Snowflake Challenge: Day 3
Jan. 3rd, 2015 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pensnestIn your own space, talk about your creative process - from what inspires you to what motivates you to how you manage to break through blocks. Does your process change depending on the type of creating you're doing? Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
What inspires me? All kinds of stuff…
Other fans, a lot. Oh, really a lot.
I've written more than forty stories to prompts on the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fic_requests community, including one which then turned into a series of twelve stories of increasing length (with two more to come). Then there are other challenges, from SeSa exchanges to Remix to my own Dragon Challenge to various Big Bang challenges, plus there have been several one-off challenges too, particularly when I first got into popslash. I love having a place to start, so the challenges fans give one another are a fantastic source of inspiration. There are more than sixty stories that I can definitely attribute to a challenge of some kind.
In other instances, the inspiration is derived from other fans but a bit more randomly. Someone posts a photo, or expresses a desire for a particular pairing. My first popslash fic was inspired by the comments to someone else's story. Others have come from meta—I did a couple of stories about consent issues, and another was inspired by a contrary desire to prove someone infanficrants wrong (kinda like the time I painted a bowl in pink and yellow just because the Dowager Duchess of Denver stated 'pink and yellow obviously impossible').
Less often the inspiration comes from outside fandom. A couple of stories sparked by Calvin and Hobbes; one inspired by a comment to an author's blog. One was a combination of a prompt of time travel and a news report on a legal ruling. I came across a very helpful piece about how people in medieval times WOULD JUST DIE and not be romantically olde-worlde at all, just in time for me to work out a post-apocalypse story.
And I suppose occasionally I just think—what if? or, wouldn't it be cool if? or, how would it feel to be…?
Then what?
I seem to have some interesting ways of figuring out how to write a story. Sometimes I have a particular scene in my head as the core of the story, and have to work out how the characters get there. (In one case, the characters did get there but the scene itself didn't make it into the story, on the grounds that the POV character wasn't in that scene, and in any case the readers didn't need to be told what would happen, they already knew.) Sometimes I start from a first line: I was in the kitchen, cooking the books when I should have been cooking the dinner. Or "Not rat again!". Or Perez Hilton was dead. Sometimes I start from a title, like "Who's Your Daddy?" or "It Pays To Advertise". Quite often I find a format that I like, and once I've worked that out, I can write the story.
Sometimes, writing is like pulling teeth. It sticks, and sticks, and I produce a sentence and have to wander off and clean the kitchen, or something. A lot of my housework is a response to having a story to write. All I can say is, thank God for deadlines. If I didn't have deadlines… in 2013 I thought I'd lost the ability to write at all, I could sit in front of the computer and procrastinate for Britain but I couldn't produce anything, and it wasn't until I realised I had about ten days to produce a rough draft of a big bang challenge that I wrote any fiction that year. Happily the imminence of the deadline provided me with enough of a prod to get me going, and I had a good 10,000 words to turn in, which was a decent start. After that I was able to come up with a couple of SeSa stories without too much pain, one of them written in a day. I can write fast if I have to, but my fandom doesn't offer a lot of deadlines nowadays so there isn't a lot of point… and so often I need those deadlines.
Sometimes, the writing just wants to come out. A couple of times I've had something in my heart, and a prompt or something has arrived at the perfect moment to crystallise the emotions into a story, in which case it just flows and hardly even needs any editing. That's an amazing feeling. Similar is the kind of story where I know what happens, I just don't know *how* so I have to find out by writing the story. Usually I find I write a bit, then make myself a coffee and when I get back to the keyboard I can write the next bit. It's a lot of fun writing a story like that, because I find out what happens. It's nice to be surprised by a story. More often than that, I work things out a little ahead of writing them, which works pretty well, and tends to provide the kind of story that has stuff embedded at the beginning which turns out to be really useful later on, usually to my surprise. Sometimes I can see the fossils of the story I thought I was going to write in the substance of what the story ended up being.
Occasionally, very occasionally, I actually plan. In one instance, I had a time travel story and had to work it out carefully—and then print off what I'd written and make sure all the bits fitted together as they should. Once in a while I have to check the story logic before I launch in. I don't like planning, though, because most of the fun for me is discovering how it happens, and if I've planned, the part where I discover what happens is missing from the actual writing… and that's the part that gets me through. I don't work to 'beats' and I don't work to length—the story is as long as it is supposed to be, and then it stops. Which is one of the best things about fanfic.
I think the most methodical kind of writing I do is poems. Well, verse. Occasionally I bust out a sonnet or some other kind of versification. The process basically starts with the rhymes. I'll find some rhymes I like (I was particularly pleased with incandescence/adolescents) and fit them like mosaic into lines and then see if I can put them into an order that makes sense. The process seems to produce things with a bit more depth than I ever consciously put into them, which is kinda weird, 'cause I don't think I've ever started a verse with any intention beyond being funny. I don't attempt to write poetry.
What inspires me? All kinds of stuff…
Other fans, a lot. Oh, really a lot.
I've written more than forty stories to prompts on the
fic_requests community, including one which then turned into a series of twelve stories of increasing length (with two more to come). Then there are other challenges, from SeSa exchanges to Remix to my own Dragon Challenge to various Big Bang challenges, plus there have been several one-off challenges too, particularly when I first got into popslash. I love having a place to start, so the challenges fans give one another are a fantastic source of inspiration. There are more than sixty stories that I can definitely attribute to a challenge of some kind.In other instances, the inspiration is derived from other fans but a bit more randomly. Someone posts a photo, or expresses a desire for a particular pairing. My first popslash fic was inspired by the comments to someone else's story. Others have come from meta—I did a couple of stories about consent issues, and another was inspired by a contrary desire to prove someone in
fanficrants wrong (kinda like the time I painted a bowl in pink and yellow just because the Dowager Duchess of Denver stated 'pink and yellow obviously impossible').Less often the inspiration comes from outside fandom. A couple of stories sparked by Calvin and Hobbes; one inspired by a comment to an author's blog. One was a combination of a prompt of time travel and a news report on a legal ruling. I came across a very helpful piece about how people in medieval times WOULD JUST DIE and not be romantically olde-worlde at all, just in time for me to work out a post-apocalypse story.
And I suppose occasionally I just think—what if? or, wouldn't it be cool if? or, how would it feel to be…?
Then what?
I seem to have some interesting ways of figuring out how to write a story. Sometimes I have a particular scene in my head as the core of the story, and have to work out how the characters get there. (In one case, the characters did get there but the scene itself didn't make it into the story, on the grounds that the POV character wasn't in that scene, and in any case the readers didn't need to be told what would happen, they already knew.) Sometimes I start from a first line: I was in the kitchen, cooking the books when I should have been cooking the dinner. Or "Not rat again!". Or Perez Hilton was dead. Sometimes I start from a title, like "Who's Your Daddy?" or "It Pays To Advertise". Quite often I find a format that I like, and once I've worked that out, I can write the story.
Sometimes, writing is like pulling teeth. It sticks, and sticks, and I produce a sentence and have to wander off and clean the kitchen, or something. A lot of my housework is a response to having a story to write. All I can say is, thank God for deadlines. If I didn't have deadlines… in 2013 I thought I'd lost the ability to write at all, I could sit in front of the computer and procrastinate for Britain but I couldn't produce anything, and it wasn't until I realised I had about ten days to produce a rough draft of a big bang challenge that I wrote any fiction that year. Happily the imminence of the deadline provided me with enough of a prod to get me going, and I had a good 10,000 words to turn in, which was a decent start. After that I was able to come up with a couple of SeSa stories without too much pain, one of them written in a day. I can write fast if I have to, but my fandom doesn't offer a lot of deadlines nowadays so there isn't a lot of point… and so often I need those deadlines.
Sometimes, the writing just wants to come out. A couple of times I've had something in my heart, and a prompt or something has arrived at the perfect moment to crystallise the emotions into a story, in which case it just flows and hardly even needs any editing. That's an amazing feeling. Similar is the kind of story where I know what happens, I just don't know *how* so I have to find out by writing the story. Usually I find I write a bit, then make myself a coffee and when I get back to the keyboard I can write the next bit. It's a lot of fun writing a story like that, because I find out what happens. It's nice to be surprised by a story. More often than that, I work things out a little ahead of writing them, which works pretty well, and tends to provide the kind of story that has stuff embedded at the beginning which turns out to be really useful later on, usually to my surprise. Sometimes I can see the fossils of the story I thought I was going to write in the substance of what the story ended up being.
Occasionally, very occasionally, I actually plan. In one instance, I had a time travel story and had to work it out carefully—and then print off what I'd written and make sure all the bits fitted together as they should. Once in a while I have to check the story logic before I launch in. I don't like planning, though, because most of the fun for me is discovering how it happens, and if I've planned, the part where I discover what happens is missing from the actual writing… and that's the part that gets me through. I don't work to 'beats' and I don't work to length—the story is as long as it is supposed to be, and then it stops. Which is one of the best things about fanfic.
I think the most methodical kind of writing I do is poems. Well, verse. Occasionally I bust out a sonnet or some other kind of versification. The process basically starts with the rhymes. I'll find some rhymes I like (I was particularly pleased with incandescence/adolescents) and fit them like mosaic into lines and then see if I can put them into an order that makes sense. The process seems to produce things with a bit more depth than I ever consciously put into them, which is kinda weird, 'cause I don't think I've ever started a verse with any intention beyond being funny. I don't attempt to write poetry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 09:06 am (UTC)I am madly impressed by you *starting* from a title, though. Clearly you are even more superpowered than I already knew! *g*
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 01:54 pm (UTC)And so true about using the motivation of writing a climactic scene to write the middle bits to get to it.
:-)
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 02:49 pm (UTC)Fandom is so brilliant at encouraging fans to write! I'm less enamoured of the "x meme" idea than I was of challenges which encouraged you to post in your own journal (or website), and I really mourn fic_requests, which was a splendid little comm. But fans will, I think, keep finding ways to encourage one another to write.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 02:50 pm (UTC)The funniest thing was having that scene in mind and then not writing it, which was strange!
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 06:03 pm (UTC)The incandescence/adolescents rhyme is brilliantly sublime!
no subject
Date: 2015-01-05 01:15 pm (UTC)A couple of times I've had something in my heart, and a prompt or something has arrived at the perfect moment to crystallise the emotions into a story, in which case it just flows and hardly even needs any editing
I love when that happens. I just wish it would happen more often.
I'm another impressed with your ability to write from a title.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-08 08:42 pm (UTC)I suppose I'm rather a "let's see what happens" person in every creative sphere I try. Planning? Not really my thing.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-08 08:43 pm (UTC)Me too(!). But 'in porco, veritas' came to me so early, I had to try and write a story that would live up to it.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 12:55 pm (UTC)Challenges are great for everyone. As a new writer, they're a fantastic way to get noticed and make friends. For people who have been around a while, sometimes the deadlines really help spark the writing.
I find it interesting all the different inspirations people have. Writing is such a wonderful hobby and so varied. There is always something new to write or read.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 07:33 pm (UTC)and i'm gonna go read the calvin & hobbes inspired story now because i was obsessed with that comic so bear with me...
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 07:44 pm (UTC)♥
i liked the way jc talked here: "No, but hey. Protein. Lunch? Anyway, you used all the bread."
i loved this bit: "...then JC did that thing where his shoulders coathangered and the rest of him hung down and rippled like silk in a breeze. JC should be reclassified as a liquid, Chris thought.
and i believe this explanation, it sounds true: "Dude, why do you sleep so much?" "I like to be rested when things start to happen."
ugh so CUUUUUUUTE: "...when Lance picked JC up by the scruff of the neck to retrieve the pile of papers JC had been snoozing on
i'm so glad you did this post because i don't remember this story!!
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 08:26 pm (UTC)There's another C&H-inspired story in quite a different vein, An Empty Cardboard Box, which is not exactly fun...
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 09:33 pm (UTC)Link, please? *sad Oliver Twist eyes*
no subject
Date: 2015-01-04 09:58 pm (UTC)being eaten in the dark
Date: 2015-01-05 11:32 am (UTC)Wow. For once, being a nosy bastard has actually served me well. Vindication! *victory arms*
Okay, so this is pretty short and I probably COULD copy and paste the whole entire thing here just for emphasis, even though that'd be crazy and unnecessary and way beyond obnoxious. I won't do it, but I WANT TO.
JC should be reclassified as a liquid, Chris thought.
Yes. Yes, he should.
(Eeeeeee!)
Re: being eaten in the dark
Date: 2015-01-05 08:05 pm (UTC)