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I'm a teacher. I HAD to learn something from this.
With a great deal of pacing and some serious marathon typing sessions, I finished my fic draft on Sunday. (I think I started typing around 10 AM and finished around 6 PM.) I had taken Saturday off to go to the annual pirate faire that’s within driving distance of my house, and Friday night we had some guests over (which was a whole load of fun…), so I didn’t get to work on it then. So… Sunday was it. I think I wrote upwards of 3,000 words that day, and when I was done I ran around the house telling everyone who would listen to me that I had finished, and then I promptly went to do anything other than stare at a computer screen for a while before I got down to grading the twenty essays I still had lying around that needed to be looked at before 7:30 Monday morning.
I know I have some work to do on my draft, but on the whole I’m very happy. I’ve learned (or been reminded of) quite a bit about myself as a writer as I’ve gone through this process. And because I internalize by writing, here’s my list. (I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging here… I’m just astonished that any of this worked at all, and I’m trying to figure out exactly what I did for the future.)
1. I. Need. Deadlines.
When I stop to think about it, most of the long fics I’ve ever written have had some sort of deadline to them, whether external or self-imposed (I was leaving for school or there was a holiday theme that set a date the fic needed to be finished by). The only one that didn’t took me more than two years to complete. With a deadline, though, I ended up going from 4 or 5 thousand words at the beginning of September to just under 40,000 by the time my draft was done. And that’s not NaNo “I can’t believe I’m actually calling this writing” stuff either… I like most of my scenes. A lot. Freed from the pressure to make everything perfect and given a concrete deadline, I can produce quality and quantity.
2. I need a plan.
I will never be one of those people who is able to write without an outline. When I sat down to start writing, I planned out six or seven sections that I thought the story was going to have, and I added to the outline as the story progressed and the specifics I couldn’t have predicted at the beginning started to become clear. However, sitting down and being able to say, “Today, I’m going to write the scene where….” was key. I didn’t have to ask myself, “What now?” I already knew, and a lot of times I had been planning out said scene in my head a couple of days beforehand. Also, I discovered that any time spent planning out the specifics of complicated actions scenes that involve a lot of people is definitely not time wasted. It makes it so much easier to figure out who is where when and not have people in two places at one time.
3. Feeling like I’ve accomplished other things frees me to write.
I have been incredibly busy this month with grading and school, and yet I have still somehow managed to bang out my draft. I think that writing has actually made me more on top of things because each day when I came home from school, I would think to myself, “Ok, what do I need to get done so that I can survive tomorrow and the rest of the week before I turn off my teaching-brain and turn on my writing-brain?” Then, I would get that stuff done, and because I wanted so badly to get to writing that I got it done quickly. And then, when I began to write, I knew that there was nothing (for a few hours, at least) that was going to get in the way of the creative flow.
4. Being in contact with source material is key when writing fic.
I honestly think that doing the Season 1 re-watch is the reason that character voices and traits were in my head when I needed them. From Djaq’s distinctive cadence to the way Marian sounds when she’s annoyed to the way Guy phrases things when he’s being patronizing… it was fun to play with, and watching canon kept me from straying to far from the basics of characters’ personalities even as I altered events radically.
5. Writing begets more writing.
Once I got rolling, the story kind of… wrote itself. Plot points I wasn’t sure how to connect dovetailed without my realizing it, things that obviously needed to happen worked their way into the story even when they weren’t in the outline, and characters acted and spoke out of what seemed like their own free will. This doesn’t mean it was always easy… I agonized over many sections, especially anything where feelings were involved. Using Guy as my third person limited viewpoint character made writing anything that had to do with emotions like pulling teeth because he either wouldn’t talk or think about them, or they would be this gnarled mess that did not sound anything resembling coherent. But even with those scenes… I told myself that I didn’t have a choice. I had to power through them to get to the next scene, and then the next, and somehow, I always did, and a lot of times, there was something in the hard scene that showed me a new facet of what I was going to write next.
6. I need feedback, but not too much feedback.
I will admit it. I love getting comments on my fic. A lot. However, it has been noted by others far smarter that I that all of those comments an author can get from short fic are a form of instant gratification. If I can get it on a short fic, why bother writing a longer one? So… as I wrote, I made Rae read my latest work. Sometimes I was excited to be sharing it. Sometimes I just needed her to tell me it didn’t completely suck. (She never did, though she let me know when things weren’t working.) A lot of times, she gave me the push in the right direction that I needed. At a very early stage, she made several suggestions that significantly improved major parts of the plot and made Guy a lot more sympathetic, and I don’t think the story would be half as good without her. However, I don’t think it would have gotten written if I’d shared it with too many other people. Then, I would have gotten the comments without finishing the work. I needed to finish the work first.
I can't wait to read what everyone else on the challenge came up with, and to see the artwork! I've never participated in something this BIG before, and the idea of having such an influx of long work into the fandom makes me ridiculously happy.
I know I have some work to do on my draft, but on the whole I’m very happy. I’ve learned (or been reminded of) quite a bit about myself as a writer as I’ve gone through this process. And because I internalize by writing, here’s my list. (I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging here… I’m just astonished that any of this worked at all, and I’m trying to figure out exactly what I did for the future.)
1. I. Need. Deadlines.
When I stop to think about it, most of the long fics I’ve ever written have had some sort of deadline to them, whether external or self-imposed (I was leaving for school or there was a holiday theme that set a date the fic needed to be finished by). The only one that didn’t took me more than two years to complete. With a deadline, though, I ended up going from 4 or 5 thousand words at the beginning of September to just under 40,000 by the time my draft was done. And that’s not NaNo “I can’t believe I’m actually calling this writing” stuff either… I like most of my scenes. A lot. Freed from the pressure to make everything perfect and given a concrete deadline, I can produce quality and quantity.
2. I need a plan.
I will never be one of those people who is able to write without an outline. When I sat down to start writing, I planned out six or seven sections that I thought the story was going to have, and I added to the outline as the story progressed and the specifics I couldn’t have predicted at the beginning started to become clear. However, sitting down and being able to say, “Today, I’m going to write the scene where….” was key. I didn’t have to ask myself, “What now?” I already knew, and a lot of times I had been planning out said scene in my head a couple of days beforehand. Also, I discovered that any time spent planning out the specifics of complicated actions scenes that involve a lot of people is definitely not time wasted. It makes it so much easier to figure out who is where when and not have people in two places at one time.
3. Feeling like I’ve accomplished other things frees me to write.
I have been incredibly busy this month with grading and school, and yet I have still somehow managed to bang out my draft. I think that writing has actually made me more on top of things because each day when I came home from school, I would think to myself, “Ok, what do I need to get done so that I can survive tomorrow and the rest of the week before I turn off my teaching-brain and turn on my writing-brain?” Then, I would get that stuff done, and because I wanted so badly to get to writing that I got it done quickly. And then, when I began to write, I knew that there was nothing (for a few hours, at least) that was going to get in the way of the creative flow.
4. Being in contact with source material is key when writing fic.
I honestly think that doing the Season 1 re-watch is the reason that character voices and traits were in my head when I needed them. From Djaq’s distinctive cadence to the way Marian sounds when she’s annoyed to the way Guy phrases things when he’s being patronizing… it was fun to play with, and watching canon kept me from straying to far from the basics of characters’ personalities even as I altered events radically.
5. Writing begets more writing.
Once I got rolling, the story kind of… wrote itself. Plot points I wasn’t sure how to connect dovetailed without my realizing it, things that obviously needed to happen worked their way into the story even when they weren’t in the outline, and characters acted and spoke out of what seemed like their own free will. This doesn’t mean it was always easy… I agonized over many sections, especially anything where feelings were involved. Using Guy as my third person limited viewpoint character made writing anything that had to do with emotions like pulling teeth because he either wouldn’t talk or think about them, or they would be this gnarled mess that did not sound anything resembling coherent. But even with those scenes… I told myself that I didn’t have a choice. I had to power through them to get to the next scene, and then the next, and somehow, I always did, and a lot of times, there was something in the hard scene that showed me a new facet of what I was going to write next.
6. I need feedback, but not too much feedback.
I will admit it. I love getting comments on my fic. A lot. However, it has been noted by others far smarter that I that all of those comments an author can get from short fic are a form of instant gratification. If I can get it on a short fic, why bother writing a longer one? So… as I wrote, I made Rae read my latest work. Sometimes I was excited to be sharing it. Sometimes I just needed her to tell me it didn’t completely suck. (She never did, though she let me know when things weren’t working.) A lot of times, she gave me the push in the right direction that I needed. At a very early stage, she made several suggestions that significantly improved major parts of the plot and made Guy a lot more sympathetic, and I don’t think the story would be half as good without her. However, I don’t think it would have gotten written if I’d shared it with too many other people. Then, I would have gotten the comments without finishing the work. I needed to finish the work first.
I can't wait to read what everyone else on the challenge came up with, and to see the artwork! I've never participated in something this BIG before, and the idea of having such an influx of long work into the fandom makes me ridiculously happy.