December Daily: longhand

[resonant]

isis and clevermanka and trobadora - longhand?!

When I mentioned that I compose all my stories in longhand, that got a lot of surprised responses.

I don't really understand why I have so much trouble composing fiction onscreen. I can write a blog entry onscreen. At work a good chunk of my job is writing legal documents onscreen and i have no difficulty with that. (Though suddenly it occurs to me that if I know I'm going to be writing for the next chunk of time, I'll often listen to an ASMR video or a "rainy cafe noise" soundtrack, even if I'm at home with no distractions; wonder if that's related?)

I think one of my difficulties is that words on a screen look so finished. It's inhibiting.







This is pre-first draft -- it's the phase where ideas are coming to me and I'm jotting them down any old way. I might get entire scenes, I might get snatches of dialog, I might have notes that say things like HELP IF HE STOPS ASKING HOW DO I MAKE HIM START AGAIN?

Eventually the whole thing will start to stick together in larger clumps (feels like making pie crust) and I'll begin to have numbers in circles and arrows and crossed-out pages and scenes that stop in the middle with notes that say NO WAIT THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN BEFORE THE TAPE MEASURE SWORDFIGHT -- it's a mess.

And it hurts my wrist. But then so does typing.

I don't exactly do it because it's good; I do it because I don't seem to be capable of doing it any other way. But it does have advantages:

- Typing it up becomes a second draft, an easy opportunity to catch excessive adverbs, overuse of the characters' names in dialog, 'whisper' and 'flushed' and 'minute' and 'a little bit' and other things I write and then have to unwrite.

- I'm wordy in general, and in particular in sex scenes I have to write a substantial amount of it before it tells me what it wants to be about. The typing stage is a good opportunity to look at five paragraphs of unbuttonining buttons and say, "I'm not gonna type all that. It's boring anyway."

- Writing in order doesn't work very well for me, for some reason -- things get boring and stodgy. It works better if I write the scene I'm enthusiastic about, and then do the assembly later.

- I like my handwriting. I used to have terrible handwriting, and back in the ninth grade I literally spent all summer long laboriously working out new letterforms and practicing them over and over. That means that every letter I write is a reminder of a time when I combined creativity with persistence to make something I'm proud of -- a good thing to have in your mind when you're doing the inevitable bad writing that's necessary to create good writing!

(If you're wondering, what you're looking at is the only writing project that currently has any energy, and it's a ridiculous one: it's a story in The Adventure Zone: Amnesty in which Beacon the sword gets temporarily turned into a human being. I know. I know.)




Specify a date if you want; otherwise I'll just answer them whenever.

This year, in addition to the usual kinds of questions, I'd also love to get storyish prompts. Storyish meaning you never know what you might get: two sentences of a story, or a description of a story that will never exist, or a love song about how much I like that trope, or a rant about my pet peeve about that trope, or I know nothing about that canon except what I see on social media and here's what I think it might be about, or Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate/Am Indifferent To that character, canon, or trope, or ...

As always, I'd love to hear about it if you're doing the meme too.



15. china_shop - Guardian as described by someone who only knows it via social media
16. kiezh following up with - "What have you heard about MDZS/The Untamed, and what did you think of what you heard?"
17. ride4ever's birthday prompt - "Storyish prompt: for any due South fic you've written, write a prequel or sequel snippet for the fic or meta about the before-or-after that can be imagined about the fic's story arc."
18. mific - "the genderswap trope where a character's gender is changed. Yes? No? Maybe?"
19. runpunkrun - "fake dating: yes or no"
20. minoanmiss - "One of my favorite tropes is Then Let Me Be Evil. What do you think of it/have you explored it/so on and so forth?"
21. hypertwink - "21. Now that you've come back, is there a fandom that you want to dip your toe into? (Follow up: Are you apprehensive/excited about it?)"
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24. runpunkrun - "John and Rodney in 2020"
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26. ride4ever - "for any dS or C6D pairing that you ship, how that ship is doing in 2020."
27. reginagiraffe - "Hermione/Harry/Ron from Bed and Board in 2020"
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Comments

[resonant]

I know the words on the screen are easy to change, but they look so permanent.

Sadly, it's probably the same impulse that makes many of my generation believe all kinds of conspiracy theories because if it wasn't true that there were microchips in your autism vaccine, "they" wouldn't let them put it on the internet.