#saw a method for lining to a draft to keep it internal and I wanna try that

[bigbarabelly]

Ah my shits getting flagged

How tf do u tag for n sfw without it immediately trigfering what I’m assuming is an app sweep for it

Regardless I need to find a better censoring workaround anyway and learn preview box dimensions

[pasiphile]

idk if this is something you've either a) ever felt the desire to talk about (if not, please excuse the curiosity!) or b) talked about before, but how do you go about writing your ep(f)ics? it's one of those things i've always been curious about because there's plenty of chat about how to start an original novel and plot it etc but usually a good chunk of those hypothetical word counts come down to character building, which is less relevant in fic. any thoughts?

I don’t mind at all! Especially because after writing four (five?) of these fuckers I finally feel like I got the hang of how I actually tackle them.

(that is, the general method. If you're asking about knowing what scenes to write/how to decide what actually happens, there I can't help you. Imo, that's just a case of having imagination)

First a caveat, though: I don’t write chronologically. I know people who do, and honestly it seriously impresses me, but it’s not something that I can do. If you can write chronologically, please do, because you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches. But if you’re like me and you just hop around...

So basically I start out with a vague idea. In Laws that was picking up after ACWNR and showing how they got from there to the point at the start of the series, for TVD it was I wanna show Moriarty’s pov for most of the series, and for the Untamed it was what if post-canon someone starts fucking around with the Yin Metal again. Basic, huge ideas, that give me a start, a middle and an ending.

This is also the point where some people outline. Again, if you can, great! do it! give yourself structure! I personally keep trying and it never works so I’ve given up, and try to keep track in my head instead.

Once I’ve got the basic idea, I basically just... start writing. By which I mean, more specifically, that whenever I have a bit of free time I retreat into daydream-land and start imagining things that might happen. Anything might be a jumping-off point there; a thing I read in another story, an interesting meta I read, a detail I saw in canon. Anything that fits the general storyshape. 

(A lot of those scenes start their life in the space before I fall asleep).

The trick after that is to get to a keyboard asap, before I forget what I actually had in mind, and write it down (this is also why fic fragments tend to show up in the notes app of my phone). Once I start writing those down, usually I go beyond what I initially thought of - they write themselves, in a way.

If you do that often enough, eventually you’ll end up with a critical mass of scenes. I do try to put those scenes roughly in the right place, chronologically, but that’s only an estimate. This phase two is basically one giant shuffle game: trying to see which scenes can follow on which, whether there’s a logical connection between them, and then cut-paste and adapt all over the place. 

I don’t actually edit in this phase, to be clear. I might put in a placeholder and a note if I have an idea what needs to show up to make two scenes link to each other, but I don’t go any deeper. At this point, you need a bird’s view on your story.

Once that’s in place, I start the hard work, which is taking those scenes and turning them into a coherent whole. Basically I just start reading at the start (of the story/chapter) and then run through the story as if I’m watching a series. The bulk of it has been written by now, so I now have room to write in the connective bits, the references to previous happenings, more internal thoughts and reflections...

And at the end of that phase, you’ve got something that resembles a (clunky, messy, occasionally weird) story. 

So then I reread. This is usually when the bigger things start showing up, the character arcs and relationship-building. Some of that is already present, but it isn’t until I’ve got the whole thing in front of me that I actually start seeing the patterns. I try not to edit straight in the text at this point (which is why I often put the file in epub on my ereader, so I don’t get tempted) and take notes about general trends. Detailed editing is later.

(sidenote: fanfic needs less character building than original fiction, but you still need character development. if you’re writing an actual long thing instead of series of vignettes or one-shots, the way the characters are at the start can’t be the way they are in the end. Something’s gotta change, both in terms of characterisation as in relationships, otherwise you’re just going to end up with a boring story.)

And once that’s done, the process starts over, basically. Based on the notes, I start writing missing scenes and shuffling around scenes again if needed, and while I’m at it, I also try to edit the more detailed things. Said editing process keeps going until right at the end: I line-edit in AO3 one last time, just before I post, with the chapter copy-pasted from words straight into the drafts there.

Is this an efficient, logical or neat system? Fuck no. But it’s the only one that works for me, and I’ve gotten some good results with it. 

It is, however, a rather intuitive system, because I know roughly how stories work, how tension and character building works etc. When I read, I tend to sense where it needs a cliffhanger, or a spanner in the works, or a big dramatic reveal. If you don’t have that sense (which honestly, I think you can only get if you read/watch/consume shitloads of fiction) you’ll need a way more structured approach - but those have never worked for me, tbh.

TL;DR

Phase 0: have an idea. can be as vague as you want, but try to know the beginning, middle and end of the story. 

Phase 1: just fucking write. give no fucks about writing ‘complete’ scenes, just put it down on the page, even if it’s just a dialogue fragment. try to put things roughly in the right place but don’t spend too much thought on that. Put all your energy into imagining things, and then scribbling them down as soon as possible before you forget them again.

Phase 2: shuffle. Move the scenes around until you’ve got an idea what happens and in what order. Don’t bother edting. Just try to get one coherent plotline going.

Phase 3: read-and-write. Start from the beginning and walk yourself through the story, writing as much connective bits and embellishing everything you can.

Phase 4: read-and-check. Read your story as if you were a reader, not the author, and try to see if it makes sense, what the characters’ arcs are, what the story tension is like, and what’s happening plotwise. 

Phase 5: Adjust accordingly, ie Rinse and repeat.