation.
What if you really, really want to include something but part of you is saying it's not right for that particular story?
I might try it in a different point of view, or at a different place in the narrative. But most of the time I just toss it. Or save it on the outside chance that it might grow up to be a different story. I have a folder full of outtakes, but I don't think I've ever actually done anything with any of them.
Do you take notes longhand, and if so, when?
Gratuitous lifestyle detail: I have a fulltime job and a preschooler. So I don't have a lot of time to concentrate. The spouse and I have firmly established "parenting days off" -- he gets Sunday afternoons, I get Saturday mornings.
So on Saturday morning I usually sneak out of the house before anyone else is awake, and I go and sit in a cushy chair in the mystery section of Barnes & Noble and write my stories in a little spiral notebook with a mechanical pencil.
I do have a laptop now, but I find that I can only use it at a certain stage in the process; if I try to get into the computer too early, it blocks me. I write the first draft in longhand, type it, then go to the computer at the stage where I'm filling in holes, rearranging the order of things, and polishing the language.
Do you use challenges by other people to inspire you?
Not often; I think "Juncture" is the only story I've ever written specifically in response to a challenge. I do get ideas from conversations with people, though.
Do you do anything in particular to get you into the right mindset to write a certain character or characters?
Watch eps, sometimes. Look at pictures. Discuss the character with others.
Which characters are easiest for you to write, and WHY?
I find it very easy to write Ray Kowalski. I have no idea why. He's very different from me.
I'm finding Hermione Granger so easy to write that the hardest thing is preventing her from taking over my story (in which she plays only a minor role).
Which ones are hardest, and again, WHY?
Benton Fraser, in spite of being superficially similar to me, is really hard to get inside. He clearly has an interior life -- I mean, it's not like trying to write Draco Malfoy, which is basically a matter of creating an original character -- but I find it very hard to access his motives sometimes. Part of the difficulty is that he himself seems to be either ignorant of or suspicious of his emotional drives most of the time.
Which characters are most like you emotionally?
I'm like the quiet, repressed, introverted ones -- Fraser, Jim Ellison -- except that they're heroes and I'm a lazy slob.
How often do you feel like what you're writing is fulfilling some emotional need - ie, when you're writing comfort, is it because you often feel that you don't get it IRL?
This doesn't work for me at all. If I don't have access to an emotion in real life, I don't have access to it in writing, either.
I have been known to mentally block out a sex scene to get myself in the mood for the real thing, though.
What about writing smut - do you find it easy, difficult?
Very, very easy. So easy that it takes discipline to prevent myself from writing it first and then losing interest in the rest of the story. (Wham, bam, post it, ma'am.)
What kinds of smut are easiest for you to write, and WHY?
I don't do well with fade to black, even where the story needs it. There's a scene at the end of "American Way" that ends in mid-stroke with Ray saying, "It was you I wanted all along --" and it was incredibly difficult to make myself stop there, instead of going on to the last sigh. (I said to
liviapenn, "You don't think it's a problem that I stop in the middle?" and she said, "It's not like there's no other sex in the story, Res.")Also, I've noticed, in reading smut, that most writers default to a certain pitch of excitement. (Compare an Aristide story, where the level of arousal and connection is so high that it almost reads as terror, to a Speranza story, where there's room for more playfulness and awkwardness.)
I don't know how to describe my own position on the intense-o-meter, but I know it's very difficult to write either above that or below it. That's a problem in stories with more than one sex scene, because obviously you want something to be developing, which means that they can't be at the very peak of excitement first time out.
Which of your stories is your favorite and WHY? Least favorite?
"Broadway Hotel." No question. Best thing I've ever written.
Most of my Sentinel stories are very obviously apprentice work, and I detest "Light."
"Too Sweet" is deeply flawed --
wax_jism did an on-list review of it that made me want to rend my garments that she wasn't one of the people who read it before it was published -- but I've tried to fix it and I can't seem to do it. There's also a problem with "Amends," the way it starts out so dark and flips over to light in about one paragraph -- I can't seem to sustain any mood but cheerful.Which of your titles do you like the most/least, and why?
"Light" is boring, "Midnight Oil" is kind of cutesy, and "Too Sweet" reads like one of those pre-emptive apologies ("Don't say I didn't warn you!"), but other than that I like them all.
I never did come up with a decent title for my Shanghai Noon story, but then again, I never posted the story, so what the hell.
How do you choose titles for your stories?
The title is almost always part of that initial FedEx from the Muse -- in fact, a lot of the time it's the only thing in the box.
"Transfigurations," the HP in progress, started out as "Erised" (which even at the time was doomed to be a fandom cliche) and then gradually outgrew its working title.
I think the working title of "Left" was "Warm," which is way too obvious.
Do you write differently with a cowriter than you do alone? Is it easier or harder?
The only story I've co-written was "Nuance," and that was also the first plotty story I ever wrote, so it's hard to distinguish one from the other. It was pretty easy, but it took a long time, and I was constantly surprised at how we never encountered a problem that could be fixed by making the story shorter. But that's generally been true of my longer plotty solo stories.
Do you write original fic differently from fanfic (if you write it at all)?
I'm just starting work on my first-ever original story. So I have no idea.
When I write original characters, I find it difficult to work with someone whose voice I haven't heard. So often I'll arbitrarily choose the voice of someone I know, or of another TV or movie character, just so that I can hear the character talk in my head. (Amanda Jackson in "Hydra" has the voice of my college roommate, and Bev Constantine has the voice of my favorite cousin.)
For series and long works, do you decide a goal in advance to stop at or are they open ended? If you do choose a goal, how often do you stick to it?
Except with PWPs, I rarely know at the outset whether a story is going to be short or long.
Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to decide where I'm going, so I'll be able to tell when I get there, because even in a plotty story I often succeed in getting the characters into bed and then feel like, "Yup, OK, I'm done now." I don't like that sex-solves-everything thing when other people do it, and I don't like it when I do it, but sometimes it's difficult not to.
How do you deal with character plinkage?
If the plot wants to go one way and the characters want to go another way, I follow the characters. Occasionally they lead me on a long detour which later has to be deleted, but if I try to push them in a direction they don't want to go, it never works.
When a scene feels forced, what are the first few tricks you try to fix it?
I close my eyes and listen. And then I write down whatever the characters say, whether it seems relevant or not.
Or else I go to Ces or
julad (who are the best first-draft brainstormers I know) and say, "What am I doing wrong?" The answer is usually, "You're trying to make a character figure out exactly what he feels and then describe it in great detail, when in reality that character would probably mumble, 'Uh, I dunno,' and go drink a beer."Are most of your fixes deletions or additions?
Depends on the point in the process.
Between first draft and second draft, the fixes are almost always deletions. After that, there's a phase of additions (to make backstory more explicit, fill holes in the plot, explain things that I understand but haven't managed to get down on the page). And then at the cleanup phase I'm deleting again, but on a word-by-word level rather than whole paragraphs at a go.
How long does it usually take you to write a story? How many revisions do you go through?
"Juncture" took an hour. (I timed it with a kitchen timer.) "The Teeth of the Hydra" took six months, and that's not counting the time I spent brainstorming and doing research and just walking around with a blank look on my face humming "Bang a Gong" to myself.
I'd say I usually spend a month or so thinking and brainstorming about a story, and then a couple of months actually working on it. I usually have three or four stories going at any given time.
Do you use beta readers?
Oh, yes. You could even say I use beta thinkers, since so much of what I do depends on brainstorming with the people I meet in chat.
(Buffyverse specific) How do you name your demons?
I've never written Buffyverse. To judge from the transcripts, you could get a pretty workable name out of the obituaries.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 8/30/02 02:37 pm (UTC)Right now I'm immersed in Oysterband, trying to hatch a song story for giglet.
And I can't tell you how happy I am about this, but I'm trying! Go Res Go!
Wham, bam, post it, ma'am.
This is me, rolling on the floor laughing!
(no subject)
Date: 8/30/02 06:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 8/30/02 08:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9/20/02 11:10 pm (UTC)(And I realize that it's a fairly old story, and this is a fairly old post, but I just found your LJ and thought I'd just get over my 'net-shyness and say hi, and that I enjoy your writing as a whole, and that story in particular. :)
(no subject)
Date: 9/24/02 09:33 am (UTC)Hope you're loving DS as much as I am -- so many amazing stories. If you want recs, let me know.
(no subject)
Date: 9/25/02 09:46 am (UTC)***Naina
(no subject)
Date: 9/25/02 08:52 pm (UTC)