stunt_muppet

 

I can’t make them show up, but there are certain things that tend to trigger them, so on occasion I’ll just do those over and over again in hopes of sparking something. Watching an episode/movie or reading a book I’ve already seen/read several (hundred) times tends to do it, since by then I’ve already more than absorbed the plot and can focus on things like characterization quirks, subtext, sub-subtext, and alternative possibilities.

 

That said, what most reliably triggers ideas is needing to do something else. Plotrabbits have a tendency to ambush me while I’m showering, in the wee hours of the morning when I’m supposed to be sleeping, or while I have homework to do.

 

So, in brief: I can’t make them show up, but I can coax with all my might.

 

On occasion, and it’s always a happy day when I do. Fic like that tends to be very fluffy and quite short, however, and even those will probably endure a round or two of editing ere they’re posted.

 

More often, I’ll get ideas for a single entire scene, or chapter, or some such thing, rather than an entire story. I haven’t had a wild-horse bunny since…well, since I wrote that Law and Order drabble with Briscoe and Rodgers. That was my last one.

Ugh. All the time. It’s not so much that I don’t have ideas, because I’ve got plenty of those. It’s just that I don’t know how to commit those ideas to paper in a way that’s not straight analysis or summarizing, or where exactly a story will go after the premise is set up. I have lots of ideas, but out of every, say, ten that I have, maybe three of them will be written down. And one of them will be finished.

I edit as I write. I’ll rewrite a sentence again and again until it works for me; quite often I won’t be able to move on in the story until I’ve got that one part absolutely right. If something doesn’t look right when I reread it, I’ll go back and fix it. These means that, once I’m done, I’m usually completely done; I post right after I’m finished because by then the fic’s on Version 3.5 already. Unfortunately, it also means it takes me forever to finish anything.

 

But yes, I don’t always love editing, but I can’t not edit my work. And I derive a certain perverse satisfaction from being anal and nitpicky around the English language.

Depends on the story. A lot of my stories are collections of one-shots rather than any sort of coherent narrative, so those aren’t hard to end at all. The scenes come to their natural stopping points; the fic ends once there’s been enough chapters and the ‘point’ has been made.

 

Most of my longer fics have a definite end-point in mind when I begin writing them, so once I reach that point, the story’s over. If I honestly don’t know where a fic is going or how it’s going to end, I usually won’t start it, thus saving myself the frustration of getting blocked at the end.

Again, depends. On occasion, the title will be the first thing I’ll think of – generally a random vaguely poetic phrase that came into my head with little prompting, or else a word/phrase I’ve seen somewhere else that seems particularly apt.

 

If I don’t start with a title, it can be difficult to come up with one, as my titles have this distressing tendency to be prosaic and uninteresting until about the fifth go. Generally, I’ll pop in semi-descriptive titles that somehow relate to the story until one “sticks” or sounds good. It doesn’t always work, of course, but it’s got me a few good ones.

*raises hand* With the exception of those few ficlets that just come to me, almost everything I write is intricately plotted out and described before I begin writing, as my frequent rambly meta posts can attest to. The stories I write which have a plot are planned ahead, not just for plot but for characterization and much of the dialogue as well. “Perfects” can attest to this – I didn’t think what I was doing beforehand, and now I’ve completely stalled on it. I don’t like to even start unless I have a plan in mind.

I don’t really consciously choose the POV for my stories or scenes. When the idea comes to me, it’s already from a certain character’s POV; there’s nothing to change, since for me the scene doesn’t exist any other way. On occasion, I’ve contemplated switching from limited-3^rd-person to omniscient 3^rd-person in some fics, but that’s about as big a change as it gets.

I love challenges. I take them almost every chance I get, even if I don’t think I’ll finish them (and I, er…quite often don’t). Challenges help give my ideas structure, give a nucleus of sorts that random bits of unspecified fic can orbit around.

 

Granted, I work best with meme-style challenges, which tend to be short and open-ended, rather than elaborate or lengthy challenges (I’ve never finished a Fanfic 100. Heck, I’ve never finished a Fanfic 25 – I’m still working on one of my 20-fic claims, and I took that about a year ago.) But even having a simple prompt helps. It gives me a direction in which to direct my imaginings.

I want to like writing sex, since the ability to write convincing sex scenes opens up a lot of narrative possibilities, but I don’t. I find it to be more trouble than it’s worth, and far more frustrating than writing almost any other scenario. 

Again, it's all about the planning - I like pondering how a certain character would think and feel during a specified sex scene,  how they'd behave, how they'd respond, under what circumstances they'd get into such a situation, etc. It's actually writing it that's the hard part.