Forum:FC:Café Fanfic XXIII

Café Fanfic is a discussion topic centered around fan-fiction. Authors are encouraged to contribute to the café's monthly discussion, which are designed to stimulate ideas and encourage engagement between members of the SWF fan-fiction writing community in a criticism-free zone.

Participants in Café Fanfic are also welcome to submit ideas for the next month's topic of discussion.

Previous topics can be found in the archival list at the bottom of the page.

There are three basic premises for Café Fanfic

1. Please restrict this to stuff from your fan-fiction (written or possibly just conceptualized).
2. You can suggest and make observations, but no condemning other people's work
3. "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer.

May's topic: What is your writing process? Do you prefer to outline or draft the story? Are you more of a spontaneous writer? What triggers you to write a story—is it a character, a scene, or a story concept? What, if any, checking/editing do you do before posting it?

Entries

Sholush

Ataru, you ought to know of my writing process - you have to deal with it. :p

ANYHOOOOOOO...

1. First, I get an idea. For Rakata, it was from watching something. For MAJORSPOILERZ, it was from talking to someone on IRC. Ideas can come from many different sources, but I at least have to start with something. :p
2. Let idea bake. I don't write anything except for a few notes, I don't outline anything, I just let it sit. I think about it, work out the plot, character/s, different scenes, all that. Rakata baked for about a year. MAJORSPOILERZ baked for two or three years.
3. I finally make an outline—well, not really an outline, but a series of paragraphs that paraphrase the story. This helps me work out Chekhov's Guns (which I LOOOOVE) and helps me plan out the pacing. For MAJORSPOILERZ, I even figured out where the chapter breaks were going to be. Rakata's outline was about 3/4 of a page long, MAJORSPOILERZ's was about...5? 6? I don't remember. At the same time, I make a character and original location sheet so I can keep characterization and descriptions consistent. At this point, I usually get a story consultant to ensure that things make sense and to fix any story and logic problems (hai, Ataru).
4. Revise. Let sit. Revise. Think about it. Revise. Consult. Revise. Mull over.
5. Repeat step #4 for about half a year for Rakata and about a year or so for MAJORSPOILERZ.

   You may not have noticed, but my pre-production phase is quite long.

6. At this stage, I wrote the first draft of Rakata, which I then edited and rewrote and consulted and rewrote some more before finally releasing it. For MAJORSPOILERZ, I outlined a chapter, wrote it. Outlined a chapter, wrote it, edited first chapter. Outlined a chapter, wrote it, edited second chapter. Outlined a chapter, wrote it, edited third chapter. Outlined a chapter, edited first chapter, wrote fourth chapter, edited second chapter. Outlined chapter, edited third chapter, wrote fifth chapter, edited fourth chapter. Outlined chapter, edited first chapter, wrote sixth chapter, edited second chapter. Confused yet?
   • At this point, once I edited a chapter five times or until I was happy with it, I would send it to my beloved Edi-tor (ohai, Ataru) who would then read it, tear it to shreds, and give it back to me.
7. Since by this stage we're only talking about MAJORSPOILERZ, we'll just focus on that. At that time, I had most of it written and a few chapters sent to Edi'Tor, who then figured out a big problem with my prose. Therefore, as I want my work to be as good as I can make it, I am currently under re-writing everything to fix this prose issue (Ataru wuv). Once I'm happy with the re-writes and the fixes and the pacing changes and the characterizations and everything, I'll send some of it off to my poor, poor, abused Eddi Tohr to look at again. More fixes, more rewrites (I won't keep sending them to Ahdi Toru, though because he needs a break from my crap :p).
8. Advertise it.
9. Release it a chapter at a time on SWF and TFN. Maybe other places.

...

Yeah. dat mah long, arduous process. it be long and arduous. -Solus ^{Talk to the Hand} 03:02, May 15, 2013 (UTC)

MPK

Writing this in the morning in sleep deprival with my coffee, but I don't care.

What's my writing process? For the longest time I'm certain I didn't even have one. I get ideas in my head, and usually they tend to cook for a while up in there before I start doing any serious writing - sort of like a crockpot for containing my brain. Actually, though, in the past, the way it worked was I got an idea, and once I had a rough outline in my head, I would just jump around and write out the most awesome parts of it in the middle, and then never get any of the rest of it done.

More recently I got into the plague of outlines - by which I mean, I'd be all like "I need to know everything that actually happens first", so I'd write these buggeringly detailed outlines and, worse, keep adding to and revising these outlines while never getting far into the actual story (if I even got that far). This reached truly horrid levels of ubiquity, to the point that I was essentially sitting on top of the outline of a novel-length story, unable to make myself start seriously writing the thing because I kept thinking of new elements of characterization, new running motifs, and other bullshit that would run through the entire length of the thing and I kept figuring that I needed to figure those out before I could write it. Then I threw that idea into deep-storage because I don't write novels at the moment.

Now that I consider it, I seem to work best when my outlines are spartan. A list of bullets, no more than a few sentences per bullet, telling what literally happens, and that usually prompts me to fill in the blanks as I write. When I actually do get around to creating the words of the story on the screen and stick to it consistently enough, I do end up with a first draft. Revision tended to be a process of random amputation and reconstruction, and in certain cases I would revise behind me before even finishing the first draft.

In an attempt to counter the previous years of time-wasting, the current policy I've adopted is that I will not permit myself to write except in order, from the beginning to the end, no matter how much my ideas change, until I have a first draft done. Revision is then going linearly through the story afterward with specific goals in mind. Though I'm not writing any serious fanfic at the moment, I am using that guideline with other projects I've been working on, and it has helped somewhat. It gets me to the end; it gets something written. -MPK, Free Man 15:07, May 16, 2013 (UTC)

Trak

I used to write by the seat of my pants, but then I started outlining. Though, I've hit plenty of snags with too much outlining, so I've stopped doing that. My writing process varies from story to story. Some are outlined, some are written on the fly, some are started on the fly with each chapter outlined, some start from an idea, some from a random vignette, some are written in order, others are written out of order. It really depends on how I feel like writing. Sometimes, an outline works fine. Other times, I just write and write and manage to string along a cohesive plot.

As for what triggers a story, it depends. Perhaps a piece of music. Perhaps a character will walk into my head and demand their story be told. Quite often, it's one single scene and then I write a story around it. Sometimes, dreams play a part. Sometimes, I'm writing a vignette, and then find use for it later. It varies. Trak Nar ^{Ramble on} 09:38, May 27, 2013 (UTC)

Brandon

This is old, but I figured I'd outline my writing process anyway. I'll use Star Wars: Episode I - The Chosen One as an example:

1. Come up with the idea, begin to flesh it out.
2. Stop fleshing it out but begin writing the story anyway, with no direction.
3. Write about 20 chapters.
4. Stop writing for about 6 months.
5. Hate what I did in those 20 chapters.
6. Come up with new ideas for a new draft.
7. Start again.
8. Write 15 chapters.
9. Stop writing for 6 months.
10. Promise to make a few updates to the draft as a final version.
11. Ignore step #10.
12. Hate what I did in those 15 chapters.
13. Don't write anything for 2 more years.
14. Come up with a REALLY AWESOME NEW IDEA!
15. Release 6 chapters.
16. Stop writing for 2 months and counting, despite loving the story.

Simple as that! - Brandon Rhea^(talk) 23:38, June 29, 2013 (UTC)