Fandom Snowflake Challenge 2015, day 3
In your own space, talk about your creative process - from what inspires you to what motivates you to how you manage to break through blocks. Does your process change depending on the type of creating you're doing?
A lot of things can serve as inspiration for me: a one-word-prompt, thinking about a character and their motivation, an unusual what-if scenario, or an idea to form a story in a particular pattern. For fanfiction, most of the time I get interested in a character and want to know more about him or her. This leads to thinking about what facts we know from canon and where the open questions are. And then I try to answer those questions with a story. For original fic, I often start with a character in a certain situation and wonder what will happen next.
I have to admit that I hate writing first drafts. I find them hard work and will have to force myself to sit down and write. I recently learned through NaNo that it helps if I don't pay too much attention to the nitty details and just get the overall idea down. It also helps to know that only after writing the shitty first draft (not my words, I'm quoting Anne Lamott here :-D) I get to edit. Since I enjoy editing and am also a sensible person, I write that first draft. Duh!
While I write that first draft, I also plot. Not in meticulous details, but in rough sketches, that get finer the more I learn about the story. It's an itterative process for me, where I switch between writing and plotting. If I plot too much right away, I get blocked because I have too much to think about when writing the first draft. If I don't plot at all, I get lost in the jungle of ideas.
Most of the time, quite early in writing a story, I will also get a feeling about the ending. Not necessarily in terms of plot, but in terms of feeling. Will the story end on a positive/happy note or a sad, angry or desperate one? This gives me an idea about where the story is heading in general. Then, over the course of writing the story, quite often, a theme emerges. The thing the story is about, the message, the lessons the characters have to learn - something along those lines. And this is what helps me to prune the story and get rid of anything that doesn't fit. It also helps me to know what I have to highlight in the story about each character, which scenes to push forward and invest in. (And since I tend to underwrite my first drafts, my betas will often tell me that I have to add more scenes.)
Together, the theme and the feeling at the ending will often result in one final image or scene. And when I come to that scene, I know what I need to do: I need to close that theme and create that feeling for the characters as well as for the reader (sometimes, those feelings are not entirely identical - a character might feel triumph while a reader feels despair, for example). If I used a certain kind of imagery or an important verbal message during the story, I will make sure that it shows up in the final scene as well. If it's possible to use the final scene as a mirror image to the opening scene, I will do that.
The final scene is where it all comes together - and not just in an intellectual way. I also have a physical feeling about the final scene. If it's right, I feel happy, uplifted, sad in a good way, satisfied, relaxed - something along those lines. I just know when I'm done, because all the markers say I am.
Over the years, I've been collecting more and more aspects I want to pay attention to in my writing. Especially when it comes to writing o-fic, where there is a much bigger demand on world-building, character building and details, I find that I like to have checklists ready. Not as a cage, but as a guideline. I'm a huge fan of creative writing books, and I try to make summaries of what I read (and then try to post what I've learned from the books but often fail because there is only so much time in one day). I find that talking about writing with other authors and beta-readers as well as studying other writers improves my own writing, since there are so many different creative pathways and yet there are some aspects of the craft that are quite universal. A good text strikes a balance between applying the basic rules of the craft and the rebell act of creative freedom. And since I'm a nut who likes who likes project management far too much, my next goal is to define a creative process that carries me through writing one book after the other (with checklists and rebellion both available). :-)
Ooops - I really didn't think I had that much to talk about this subject. *blush*
The only other creative process I enjoy is cooking. I prefer it to baking, since you can be a lot messier with cooking than with baking. Baking reminds me too much of chemistry labs, while cooking feels a lot like playing and can almost always be saved somehow. :-)
A lot of things can serve as inspiration for me: a one-word-prompt, thinking about a character and their motivation, an unusual what-if scenario, or an idea to form a story in a particular pattern. For fanfiction, most of the time I get interested in a character and want to know more about him or her. This leads to thinking about what facts we know from canon and where the open questions are. And then I try to answer those questions with a story. For original fic, I often start with a character in a certain situation and wonder what will happen next.
I have to admit that I hate writing first drafts. I find them hard work and will have to force myself to sit down and write. I recently learned through NaNo that it helps if I don't pay too much attention to the nitty details and just get the overall idea down. It also helps to know that only after writing the shitty first draft (not my words, I'm quoting Anne Lamott here :-D) I get to edit. Since I enjoy editing and am also a sensible person, I write that first draft. Duh!
While I write that first draft, I also plot. Not in meticulous details, but in rough sketches, that get finer the more I learn about the story. It's an itterative process for me, where I switch between writing and plotting. If I plot too much right away, I get blocked because I have too much to think about when writing the first draft. If I don't plot at all, I get lost in the jungle of ideas.
Most of the time, quite early in writing a story, I will also get a feeling about the ending. Not necessarily in terms of plot, but in terms of feeling. Will the story end on a positive/happy note or a sad, angry or desperate one? This gives me an idea about where the story is heading in general. Then, over the course of writing the story, quite often, a theme emerges. The thing the story is about, the message, the lessons the characters have to learn - something along those lines. And this is what helps me to prune the story and get rid of anything that doesn't fit. It also helps me to know what I have to highlight in the story about each character, which scenes to push forward and invest in. (And since I tend to underwrite my first drafts, my betas will often tell me that I have to add more scenes.)
Together, the theme and the feeling at the ending will often result in one final image or scene. And when I come to that scene, I know what I need to do: I need to close that theme and create that feeling for the characters as well as for the reader (sometimes, those feelings are not entirely identical - a character might feel triumph while a reader feels despair, for example). If I used a certain kind of imagery or an important verbal message during the story, I will make sure that it shows up in the final scene as well. If it's possible to use the final scene as a mirror image to the opening scene, I will do that.
The final scene is where it all comes together - and not just in an intellectual way. I also have a physical feeling about the final scene. If it's right, I feel happy, uplifted, sad in a good way, satisfied, relaxed - something along those lines. I just know when I'm done, because all the markers say I am.
Over the years, I've been collecting more and more aspects I want to pay attention to in my writing. Especially when it comes to writing o-fic, where there is a much bigger demand on world-building, character building and details, I find that I like to have checklists ready. Not as a cage, but as a guideline. I'm a huge fan of creative writing books, and I try to make summaries of what I read (and then try to post what I've learned from the books but often fail because there is only so much time in one day). I find that talking about writing with other authors and beta-readers as well as studying other writers improves my own writing, since there are so many different creative pathways and yet there are some aspects of the craft that are quite universal. A good text strikes a balance between applying the basic rules of the craft and the rebell act of creative freedom. And since I'm a nut who likes who likes project management far too much, my next goal is to define a creative process that carries me through writing one book after the other (with checklists and rebellion both available). :-)
Ooops - I really didn't think I had that much to talk about this subject. *blush*
The only other creative process I enjoy is cooking. I prefer it to baking, since you can be a lot messier with cooking than with baking. Baking reminds me too much of chemistry labs, while cooking feels a lot like playing and can almost always be saved somehow. :-)