#as in i have 'pov' written as 'point of view' and fixed a typo in chapter 8

[waywardsalt]

bellum x linebeck chapter summary drafts that won those polls:

chapter 8

chapter 14

chapter 20

[greenerteacups]

17, 24, 30

17. Do you have a writing routine?

Yes! It's the first thing I do in the morning. It wakes me up and puts me in the right headspace to do work, because it's a thinking activity, but it's also fun, so it's not like I have to go straight from breakfast into Business. I make myself a cup of coffee and usually write from around 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM, then go do whatever, and sometimes nip around to finish up with another hour in the evenings.

24. How do you choose whose POV to write in?

It's weird, because story ideas almost always come to me with a POV baked in. I think of them as emotional experiences for the characters inside them, and specifically the emotional experiences of the POV character. For example, "The Climb" can't really happen from anyone but Severus's point of view, because the story is so tied to his internality and development. Same with "Lionheart"; I suppose I could have written it from Hermione's perspective, but I think the most interesting development is happening to Draco. He's the lynchpin of the story, so it makes more sense for me to write from his head.

30. How much do you edit your fics?  Do you edit as you write or wait until you finish the first draft?

I try not to edit while I'm writing, but I'm not very good at it. Whenever I read something I've written, my first instinct is to nitpick and find ways that it could be improved with more fluency, more Usually I'll do a draft, then go write the next one, and come back to edit it twice before it's published. By "edit" I mean major revisions, scenes deleted, lines changed, plot elements fixed or moved around. Then the second pass is for fluency and extraneous words, so I think of it as a "pruning" edit. The last pass happens right before publication on Friday mornings, to try and catch any last typos or formatting glitches before it goes to press.

[chelsfic]

Chapter 4/18 - Safety - Bucky Barnes x OC Soulmate AU

Masterlist

Summary: Soulmate AU! Bucky/OFC. Our soulmarks appear at the moment of our soulmate’s birth. The Asset’s mark appears in the Spring of 1987. The words imprinted into the skin of his forearm. “Please! Don’t hurt me…”

A/N: I wrote this fic over the course of 2017-2018 and it was originally published on AO3. Recently, I decided to do some light revisions in order to fix inconsistencies in the POV, some awkward diction and typos. Please note–I’m aware that a lot of people love this fic just as it is. This is not a rewrite, I won’t be changing major plot points and I’m purposely leaving most of the writing alone. Just sprucing it up. Since I wrote this before I started posting fic to Tumblr, I decided to take the opportunity of posting the revised chapters here as I edit them. If you got to the end of this A/N: thank you!!!

Warnings: Kidnapping, Angst, Violence, Eventual happy ending

---

The Soldier leaped nimbly down the fire escape, his arm clamped firmly around the girl’s legs, securing her over his shoulder. He heard her let out little huffs of breath with each bump along the way and felt her hands desperately clutching the back of his jacket for security.

“Hey! You...oh, god, I don’t even know your name! You can’t just haul me off wherever you please. I’m a person!” she shouted into his back but he ignored her, hitting the pavement of the alley behind the apartment building and sprinting to the vehicle parked inside it’s entrance. 

She caught sight of the car as he swung her forward, opened the rear driver’s side seat and moved to stuff her inside. “Oh, no you don’t!” she struggled against him rather pathetically. The soldier felt a flare of aggravation and his instincts were screaming at him to just knock her out and be done with it. But the very thought of trying to hurt her sent a strike of pain through his chest and he ignored the instinct. It only took a few extra seconds to stuff her inside without violence and slam the door shut. Kind of like stuffing a prank snake back inside the peanut jar. 

Where the hell had that come from?

The Soldier shook his head as if shooing an annoying fly before sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. He carefully pulled the car out of the alley and accelerated down the street. He heard the girl huffing and puffing in the back seat and glanced at her in the rear view mirror. She buckled her seat belt and folded her arms across her chest in an obviously defensive posture, turning her head to stare out the window and avoiding his gaze. He pointed his eyes back to the road and, after a moment, heard the tiniest sniffle from the back seat. His blood froze in his veins. Was she…? The Winter Soldier was not programmed to comfort damsels in distress. And the tiny secret self that still lived inside his head was horrified to contemplate that he’d made his soulmate cry.

---

Sophie sat in the back seat of the car, clutching her arms over her chest and trying to suppress the burning edge of tears that threatened to cap off this exceptionally horrid couple of days. She couldn’t stop the tiny sniffle and noticed that the man’s shoulders seemed to stiffen at the sound. She felt a constricting in her chest and the brush of his emotions against hers. Guilt. Well...good.

He should feel guilty. For manhandling her...for basically kidnapping her! She’d spent years pondering the nature of the words written on her skin and never once had she considered that the real danger might be from her soulmate himself.

“Where are we going?” she asked. He ignored her, removing a slim phone from the side pocket of his cargo pants and making a call. Sophie tried to burn laser vision holes through the back of his head while he waited for whoever he was calling to pick up.

Finally he spoke in that deep emotionless voice of his, “Target acquired….yes.” 

He hung up.

Excuse me?! 

“Um...did you just say ‘target acquired’? Referring to me? I’m a target?”

He glanced at her in the rear view mirror again. “You are...my soulmate.”

“Yes...I am!” she said with some indignation. “Why did you call me a target? Who were you talking to? Where are you taking me?”

Sophie watched as his face tensed in annoyance. Apparently he wasn’t used to people questioning him. Well...get used to it bud, I’m your true love. She felt humiliation as the tears she’d been trying to suppress suddenly spilled over. It was just too much. She’d been caught up in a gunfight, interrogated, and kidnapped by a man who was supposed to be her soulmate. She fell against the car door and sobbed angrily.

“You’re-you’re supposed to be a hero! That’s what the words mean, don’t they? You’re supposed to save me not kidnap me!”

His gloved hands tightened on the steering wheel and she felt the car accelerate even faster.

---

“You will present the target to your handlers at base 7-9, confirm.”

“...Yes.”

Base 7-9 . The Winter Soldier knew that location. He’d delivered many targets there for Hydra over the years. Located outside of D.C. it would be about a 5 hour drive. It was...a conditioning facility. A place they took valuable assets to break their will and place them under Hydra’s control. He’d personally assisted in...converting assets to Hydra. It was never a pleasant process. While the girl broke down in the back seat the soldier sat in silence, but inside he was experiencing a fury of pain and emotion. He wasn’t made for this. He wasn’t supposed to feel. But the bond with this girl wouldn’t allow his programming to suppress his feelings as usual. Instead his programming raged against the sudden tumult inside him. He felt like his head would explode but he continued driving. He needed...to think. He needed time to think.

He drove on until they made it to the city limits, finally getting on the highway for a few miles before stopping at the first available motel. When he’d neglected to respond to her hysterics the girl had settled down in the back seat. But he could still hear the ragged edge of her breathing indicating that she was crying and trying to be quiet about it. Again he felt the sour taste of guilt in his mouth. His life was suddenly more complicated than it had ever been. He pulled off the highway, parking the car at the very rear of the lot and killing the ignition. He took out his phone again and tapped at the screen.

Message: Stopping for the night. ETA: 1300

A response appeared almost immediately.

Message: Negative. Proceed directly to 7-9. Confirm.

The Asset stared at the screen for several seconds. The fingers of his metal hand tightening around the phone. The muscles in his back and shoulders went rigid with stress. When he felt the feather light touch of the girl’s finger tips brush his arm he very nearly startled. He turned his head slightly. Sophie had slid forward in the back seat and was leaning into the space between the front seats. She stared up at him, locking eyes. He took in her face, red from crying, her blue eyes looked glassy and tired. She stared at him with a sad kind of hope. It made him feel...awful. She didn’t speak, just looked at him.

The soldier cleared his throat, “We’re stopping for the night.” He powered down the cell phone and returned it to his pocket. 

Sophie glanced at the glowing sign for the motel and let out a shaky breath, “Okay. On our way to...where?”

“Let’s get inside first.” He opened his door and shifted in his seat to get out of the car. 

“Wait,” she hadn’t moved from her position. “What is your name? You’re my soulmate and I don’t even know your name.”

The soldier sat there for a long time, his brows furrowed in confusion. “I...I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean you don’t have one? Everyone has a name.”

“Not me. Let’s go.”

Tagged:

@watsonwise​

[miriannemiri]

do you have any tips for us cool kids who have no idea how to revise their own writing? how do you do it?

Oh, you’ve done it now!  I’m both an English teacher and have a degree in creative writing.  Prepare for a long answer.  :)

Revision is a personal process, with tricks that work for one person not necessarily working for someone else, so keep that in mind.  What works for me may not work for you.  So I’ll try to give you a broader range of options than merely what I do.

First, a quick definition, since I am a teacher.  Revision is big changes, rather than editing, which is fixing smaller mistakes.  It may include taking scenes out, adding new scenes, moving things around so the story flows better…  Changing up dialogue, adding characters, taking characters out.  These are all examples of what you might do.  So fixing up a piece of writing ideally goes through several stages, from draft, through revision, through editing, and through a final proofreading process for anything that slipped through the cracks.  Therefore, tools for revision are in some ways broader than tools for editing.

One trick that I don’t use but that several of my teachers advocated is to put aside everything you’ve already written, out of sight, and rewrite.  Then compare the two versions and see which you like better, combining them into something that works well for you.  It’s a trick I find immensely frustrating, but for some people, it works very well.  Something I find more useful is to write a scene I’m struggling with from a different point of view, to get a different view of the scene.  I probably won’t actually shift the story to someone else’s POV, I prefer to stay in one character’s head as much as possible and at most have brief interludes from others, it does give me a deeper understanding of both characters and scene.

But that’s for reworking scenes that you know aren’t working somehow but aren’t sure what to do with.  Other tools for revising can include, but are not limited to:

Focusing on a single issue for a reread.  So, look at how one character is working.  Focus on a single scene.  Trying to deal with the whole thing at once can be incredibly overwhelming and make you feel like quitting before you’ve started, whether you’re working on a short story or a novel.  You can also focus on dialogue for a reread.  Or look at description.  World-building.  Characterization.

Getting someone else’s opinion.  I realize that this is in some ways a bit of an obvious statement, but the value of it can’t really be overlooked.  A lot of writers, and I’m one of them, suffer from the assumption that the reader lives in their head or from seeing what they think they wrote rather than what they actually did.  So a character’s motivation may be perfectly clear to the writer and not come across well to the reader.  (This also applies to smaller things in the editing process; there are a few typos that I make regularly and read right over, because I know what I meant.)  This is something that takes time, and you probably want to share it with someone you trust.  I have a very thick skin about my writing and can take pretty much any criticism, but that isn’t true for a lot of writers, so it’s something to be aware of in yourself.  If you’re a little touchy about criticism of your writing, tell the person you’re having read it over.  They can probably put things a bit differently, so it feels less like criticism.  (And I may put a few tips for those offering critique or beta-reading at the bottom of this, now I’m thinking of it.)  Regardless, it’s much better that both of you know that’s an issue than the writer stewing over it or getting upset.

You can also ask a person to read for something specifically, if you’re not sure about it or know it’s an issue for you.  If I know a character doesn’t feel quite right in a certain scene, I can tell my reader and see if they have any suggestions.  Of course, having them read it cold can also be more helpful, because they won’t come into that scene with my bias about it, so it’s a balance.

Naturally, having someone else read over your work is time consuming, requires having someone who is willing, and is a cooperative process that simply isn’t always possible.  There are some tricks you can use yourself to try to get a better handle on revision process.

Having it read aloud to you, by someone else, by your computer, or by recording yourself reading it and playing it back, can give you a different perspective on things.  I hate this; it’s incredibly awkward for me.  One of my best friends going through school loved it.  She always caught so many things this way.

Also, try reading it backwards.  More scene by scene than paragraph by paragraph.  It lets you analyze scenes more individually than where they fit in the story as a whole.

In addition, if you originally typed the story, try rewriting parts of it by hand.  Again, a different way of accessing the work can help.

Also, the simplest thing to do, but also one of the most effective?  Put it aside for a while.  Sleep on it.  Leave it alone for a few days.  Come back to it with fresh eyes.  This reduces your own frustration with it but also helps with the whole seeing what you thought you wrote rather than what you actually did.

I hope that helps.  If you have more specific questions or want more details, feel free to ask.  I enjoy talking about this.  And this post has gotten long enough I’ll leave critique suggestions for another time.

[thesummoningdark]

Fic writer questions: 5, 14, 21, 29?

5. Share one of your strengths.

I don’t know. It’s a hard one to judge from the inside. I’ve been told I’m good at imagery, at creating an atmosphere and a sense of what the setting is like with relatively sparse bits of description. Obviously I’m going in with a pretty solid mental picture of the setting I’m describing, so it’s hard for me to tell how effectively it comes across, but it’s good to hear that other people get a sense of it.

I don’t know if it’s a strength exactly, but something I’ve noticed about my writing that I like is the way I see the narrative changing depending on the character I’m writing. Lately I’ve seen it most in writing for mag7, switching between writing Goody and Billy: the way each character speaks and thinks tends to seep into the narrative when I’m writing from their point of view. The things they’ll notice about a particular person or place are different, so that changes the details given to set the scene. More than that, the style of the narrative changes. Writing from Goody’s point of view involves a lot of florid, metaphor-heavy imagery, more flowing sentence structure, more extravagant vocabulary. Narrative written from Billy’s point of view is concise, observational, matter of fact. Someday I’d really love to write something that alternates between their POVs to really showcase that difference.

14.  What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

“Write what you know” is pretty hilarious, especially given that in my non-fanwork based writing endeavours I lean heavily toward scifi and fantasy. I also hate that “write every day no matter how uninspired you feel!” advice. I’ve been there, and as it turns out, forcing out poor-quality shit that I hate is not going to move me forward - it’s just going to leave me dreading having to find a way to fix it as well as figuring out how to write the rest.

Oh and “Don’t use this common word which means exactly what you need! Use one from this list of obscure synonyms with wildly different connotations that I lifted from a thesaurus!”

But there is no piece of advice that annoyed me more than Chuck Palahniuk and his “From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs.  These include:  Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires....”, because it assumes that anyone reading is too fucking stupid to know how to use those words effectively. It assumes that forcing you to omit them is the only way to make you show instead of tell.

Anyone who has ever told you “never do X” is peddling oversimplified bollocks and needs to fuck off.

Conversely, I think the best is probably from Neil Gaiman. “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

...I won’t lie to you, zero. Usually I write quite quickly and edit as I go, so if it feels like it’s flowing well I’ll generally just do a quick skim for typos before I throw it up. I do reread after I post, which is uh. When the majority of typos get caught.

29.  If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

I may or may not have agreed to write a companion piece to @thrillingest‘s soulmate fic once upon a time. One day I’ll get my shit together and actually write more than the opening passage of it.