#a blatant excuse to plug all my favorite fics

[internerdionality]

Question game! Tagged by @dragonmuse and @thetardigrape 💕🙏🏻😊

if you're a writer and you see this, consider yourself tagged if you want!

Do you write in order?

Nope. Frequently quite the opposite. I tend to start with the climactic scenes of a fic, the big emotional cruxes, and then figure out how to get the characters there.

There's definitely exceptions, especially when writing more humorous or lighthearted fics, and I've been experimenting more in the last year with posting works-in-progress, which requires writing much more sequentially than I used to!

WDYDWADS and A Fucking Duel, my most popular fics so far, each started with a very cracky premise and I had no clear idea where I was going when I started with them. I had the occasional out of order moment—I've been sitting on the next chapter I'll be posting of WDYDWADS since July, because I wrote it and then realized a bunch of other stuff needed to happen first, and the third chapter of A Fucking Duel was written before the second. But mostly they were written in order and I posted up each chapter before finishing the next.

But my longer fics like Soaked to the Skin and Mutually Beneficial were written much more chaotically. Chapters 17 & 18 of Soaked to the Skin have some of the earliest scenes I wrote for that verse. It's been a bit longer since I wrote Mutually Beneficial, so I don't remember the exact order, but I know that the moment in Chapter 14 where Clark goes to his knees was the first one I envisioned and one of the earliest ones I wrote.

How fully formed does your writing come out the first try?

I tend to think over the scenes first, and then workshop sentences and paragraphs as I'm writing them, so it depends what you mean by "first try." Most of the time, the fic as you would read it after my first fully written draft is pretty close to the final version. It's just fine-tuning after that, unless something isn't working.

However, sometimes something isn't working, and then it can change a lot. For example, the aforementioned Chapters 17 & 18 of Soaked to the Skin were originally one chapter, and all from the Lucius' POV. After I'd written a bunch of the rest of the fic, I realized that we desperately needed to see what Izzy was thinking during it, so I ended up splitting it in two, expanding both parts, and flipping the POV in the second half. That doesn't happen to me very often, but pretty much every longfic I've written has at least one chapter that ended up getting overhauled, sometimes multiple times. The one I tend to remember with agony is Chapter 9 of Welcome to the Mouth of Hell (please mind the tags if you follow that link)—I actually swapped out one of the major characters in that scene twice before finally figuring out how to make it work.

How many drafts do you go through?

Well, that depends on what you consider a draft, lol. The longer and more serious the fic is, the more I tend to pore over it. I also tend to reread and fine-tune earlier chapters of a longfic to get back into the right mindset before writing more, so chapters written earlier may end up getting fiddled with a lot more than later chapters. But it's all a pretty incremental process, so I don't usually have multiple "drafts" of the entire fic in the way I did when turning in assignments in school.

If we're counting every time the text changes as a different draft, though—at least two? At the very least, I'll write out a fic in Google Docs, import it into AO3, and read it over again in the rich text editor, looking for import errors and fine-tuning as I go. I think the most I've ever gone over a chapter before posting it is probably around ten times? I do also reread over my old, posted work sometime (especially the smut, that's why I write smut!), and I'll fix typos and fine-tune sentences even years later if I notice them.

So an old smut like A Private Nightmare... and Fantasy, I've probably gone through three or four "drafts" since it was originally posted. As far as drafts that are substantially different from each other though, the record is three, for that chapter linked above.

Tell me about your process.

Well, I think I covered a lot of it as I blathered on through the previous answers! I tend to seize on something that seems important or interesting (preferably both!) to me, whether it's a dynamic between two people that I couldn't get out of my heard, or a piece of emotional growth that I went through and want to model, or exploring a sexual kink or orientation that resonated with me, just a particular premise that I thought was funny! (Or well, sometimes it's just 'write the smut you want to see in the world'...)

I usually try to have at least the broad strokes of what I'm going to write worked out before I start, although as mentioned previously, there are exceptions! With longer fics, I write outlines—I'll use the heading feature of Google Docs to lay out the main beats, then block out how many chapters I think I'll need, usually with a little summary of what I'm trying to do with each one.

I get somewhat overly married to (what I think are) clever story structures sometimes—for example, the alternating POVs in Soaked to the Skin, or each chapter of A Fucking Duel aligning to a number in The 10 Duel Commandments. I have one outlined WIP that using a four-person rotating POV. We'll, ahh, see how that goes if I ever start actually writing it.