#mary pea soup still talking extensively about the road goes ever on? it's more likely than you think

[marypsue]

30, 33, 39 for writing ask meme?

[from this meme]

Sorry, meant to answer this sooner but then *gestures to All Of That*

30. Have you ever written something that was out of your comfort zone? If so, what was it, and how did it affect your approach to writing fic thereafter?

Frequently! Mostly it's in terms of content rather than form, I'm just now realising, although the sheer length of the road goes ever on was a challenge in itself. That was also the fic with the broadest scope I've ever attempted - I'd written full, mostly-original plots before, I'd written canon-continuation fics before, I'd written ensemble casts before, but never anything on that scale, with so many moving parts.

It was, also, mmmmmaybe only the second fic I'd written where a Serious Social Issue that doesn't personally affect me had a meaningful impact on the storyline (in this case, Billy Hargrove's racism and the way the show swept it under the rug) and I was Not Sure I was gonna get it right. (Still not entirely sure I did, in fact, get it right, and not sure if I'll ever be entirely sure on that front, but so far the response has been positive.)

Also, all of the Grauntie Ford series, the institutionalisation stuff in Reincarnation Blues, the few times I've written non-fade-to-black sex scenes, and - it will look hilarious next to these very serious things to be concerned about - writing accents for Bunny and North from Rise of the Guardians and Fiddleford McGucket. Listen. Getting a distinctive accent - with dialect and slang - right in text is hard.

Mostly what I've taken away from these experiences is that I am frequently my own harshest critic; taking in as much as you can that exposes you to other people's thoughts and experiences and being curious and interested and sincere will take you a long way toward understanding things that you may never have personal experience with; and that it's good to be careful and thoughtful and deliberate when you approach a touchy subject, but being scared of getting it wrong will just make you avoid it or overwrite it into infinity and never get it finished, and it'll actually end up the worse for it. Also that having written something that scares you once makes it easier to do a second time. And how to plan my way through an original plot ahead of time instead of figuring huge chunks of the Dreaded Middle out as I go, which has been immeasurably valuable.

Also that yes, writing accents well is hard, but word choice ends up being like 90% of it.

33. If you write chaptered fics, what’s your ideal chapter length to write? Is it different from your ideal chapter length to read?

Once upon a time, my chapters tended to settle at about 3,000 words. These days, it's more in the neighbourhood of 7,000, which I think is also a nice comfortable length to read - long enough to feel meaty, but not so long that it gets tiring or you start losing track of what happened at the beginning.

I don't generally choose wordcounts for chapters on purpose, though. I tend to go until I've finished my thought, and then stick in a chapter break. On occasion, if a particular chapter's feeling overlong or too-short, I might rearrange where the chapter break goes, or even shuffle a few scenes, but that's a pretty rare occurrence, since I also tend to write chronologically and with my scenes in a pretty fixed order.

39. Is any aspect of your writing process inspired by other writers or people? If so, who?

All of it all of it all of it all of it all of it. Great artists steal, right?

I have in the past made extensive use of many many things lifted from Terry Pratchett's pockets without his permission or, indeed, knowledge, but perhaps most memorably the idea of writing four hundred words per day (or some similar small, achievable milestone). Do I actually do this regularly? No, but it's a good idea.