#(a girl who unvillingly visits people’s dreams and one night wanders into the dreamscape of something decidedly not human)

[nellasbookplanet]

With Worldhoppers nearing its end, I'm thinking about future projects (spoilers: it won’t be fanfic, because I've already let this eat a year of my time and I'm itching to get back to my personal projects). And what the hell, I get to talk about my original writing and process on my own blog (sorry to everyone who’s here for critrole stuff).

What I'm most curious about is whether I can approach my original work the same way I have fic writing. Because the thing is, I'm actually terrible at finishing things. I rewrite and revise and eventually get bored and wander off into my next project. Before Among the Nein, I had only ever fully finished one story, and the only reason I did was because I was under a hard deadline (and also a hard maximum word count of 90k, which was painful but ultimately for the best because wow I can go off on unnecessary tangents when so permitted).

But when writing fic, not only did I finish the story, I did so in a fairly respectable amount of time. And I've been wondering why, and if I can translate that into my own work.

One aspect is obviously the feedback. Fic writing comes with immediate validation after every posted chapter, urging me to quickly write the next to get another kick. That part I obviously won’t be able to translate into original writing. What else?

I'm definitely more structured in my fic writing. I did outlines and research before too, but with fic I've taken a very chronological, one chapter at a time approach, with a very meticulous outline that I update/change frequently. Normally I'm more sporadic in my writing, doing random scenes according to a vague plan and tying them together retroactively. With fic I can’t do that, seeing as I want to post every chapter as it was written, and I can’t exactly post them with big holes in them. I still do random scenes, but they are generally random scenes meant for the same chapter, not wildly different parts of the story.

Obviously my fic writing process has drawbacks. There’s very little time to revise or add things like foreshadowing (though having a good outline helps in that regard!). I'm really curious to try and merge these two methods and see if I land on something that’ll actually work well in the long run.