Res ipsa loquitur

Me: Story, tell me what your title is.
Story [in the voice of a 2-year-old]: No.

Weeks later:
Me: Story, I'm very grateful for the seventeen pages of notes, snippets of dialog, and blanks marked "solution to this plot problem goes here." It would really help me if you'd tell me what your title is.
Story [in the voice of a 2-year-old who is well-rested enough to have a long attention span but not so well-rested that a tantrum is out of the question]: No.

Weeks later, while I'm focusing hard on something else:
Story: I want a song-lyrics title.
Me: Great! Just tell me what song.
Story: No.

Arguably this part is my fault, since I mostly listen to music in the car when I need to focus on, you know, driving. Montage covering several weeks:
Story: This is a great song.
Me: I will totally remember that song. [instantly forgets it]
Story: This is a great song.
Me: Yes! I love this song! [Looks up lyrics] Story, the message of this song is basically "I feel great."
Story: This is a great song.
Me: [with rising hope] I love this song. This is specifically a good RayK song. [looks up lyrics] Story, the message of this song is basically "I'm pissed off."
Story: This is a great song.
Me: I love this song. The theme fit is decent too. [looks up lyrics] These lyrics shrivel up and die if you take them out of context.
Story: This is a great song.
Me: This one? Really? Hm. [looks up lyrics] Wow, this has potential. [looks up commentary] Story, the internet says this is a suicide song.
Story: This one. This one. This one.
Me: Story, you're a sex pollen romp.
Story: [lower lip trembles ominously]
Me: Wouldn't be the first time I repurposed a song the writer thought was about suicide. Wouldn't even be the first time for this pairing. Hm, that may tell me something about this pairing. All right, Story, I'll give it a try.
Story: I want ice cream.

It's a completed draft in that every scene has been written rather than just gestured at. Unfortunately, the most significant final sex scene has considerably fewer words and considerably less tactile detail than the scene of Ray Vecchio winding a watch.

Hi! I am a primate and attention energizes me.

Comment with a word or a few letters [editing to add: for best results a *very* short one] and I will reply with a matching or approximating item from my 275-item Stray Writing list. Might be a sentence, might be a phrase, might be a characterization note or something that would eventually be smut. (Let me know if you'd prefer *not* to get smut.)

I can also offer random items from more specific sub-lists if you like: Due South (74), The Watchmaker of Filigree Street (12), or a possibly nonexistent original work with a working title of Gun Shop (42).

I'm so fannishly disengaged right now that I want to start this post with an example of a character and I'm literally sitting here thinking, "OK, who do I care about that other people also care about?" So I'm going to skip the example and just tell y'all the thing that just came into my head, which is:

- every fanfic story can present a slightly different version of a character
- these versions can be plotted on three S scales, thusly:

How straight? (In the character's own mind, anyway)
How smitten?
How stupid?

and that if a character is boring me, the answer is probably to move him a little further out to the extreme of one or more S scales.

OK, this is odd.

I opened a folder that I haven't looked at since my dad died, and in it, I found the complete first draft of a Sherlock story. I remember starting it, but I didn't remember finishing it at all.

The thing is, it needs a real, solid beta.

I mean not a proofreader, and not somebody to say, "Hey, it's pretty good, go ahead and post it." Because I actually think it is pretty good -- it's like 75% smut by volume, so it's hard to go wrong -- but it's not quite pulling the full potential out of the concept. I need somebody to take a drone view and figure out what's wrong with the shape of it.

(Details: It's aliens make them do it, and seems to have been written in the golden moment after The Reichenbach Fall and before we knew that they didn't actually have answers for any of the questions posed by The Reichenbach Fall. There's another one in that folder that has potential, too. )

I don't even know where my betas are. Any of y'all still here?

If you read a vampire story (at least in fandom or other erotic-romance context), there's an implicit promise that there's gonna be some romantic/erotic blood-drinking. Even if it's not in the story, the story almost has to be in dialog with the possibility.

You're just waiting for that moment when the characters are snowed in or imprisoned or hiding out in a safehouse or otherwise miles from the nearest blood bank and by Day Three the vampire starts to look a little paler than usual and the human nervously says, "Um ... if you wanted ... I could ..."

What if the vampire genuinely wasn't into it, though? What if it was like, "No, hey, you're my friend, and actually I have a bit of a crush on you, and the last thing I want to do is think of you as a food source. Do *you* want to neck with a hamburger? Or like passionately kiss someone and then eat one of their fingers?"

What if it ended up being the story of a vampire having to be game for a kink he didn't share?

via trobadora

Years ago on LJ I identified my ideal tropes as mapping into a double cluster around a center that's basically a period of yearning in the gap between sex and intimacy -- either you have sex first and spend the story yearning for intimacy (e.g. aliens made them do it) or you have intimacy first and spend the story yearning for sex (e.g. everything from hypothermia to truth serum). All my answers here definitely follow that pattern.

Slow burn OR love at first sight::. It amuses me that I find love at first sight less plausible than sex pollen. I do enjoy variations on a theme of "the first time I saw you, I was already obligated to do some long-term, difficult, and intimate thing with you" -- for instance, "I have amnesia and I woke up in bed with you and we were both wearing matching wedding rings," or "so you're the royalty from the neighboring kingdom that I've just entered a political marriage with." Soulbond stories ring that bell for me, as long as the bonding in the situation takes a little while to produce a bonding in feelings.

Fake dating OR secret dating:. Fake dating is definitely a gap-type trope -- here we are holding hands and pretending to be happy together while I yearn for that but believe that you're not interested. Yep, yep, that does it for me. Secret dating isn't a trope I can remember seeing a lot of. I suppose you could have a Romeo-and-Juliet type scenario, or one of those delightfully farfetched romance scenarios where you'll lose the inheritance unless you can stay single. It locates the obstacle to the relationship outside the relationship, which isn't as interesting to me.

Enemies to lovers OR best friends to lovers:. I like them both, but enemies to lovers takes longer and is more difficult. With best friends, you have to look for some additional reason why they haven't just kissed already.

Oh no there's only one bed OR long distance with correspondence:. I'm not nuts about either of these, because mostly neither of them is very plausible to me. If you had to share a bed with someone you were longing for, you'd probably either not really sleep, or wake up back to back, and while a good writer could make either of those enjoyable to read, there's not as much inherent drama in it as I would like. And I have never read a romance conducted in correspondence that didn't make me go, "Oh, come on." Either they require characters to understand what they feel and communicate it in a way that I don't find at all plausible, or they require me-the-reader to be able to understand what's being communicated in the subtext and both the characters to understand what's being communicated in the subtext, and I just don't buy it. (I've seen it done well for comedy -- "My dearest M., I assure you it wasn't my fault; the boat was already on fire when I got there, and I got nearly all the penguins out of the ballroom unharmed.")

Fantasy AU OR modern AU. Both are done badly a lot more often than they're done well. It's a worldbuildling issue. Modern AU is certainly easier for the writer, but a lot of the time if you take the characters out of a historical or fictional setting, all your conflicts go away too. Sometimes it works, though -- I think one reason the high school AU is so popular is because high school is probably the closest most contemporary people ever come to living in a world with very narrow social roles and high penalties for violating them. Fantasy AU is an awfully big category -- could include anything from "Fraser's a werewolf and Ray's a vampire" to "exactly the same as the canon except that Spock has telekinesis." Delightful if done well, but few writers want to put enough effort into worldbuilding.

Smut or fluff. I don't know, what even is the definition of fluff? I think of it as meaning explicit emotional communication, and most of the time that's out of character for the kinds of characters I like to read. On the other hand, if you give me the choice between a basically solid story with sex and no emotions or a basically solid story with emotions (expressed in an in-character way) and no sex, I'll choose the emotions.

Mutual pining OR domestic bliss. OMG, pining pining pining. What can you do with domestic bliss? What can happen? I'll read and enjoy domestic comedy, but I pine for pining.

Alternate universe OR futurefic. I mean, I like them both, but it's easier to do futurefic well, because it requires less worldbuilding, and so a higher percentage of it is good. Also, like many fanfic fans, I always view canon as basically what sets the scene for the real storytellers, i.e. us.

Oneshot OR multi-chapter. Even a long story is more likely to make me happy if it's posted as a oneshot. Stories posted in chapters have a high likelihood of being posted before they're finished, which means they have a high likelihood of disappointing me with either a weak finish or none at all.


Kidfic OR road trip fic. I haven't seen a lot of either of these, and I don't feel particularly strongly about road trip stories. But I read kidfic all wrong. If a story has a child in it, I have a laser focus on the wellbeing of that child, to the point that the relationship starts seeming like a distraction from the real story, which is when is the last time that kid ate anything other than string cheese, and isn't it about time for her to go to bed?!

Reincarnation OR character death. I really dislike character death. There's enough grief in real life, thank you. Reincarnation isn't something I always avoid, but it does tend to keep company with some specific ideas about soulmates that I don't really like all that much, though -- that whole "We will always find each other through all eternity" stuff. It might be fun to read a reincarnation story in which the two characters aren't particularly soulmates but either (1) they have real potential that just can't be developed until both of them have done several lifetimes worth of maturing or (2) they're just two people who get more and more compatible because they have more and more practice at being together.

Arranged marriage OR accidental marriage. I like both of these, but arranged marriage hits right in my trope cluster. Arranged marriage is also a nice way to add zing to a best-friend story.

Time travel OR isolated together. Another pair that are both good. Time travel is risky because it often takes over the story -- I understand the temptation to explain things, but honestly I'd prefer "Suddenly, in the night, Sam Vimes found himself meeting up with a teenage Vetinari," just as an example, rather than two pages of explanation. But isolated together is excellent too!

Neighbors OR roommates. If you're going to make them neighbors, why not go all the way and make them roommates? As far as I can see, both scenarios have the same advantages, but roommates has them more.

Sci-fi au OR magic au. Magic has some pre-existing worldbuilding that a writer can just pick up and use. This would very much not satisfy me if I were reading a nonfannish novel -- the worldbuilding there is the whole thing I'm reading for -- but I read fanfic for relationships, and so if the writer wants to go "And he's a wizard -- you know what a wizard is like" or "And it's a curse -- you know how a curse works," I'm fine with that. SF is inferior in fanfic precisely because of the lack of those worldbuilding templates. (I mean, unless by SF AU you mean "Steve Rogers goes to Starfleet Academy," in which case I am so there.)

Bodyswap OR genderbend. Bodyswap is, of course, intimacy without sex, so I love it. Genderbend is often a lot of fun as social commentary. Social commentary is something I have more strength for some days than others; in the current political situation, often it's going to hit on some things I'm trying not to think about.

Angst OR crack. Now these are both things that are so dependent on skilled handling for me! Angst has to have a light hand with emotional explicitness -- it's a lot more effective if you give me the sorrow-and-yearning kit and make me put it together myself. And crack depends on (1) whether I agree with you about how funny the premise is and (2) whether you're able to execute it with a complete straight face.

Apocalyptic OR mundane. God, I hate apocalypse. I hate it so much. It's so lazy. And it seems like it shows up in all the canons [hisses at Marvel] and ruins everything. I like stakes high but human. Throw too much risk in there and you lose me.

Editing to add the "story idea" tag and point my future self at the Dome Habitat AU.

I'm beginning to feel some stirrings of desire to get involved in fandom again, but mostly they just make me sad, because I can tell that there's not enough energy behind them to result in action.

But I had a blinding flash of the obvious the other day: My writing went away when my Saturday mornings went away.

( Read more... )

monanotlisa asks: What's the hardest thing to write for you, and how do you get around it and yet write it?

Word by word, sentence by sentence, even paragraph by paragraph, I find writing very easy. On top of the usual ways that writers get educated, I was also a journalism major in college, which means I spent hours, literal hours, doing nothing but re-wording a page full of sentences to improve their parallel structure.

But I find it incredibly hard to make things happen.

Left to themselves, my characters want to sit in vaguely drawn rooms and have conversations. Or sometimes my narrators want to describe things. In depth.

This is especially a problem when the story in question involves any sort of worldbuilding. I've built a world; the most fun thing I can imagine is to let some characters just go wander around in it, picking things up and looking at them. You remember in "Groundhog Day" the montage where the Bill Murray character just experiments with the terms of his curse? Tries things that ought to kill him, and wakes up the next morning ... learns what everybody in town is doing so that he can catch people who fall? My writing wants to be nothing but that montage.

And I'm afraid that the only way I can write meaningful conflict is to make a great slog of it. It takes forever for it to come to life and flow -- while I'm waiting for that to happen, I have to write hundreds, thousands of words that are like walking in knee-deep mud, knowing that once the life finally comes into the thing I'm going to have to go back and rewrite all that sloggy stuff to make it sound good. (I think this paragraph contains several contradictory metaphors, but what the hell. It's a good example of what I'm talking about.)

I'm sure there's a point at which I will have had enough practice that it will get easier, but it hasn't happened yet.







Go here to add your own question.

( The questions thus far are under here. )

runpunkrun asks: What's a favorite piece of writing advice you've picked up over the years?

I'm going to share two that have been particularly useful to me.

From julad: Make it more difficult for the characters.

And from the sadly defunct Eddie's Anti-Procrastination Site: You just have to keep starting.