#y did i say tfat

[beetlebongos]

notice how all the perfumes u once loved smell nothing like they used to and that's fine cuz now they're probably more sustainably made but it sucks cuz you'll never get that smell back and that smell was more real to u than the full memory

[tossertozier]

do you have any tips for organizing your writing thoughts i feel like you said you used google docs but i can’t remember

i’ve been saying i’d do this forever so this is just me rambling about my writing process under the cut

DEFINITELY use google docs.

once i wanted to be one of those really cool people (different fandom) who does those super artsy updates that update with something like 20k and fancy. it was a two shot, i posted the first chapter and when  i got about 16.5k into the second, my computer died. lost the entire thing. i was so fucking upset i could never re-write it so that work went completely unfinished.

like and i knew before that to switch to google docs but i couldn’t get in the habit? definitely don’t make the same mistake i did, i was such an idiot. 

generally i get hit with a concept. i posted like two days ago that i have a new AU idea. (perpetually AU’s for me, way more fun for me) HONESTLY, normally, the first thing i do is message a friend about it (rip @heterophobickaspbrak forever listening to me ramble) OR, before i had fandom friends, i made posts. way way back in my blog, you’ll see a number of things that are just. ideas of mine. things that came to be a fic: like on pointe and tfoas. there’s a bunch of other ones, though. reddie as anastasia, this complicated lawyer thing, a falsettos AU. i talk through general plot points and character archs. when i didn’t have a fandom tumblr or fandom friends, i took out my feelings for &tfat on one of my walls and basically pepe-silvia-ed it. 

just bc i remember the ##conception of &tfat better than anything else (not true on pointe’s just generally more …. nsfw) , that’s gonna be our p of reference here. so, &tfat started the way a lot of fics do, i think, with like. an idea for a scene specifically. lemme say: first things first, if i have a strong idea for a scene, i sit down and i write it out. it will never be as good as it will be the first time if you sit on it and you wait. if it’s like…coming to life in your mind, then sit down and write it.

my google docs generally look like 

(half complete scene)

brief description of next scene

(one specific piece of dialogue i like that’s another chapter away)

and i generally try and keep it in chronological order.

in the case of &tfat, i then had to take a step back and say “how the fuck did we get here.” like who were the characters, and how have they come to be this. and then i start building from there, most of the time other little scenes that lead up to that moment.

that being said, i know the general “arch” of where we’re going in a fic, generally by the time i sit down and say “okay. i’m writing the first chapter now.” even if i don’t necessarily know how we get there.  it starts to become more apparent about where we’re going as we go. it’s cheese-y as fuck, but i let my characters talk to me just as much as i manipulate them. by the time we hit midway point in a fic (like on pointe) i can generally give a chapter by chapter break down of exactly what’s going to happen. the rest of on pointe is planned out basically scene by scene, even if it’s:

description of scene

“dialogue that’s very indiciative of this scenes general direction”

description of scene

in my google docs. 

but normally, even if i don’t know exactly where every arch is going (and i don’t always. there’s a major arch in &tfat that i don’t know how it ends, and there’s another MAJOR arch that i don’t know how we ~get~ to the end.) the 1. thing i do know before i start writing chapter one is the //point//.

like, full disclosure abuot me: i find love stories very uninteresting. none of my characters in anything exist to be matched with each other, and nothing i write will ever be about like “this is how so and so fell in love.” there’s always going to be some kind of point. there’s always gonna be some kind of takeaway or (in the case of a fic where there’s one characters pov for the entire thing, a lesson they learned from either the entire debacle, or their relationship or etc.) i always know what this is before i start chapter one. 

welp. i can’t say any of this constitutes as tips or advice because i’m trash who can’t write, but this is a little bit more detail about my writing process!