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thefroggDisclaimer: These are my thoughts on what I've learned about writing here on LJ. I figured I might as well share them. What works for me may or may not work for every writer, but by and large I've found the following to be true. Mileage may vary. Do not remove this tag. Caution: contents may be hot. Keep out of reach of children. Do not operate heavy machinery while under the influence. Yada yada yada.
I've been meaning to write this for a long, long time.
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fluffnutter managed to kick my ass into actually doing it.
I've been writing for what seems like forever. I don't have a whole lot of clear memories of a time when I wasn't a writer, or an avid reader.
It's been said time and again that the best ways to learn how to write are to A) write and B) read. But that isn't always going to be the best, or the only way. Learning to write by writing and reading without any other influence is writing and reading in a vacuum, and while you can learn from it, the going will likely be slow, and formulaic. By formulaic, I mean the style of writing will come to mimic the style of the material read at the time that hits most deeply.
Such as when Christopher Stasheff's style of stiff English speech from his Wizard in Rhyme series starts showing up in Transformers fanfic. But I digress.
There will never be a time when I come to believe that writing in a vacuum is superior to that done with intelligent, meaningful feedback - or better yet, within a dialog between writer and reader. And in the last several years -- the years I've been most actively writing and discussing and learning not just the hows of writing, but actually internalizing and becoming aware of the tools used while writing -- that feedback and dialogue has been here, online, and specifically in LJ.
I've been writing for more than twenty years, and I've learned more about the process of writing - not the nuts and bolts of spelling and grammar, but the other things - in the last two years than I did in the near two decades before that. And I have all the people who've commented or criticized or pointed out continuity or characterization errors in my fic, written meta essays pertinent to my writing (of which there are too many to bother counting), written commentary on the shows I watch (I'm looking at you,dragonladyk and matociquala, among others), and written the absolute gems of fiction I could only aspire to match one day to thank. And a very special thank you to those who've been my beta readers, people like fluffnutter and hawk_dancing and ohpuppies and blue_oceandeep to name but a few, without whom my own fic would be so much less than it is.
I've been meaning to write this post because I've wanted to share some of the things I've learned here online, and on LJ.
On Being a Mad Scientist, or Experimenting in Writing Method and Style
I am not a one-style-fits-all writer. And I tend to write on the edges of [large] fandom(s), writing around side characters or characters whose alignments are questionable at best. I don't believe in OTPs, either.
Being experimental, while it has its drawbacks (a limited readership in many cases, for one), has allowed me to flex my writing muscles in ways I don't think picking a style and sticking with it would. I've done flowery prose (LOTR). I've done sparse, stark language (Salt!verse, SPN). I've done linear storylines (too many to list). I've done out of order (Of Innocence & Empathy, Criminal Minds). I've done fic without proper names (Somewhere to Call Home, SGA). I've done crack!fic, and serious fic, and angst and fluff and and and...In the course of well over a hundred fics, there's very little I haven't touched on. (I still have to try my hand at first person POV, because I'm a sucker for it in terms of reading. Second person POV is something I'm not sure I have the chops to even bother with.)
I've said before that fandom is an incredibly nurturing place, and that cannot be stressed enough. The acceptance of all these wildly varied styles is a testament to that, and the fact that the readers and betas and writers are willing to put time and thought into writing and commenting and helping polish all these disparate works is something that amazes me every day.
The authors that I'm most likely to recommend - those that I go back to time and again, the ones who habitually write stories that make me go "I wish I'd written that!" or "I want to play in that universe!" after I manage to pick my jaw up off the floor - aren't on the cutting edge of experimental. They're on the bleeding edge. Their works are sometimes recognizable, but they aren't writing the same thing over and over again even if the story's the same. Their willingness to change the rules and not keep to a single or limited style enables them to reinvent that story so it can be cherished and admired, not merely regarded as a mirror image.
This is also a reflection of my own preference for that which I have not encountered before - the urge to seek out and read new things, or to write them. The works that stick out in my mind are most often the ones that have twists that don't show up anywhere else, that were written because nobody had seen the possibility and written it yet.
Experimentalism is a good thing. It is one of many things that keeps Fandom from stagnating.
Bleeding from My Forehead in New and Interesting Ways, or Writing Processes
Well, okay, so if I've written all these different styles, and pairings, and whatnot, what all have I learned from them that I couldn't learn from writing one style/pairing/etc.?
The wake-up call, for me - the single biggest lesson I've learned in writing - was the realization I made sometime early in the whole Of Innocence & Empathy run: that somehow, I learned to limit the scope of my writing to the characters given. I no longer had to 'connect' with the canon characters through the voice of an original (major) character. (Please note, I don't mean a self-insertion or a Mary Sue here; my first foray into online fandom was through Dragonriders of Pern, where canon characters weren't allowed to be used.)
The nice thing about writing in others' universes is that you don't have to make up all the rules. The nice thing about writing in your own universe is that...you get to make up all the rules. And for a long time, I had to bridge the gap between the two with an original character in order to function as a writer. My work here on LJ enabled me to take off the training wheels, so to speak, and write the canon characters without the crutch.
A lot of the other things I've learned tend to be on a sliding scale, or in direct one-to-one comparison.
Viruses from Outer Space, or What Separates Two Countries
Words affect everything -- which ones and how many are used will change everything from setting to characterization to pacing.
Language changes naturally from fandom to fandom. This is in direct response to the fandom being written in, and a subconscious effort to fit the written piece into the same sensory and emotional frame as the original work. It is natural to use flowery prose in a fandom like Lord of the Rings, because the books are incredibly rich with it, and the movies are too, in visual and audible terms. However, a fandom like Supernatural lends itself to limiting descriptions to that which most set the mood. It would feel out of place to have the same sensory depth of setting description as would be expected in a LOTR fic.
There's a sliding scale between sensory and emotional. The language used in defining where on that scale a story lies is going to be in the setting; most fandoms I've written or lurked in reside somewhere in the middle.
While it is possible to experiment in this area within a single fandom, it's much more difficult than when able to jump from fandom to fandom. Some fandoms also lend themselves to a broader spectrum than others: While LOTR is on the sensory input end of the spectrum and Supernatural on the emotional, something like Stargate: Atlantis or Harry Potter could, conceivably, reside comfortably at either end or anywhere in the middle.
I am not saying that I don't find LOTR to be unemotional, or Supernatural to lack in sensory input. Far from it, in fact - LOTR simply evokes emotion through the incredible richness in sensory description, and the exact opposite with Supernatural. I'm using them as examples because they're the two that stick out in my mind most strongly.
Including Written Work As Part-Of-Process, or, in simpler terms, Nonlinear Writing
There are a handful of my own works that I look back on and say, "Yes, I learned a lot writing that." The big one in this category is Of Innocence & Empathy, my 80-odd chapter Criminal Minds series.
For those of you who haven't read it (and those of you who have, *waves* Hi! Thanks for reading!), a small overview:
OI&E, as a series, started off with Knowledge and Innocence, a songfic (Eww! I don't LIKE song!fic, and I don't write them either. Except for this one, apparently). It was supposed to be a one-shot: poignant, bittersweet, with a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel possibility of hope at the end.
Then...it ballooned. Eight more chapters - and by chapter, I mean one, perhaps two short scenes from a particular character's point of view, mostly reaction shots - followed, chronologically speaking in terms of the story timeline. Then?
It got complicated.
By the time it ran down, after almost a year, it included: a crack!fic AU including tentacle!porn; a three-chapter arc that may or may not have been yet another AU; an interview with the series cast; an official table of contents; an official notes of including series chronology in comparison to written order post; and a finished-and-then-some 50episodes challenge table. The official universe timeline spanned over three years, with an unwritten prequel planned for a decade before the first official chapter.
And it was written all out of order.
I have yet to find another series or long work like it, and yes, I have been looking, in multiple fandoms. There's one in SGA that's sort of maybe close, but not really.
The cons of writing in this fashion are obvious. I started out at what at one point was near the end of the timeline, so right then and there I was forced to write towards an event that was set in stone. Timelines were a bitch. It was canon-compliant up until Season 3 (that is, it diverged directly after the last episode of Season 2), so everything had to fit either between episodes or off-screen during an episode. Having to keep notes straight was an absolute must, no ifs ands or buts about it. And I still screwed up chronologically, and in actually titling at least one chapter.matociquala's episode analyses kicked my ass when I started reading them; until then, I'd only watched Criminal Minds for the entertainment value and characters. And having the afore-mentioned canon compliance brought its own problems, particularly once Season 3 started - one character went from being a three-dimensional interpretation of a one-dimensional character into a completely different characterization (and that's not including the cast change)! I kept having to remind myself 'this never happened in OI&E', and the radical shift in characterization between OI&E and Season 3 was no picnic for at least part of my readership, either.
The pros probably aren't as recognizable from the outside, but writing OI&E is what got me to seeing fic as a dialog between writer and reader. It goes like this:
Published writing does not happen like this, not with the readers at large. Published writing is *boom* have a book. Read. Like. Buy sequel/other books author published. There's no real possibility of any kind of input by the reader on the next book.
This is what's so amazing about the world of online fandom.
Because of this continuous dialog between myself and my readers, this series made me aware of the craft of writing in a way that nothing else managed. Not writing classes, not beta readers, not books on writing, nothing. Before I wrote OI&E, my writing process was something like this:
The Writer-Reader Dialog Beyond OI&E
The relationship I shared with the readers of OI&E is something I treasure. However, I don't think it's entirely unique.
Some of this writing-as-dialog transferred over to other works, namely Salt!verse (SPN), Where We Live, one of my longer SGA WIPs, and to a lesser extent TUNE!verse and Rose!verse, also SGA. This happened mainly because I post as I write, so that readers can comment and I can incorporate that commentary, if applicable and appropriate to upcoming chapters.
I don't have the mental distance or the objectivity necessary to go back and read OI&E from chronological start to chronological finish and see the difference in writing quality from chapter to chapter. Someone who does, though, might be able to see how uneven it must be, since the first piece written is in the middle, and the rest all over the timeline.
That unevenness would be unlikely to show up in a fic written in linear fashion, even with reader input - the writing quality would go slowly, if steadily, upwards, barring a long hiatus.
Which leads me to...
Written Work as Final Product, or Linear Writing (Writer-Reader Dialog Optional)
While OI&E is my largest body of work to date, most of my other work has been written in a chronologically linear fashion. That is, I wrote it in the order the events took place.
Most short fic is written linearly, and to a large extent, most long fic as well (sometimes minus the tricky action/combat bits). This is an impression I get from reading other writers' commentary on their own writing processes, so I don't know how true it holds.
If the above does hold true, most learning of the craft of writing would be done through writing this way. For me, though, after writing OI&E, writing like this is like returning to basic scales after playing Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 at Carnegie Hall.
Linear writing isn't offering me lessons on its own process right now. Its simplicity has shifted my focus away from the techniques necessary to write point-in-timeline vignettes, such as tone, characterization and character development, and mood. In their place, I’ve been able to turn most of my attention to more complex concepts and question my basic understanding of motivation and drive within the writing process; I’ll expand on some of this later.
Work as Dialog with Itself, or Writing Both and Neither Linear and/or Nonlinear
You probably read the section title and went WTF? Is that even possible? Actually, yes. Sort of. I don't know how else to describe it, and it doesn't fall into either strictly linear or strictly nonlinear.
This would include a lot of stories with non-standard structure, including one of the gems I mentioned way back that made my jaw hit the floor. It's a work where the scenes - I use the term 'scene' loosely here, and I'll explain in a minute - are written in the order they appear in the story as much as is possible, but the order they appear in the story is not the order they happen chronologically in the story timeline. It does not include flashbacks, nightmares, visions, or the like.
My own experience with this is We Band of Brothers, an SGA short story I wrote for Rounds of Kink. This story drove me absolutely fucking nuts; I knew exactly how I wanted the beginning, but it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever without background, and trying to explain background in the middle of an action scene is recipe for epic fail.
The answer was writing alternating chunks of action and background. I didn't expect it to work as well as it did. Hell, I didn't expect it to work at all. But it managed not only to get across the story I wanted to tell, but something else that I'll leave for later.
This technique created a dialog between the action, the meat or 'now' of the story, and what I'll go ahead and call the 'memory', or in We Band of Brothers, the background. The memory scenes in other stories might be in-story documentation, such as case files or mission reports, or someone's future reaction to the 'now' either in action or written form (newspaper/blog articles, historical analyses, etc.).
We Band of Brothers was written from beginning to end, instead of simply as two separate timelines that were slotted together. I suspect, though, that most stories that use this aren't - simply because of the drastic style changes necessary between 'scene' voices, and the fact that many forms of the memory would require the use of graphics. They are included in this section more because of the finished product than the process itself - there are other, technical problems that would prevent following the process in its purest sense.
Being a Passenger, or Who's Driving This Story?
Stories are about character, not plot. My stories are character pieces - episode tags, reaction shots, and the like.
Does this mean that character is driving my stories?
In a word? No.
Not until recently, that is.
OI&E, and the vast majority of my other work, are all event-driven. Something happens, either at the beginning of the story, or off-screen just before the story started. The rest of the story is everyone else reacting to it, and sometimes reacting to each other's reactions.
The event is the driver: X happens, and however many characters are in the story react, so my question for this kind of writing is "What's my event?" Sometimes the secondary question is "Who's involved?"
Even my longer stories, whether WIPs (Where We Live, To Cross the Divide) or series (TUNE!verse, Rose!verse, etc), are simply patterns of events and reactions.
Somewhere to Call Home turned that on its head. It's the first piece, WIP or otherwise, that I can claim to be truly character-driven. While I have some events in mind, the only things set in stone for this story have to do with character qualities, growth, and transformation.
The questions become correspondingly more complicated. It's not "What's my event?" It's "What would make sense at this point in the main protagonist's journey?" "What is she ready for?" "What has to happen now as opposed to later?"
This has resulted in a creative flexibility that's as of yet uncomfortable for me to work with, but necessary for me to continue to grow as a writer.
(This section has been sponsored bysarken's meta essay on the magic question.)
Removing the Rose-Tinted Glasses, or Seeing a Technicolor World
I write and read primarily slash; Somewhere to Call Home has the only heterosexual central relationship I've written in the last ten years. However, it's slowly come to my attention that I prefer stories that incorporate relationships as a part of the story fabric, instead of having the story revolve around them.
The real-life chronology of OI&E actually maps that realization out: it began as vignettes around the central pair breaking up and making up, then how their relationship started; it drifted back towards team fic, including two other pairings along the way as well as the only canon relationship (prior to OI&E diverging from the show); and by the time I finished with it, there were no pieces that focused only on any of the pairings involved - all of them had been absorbed as threads in a larger tapestry.
I didn't recognize what was going on at the time. The first time I did was after I'd written By Any Other Name (Rose!verse, SGA), and I said so in my comments:
"You know, it occurred to me, long after I finished it, that instead of the story being about the relationship, and how other events and circumstances affected it, that this was a story about other events and circumstances and how the relationship supported/affected them.
It was a reversal I really haven't given much thought to, or played with."
My ability to continue with this inversion is limited, particularly in very short stories, but I am making an effort to whenever possible.
Everything Else is Just a Bonus
Most stories we read and write have happy endings. We like having happy endings, even if they're not fairy tale-level happy endings.
The question is, "Happy for who? And for what degree of happy?"
Sometimes, in the course of making one person or group happy, someone else breaks (Psychecentric Space trilogy, Criminal Minds), or dies (Peace Comes Bearing Shoes That Dare Not Fit, SGA). Sometimes the point of the story is not to fix something (A Dark World Dreaming, Criminal Minds), or make someone happy at all (The Uniform is Not Enough, SGA).
And in writing these stories, I have to stop and remind myself that it's okay for people to stay broken.
Shall we dance (One, two, three, and!), or Pacing
I never had a chance to figure out, much less understand, what pacing was until I started writing Somewhere to Call Home. It's hard to work with pacing when the story only lasts one scene.
When the protagonists came across the howling things in Somewhere to Call Home, all I knew was that my scene wasn't working. I couldn't see what was wrong, so I couldn't see what I needed to do to fix it.
If I hadn't had a beta reader, it would have been scrapped. Instead, I got hit over the head with a two-by-four with PACING scribbled across it.
Then she had to explain what pacing was. *facepalm*
Equal and Opposite Government Programs
Before I got involved with LJ, beta readers did two things: edit for grammar/spelling, not easy to do for an unapologetic grammar Nazi like myself; and roleplay in mIRC, instant messages, or email. Neither falls within my current definition of 'beta reader'.
It wasn't until I came to LJ that I found people who could, and were willing to, rip my fic apart and tell me point-blank what worked, and what didn't.
Who could rescue fic I was ready to give up on because of issues I didn't understand in one breath, and in the next, gently lay a failed story to rest with the painful, but honest assessment that All fic are not created equal.
"With OI&E, you have the episodes to act as your scaffolding. Here, you don't. That explains the nagging lack of frame and context I'm getting. Honestly? I recommend starting over. I think you've picked over this one enough times that you won't be writing what you think you're writing, so to speak."
One of my beta readers said that about New Books for an Old School, what was to be the second chapter in TUNE!verse. I'd deliberately tried to set the series up as the SGA version of OI&E, without considering the underlying difficulties in translation.
The drawback to having written something as successful as OI&E is the need to duplicate that success; without beta readers capable of seeing the underlying flaws in the attempt, I would be in a very different place.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned on LJ
I'm not a prolific writer, and I can't decide on any given day that I'm going to work on my pacing, or characterization, or action; my learning process for writing doesn't work that way.
I can only write what I have an idea for, and read it and go "Oh. That's what I was doing." Hindsight is ever 20/20.
Knowing and understanding my own learning process is quite possibly the most important lesson I've learned here on LJ; without it, this essay would be a lot shorter.
The other 'most important lesson' I've taken from LJ, and one I'm still struggling with, is to trust my muse. Over the years, it's become a mental construct, a character with moods and personality of its own - that of a grumpy, striped grey cat named Taddpole. Several other authors I've worked with over the years have done similar things; I don't know if I got it from one of them, or if seeing my muse as a separate entity is a tool I came up with out of necessity.
I say necessity, because very little I write down is first 'draft' - I 'rehearse' stories in my head before putting them in writing, running them over and over silently while driving or trying to sleep. They never turn out on paper or screen how they went in my mind; I spent years trying to force the written work match the imagined.
Forced writing doesn't work. I've had to come to terms with the fact that whatever happens in my head probably won't make it on-screen the way I wanted it to, but if I let Tadd do his job, I'll have done something unexpected. For example:
-- if you want to go read We Band of Brothers and try and figure it out on your own, now's the time to do it; I'll wait --
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Earlier, I spoke of structuring fiction as a dialogue with itself. After I went back and read the story several times, I realized that as the 'memory' scenes converged on the 'now' scenes, the dialog in them did the same; by the end of the story, the dialog reads like a single conversation. It may be a standard tool for this kind of writing, but it was new to me.
And I hadn't realized I'd been using it until after it was finished.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Yeesh. That's a lot of stuff. I toldfluffnutter the other day that I wish I'd written this a year ago, because it would have been a lot shorter.
But that...appears to be it. Everything I can think of right now, and looking over my fic list doesn't remind me of anything I forgot.
Speaking of which - I didn't want to make this a huge self-promotion, but I don't consciously learn positive things from reading other people's fiction. I learn what not to do, and I have more respect for my fellow authors than to list those things, because many of them would be traceable. However, I did want to share the lessons I've picked up along the way. Thoughts?
I've been meaning to write this for a long, long time.
fluffnutter managed to kick my ass into actually doing it.I've been writing for what seems like forever. I don't have a whole lot of clear memories of a time when I wasn't a writer, or an avid reader.
It's been said time and again that the best ways to learn how to write are to A) write and B) read. But that isn't always going to be the best, or the only way. Learning to write by writing and reading without any other influence is writing and reading in a vacuum, and while you can learn from it, the going will likely be slow, and formulaic. By formulaic, I mean the style of writing will come to mimic the style of the material read at the time that hits most deeply.
Such as when Christopher Stasheff's style of stiff English speech from his Wizard in Rhyme series starts showing up in Transformers fanfic. But I digress.
There will never be a time when I come to believe that writing in a vacuum is superior to that done with intelligent, meaningful feedback - or better yet, within a dialog between writer and reader. And in the last several years -- the years I've been most actively writing and discussing and learning not just the hows of writing, but actually internalizing and becoming aware of the tools used while writing -- that feedback and dialogue has been here, online, and specifically in LJ.
I've been writing for more than twenty years, and I've learned more about the process of writing - not the nuts and bolts of spelling and grammar, but the other things - in the last two years than I did in the near two decades before that. And I have all the people who've commented or criticized or pointed out continuity or characterization errors in my fic, written meta essays pertinent to my writing (of which there are too many to bother counting), written commentary on the shows I watch (I'm looking at you,
dragonladyk and matociquala, among others), and written the absolute gems of fiction I could only aspire to match one day to thank. And a very special thank you to those who've been my beta readers, people like fluffnutter and hawk_dancing and ohpuppies and blue_oceandeep to name but a few, without whom my own fic would be so much less than it is.I've been meaning to write this post because I've wanted to share some of the things I've learned here online, and on LJ.
On Being a Mad Scientist, or Experimenting in Writing Method and Style
I am not a one-style-fits-all writer. And I tend to write on the edges of [large] fandom(s), writing around side characters or characters whose alignments are questionable at best. I don't believe in OTPs, either.
Being experimental, while it has its drawbacks (a limited readership in many cases, for one), has allowed me to flex my writing muscles in ways I don't think picking a style and sticking with it would. I've done flowery prose (LOTR). I've done sparse, stark language (Salt!verse, SPN). I've done linear storylines (too many to list). I've done out of order (Of Innocence & Empathy, Criminal Minds). I've done fic without proper names (Somewhere to Call Home, SGA). I've done crack!fic, and serious fic, and angst and fluff and and and...In the course of well over a hundred fics, there's very little I haven't touched on. (I still have to try my hand at first person POV, because I'm a sucker for it in terms of reading. Second person POV is something I'm not sure I have the chops to even bother with.)
I've said before that fandom is an incredibly nurturing place, and that cannot be stressed enough. The acceptance of all these wildly varied styles is a testament to that, and the fact that the readers and betas and writers are willing to put time and thought into writing and commenting and helping polish all these disparate works is something that amazes me every day.
The authors that I'm most likely to recommend - those that I go back to time and again, the ones who habitually write stories that make me go "I wish I'd written that!" or "I want to play in that universe!" after I manage to pick my jaw up off the floor - aren't on the cutting edge of experimental. They're on the bleeding edge. Their works are sometimes recognizable, but they aren't writing the same thing over and over again even if the story's the same. Their willingness to change the rules and not keep to a single or limited style enables them to reinvent that story so it can be cherished and admired, not merely regarded as a mirror image.
This is also a reflection of my own preference for that which I have not encountered before - the urge to seek out and read new things, or to write them. The works that stick out in my mind are most often the ones that have twists that don't show up anywhere else, that were written because nobody had seen the possibility and written it yet.
Experimentalism is a good thing. It is one of many things that keeps Fandom from stagnating.
Bleeding from My Forehead in New and Interesting Ways, or Writing Processes
Well, okay, so if I've written all these different styles, and pairings, and whatnot, what all have I learned from them that I couldn't learn from writing one style/pairing/etc.?
The wake-up call, for me - the single biggest lesson I've learned in writing - was the realization I made sometime early in the whole Of Innocence & Empathy run: that somehow, I learned to limit the scope of my writing to the characters given. I no longer had to 'connect' with the canon characters through the voice of an original (major) character. (Please note, I don't mean a self-insertion or a Mary Sue here; my first foray into online fandom was through Dragonriders of Pern, where canon characters weren't allowed to be used.)
The nice thing about writing in others' universes is that you don't have to make up all the rules. The nice thing about writing in your own universe is that...you get to make up all the rules. And for a long time, I had to bridge the gap between the two with an original character in order to function as a writer. My work here on LJ enabled me to take off the training wheels, so to speak, and write the canon characters without the crutch.
A lot of the other things I've learned tend to be on a sliding scale, or in direct one-to-one comparison.
Viruses from Outer Space, or What Separates Two Countries
Words affect everything -- which ones and how many are used will change everything from setting to characterization to pacing.
Language changes naturally from fandom to fandom. This is in direct response to the fandom being written in, and a subconscious effort to fit the written piece into the same sensory and emotional frame as the original work. It is natural to use flowery prose in a fandom like Lord of the Rings, because the books are incredibly rich with it, and the movies are too, in visual and audible terms. However, a fandom like Supernatural lends itself to limiting descriptions to that which most set the mood. It would feel out of place to have the same sensory depth of setting description as would be expected in a LOTR fic.
There's a sliding scale between sensory and emotional. The language used in defining where on that scale a story lies is going to be in the setting; most fandoms I've written or lurked in reside somewhere in the middle.
While it is possible to experiment in this area within a single fandom, it's much more difficult than when able to jump from fandom to fandom. Some fandoms also lend themselves to a broader spectrum than others: While LOTR is on the sensory input end of the spectrum and Supernatural on the emotional, something like Stargate: Atlantis or Harry Potter could, conceivably, reside comfortably at either end or anywhere in the middle.
I am not saying that I don't find LOTR to be unemotional, or Supernatural to lack in sensory input. Far from it, in fact - LOTR simply evokes emotion through the incredible richness in sensory description, and the exact opposite with Supernatural. I'm using them as examples because they're the two that stick out in my mind most strongly.
Including Written Work As Part-Of-Process, or, in simpler terms, Nonlinear Writing
There are a handful of my own works that I look back on and say, "Yes, I learned a lot writing that." The big one in this category is Of Innocence & Empathy, my 80-odd chapter Criminal Minds series.
For those of you who haven't read it (and those of you who have, *waves* Hi! Thanks for reading!), a small overview:
OI&E, as a series, started off with Knowledge and Innocence, a songfic (Eww! I don't LIKE song!fic, and I don't write them either. Except for this one, apparently). It was supposed to be a one-shot: poignant, bittersweet, with a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel possibility of hope at the end.
Then...it ballooned. Eight more chapters - and by chapter, I mean one, perhaps two short scenes from a particular character's point of view, mostly reaction shots - followed, chronologically speaking in terms of the story timeline. Then?
It got complicated.
By the time it ran down, after almost a year, it included: a crack!fic AU including tentacle!porn; a three-chapter arc that may or may not have been yet another AU; an interview with the series cast; an official table of contents; an official notes of including series chronology in comparison to written order post; and a finished-and-then-some 50episodes challenge table. The official universe timeline spanned over three years, with an unwritten prequel planned for a decade before the first official chapter.
And it was written all out of order.
I have yet to find another series or long work like it, and yes, I have been looking, in multiple fandoms. There's one in SGA that's sort of maybe close, but not really.
The cons of writing in this fashion are obvious. I started out at what at one point was near the end of the timeline, so right then and there I was forced to write towards an event that was set in stone. Timelines were a bitch. It was canon-compliant up until Season 3 (that is, it diverged directly after the last episode of Season 2), so everything had to fit either between episodes or off-screen during an episode. Having to keep notes straight was an absolute must, no ifs ands or buts about it. And I still screwed up chronologically, and in actually titling at least one chapter.
matociquala's episode analyses kicked my ass when I started reading them; until then, I'd only watched Criminal Minds for the entertainment value and characters. And having the afore-mentioned canon compliance brought its own problems, particularly once Season 3 started - one character went from being a three-dimensional interpretation of a one-dimensional character into a completely different characterization (and that's not including the cast change)! I kept having to remind myself 'this never happened in OI&E', and the radical shift in characterization between OI&E and Season 3 was no picnic for at least part of my readership, either.The pros probably aren't as recognizable from the outside, but writing OI&E is what got me to seeing fic as a dialog between writer and reader. It goes like this:
- I would write a chapter, usually one I'd listed as planned on my official table of contents, have it betaed, and post it.
- A reader would comment about meta I hadn't intended, or an alternate interpretation of events, or a perceived flaw in characterization.
- A discussion in comments between myself and the reader, and sometimes other readers, would follow.
- And more often than not, another chapter, usually the next one posted (though usually not the next one chronologically), would involve the unintentional meta pointed out, or explaining the problematic characterization, or otherwise 'repairing' the flaw.
- Repeat as necessary.
Published writing does not happen like this, not with the readers at large. Published writing is *boom* have a book. Read. Like. Buy sequel/other books author published. There's no real possibility of any kind of input by the reader on the next book.
This is what's so amazing about the world of online fandom.
Because of this continuous dialog between myself and my readers, this series made me aware of the craft of writing in a way that nothing else managed. Not writing classes, not beta readers, not books on writing, nothing. Before I wrote OI&E, my writing process was something like this:
- Get idea.
- Write story.
- Read story.
- Does story work?
- If yes, send story to beta.
- Go to step 5.
- If no:
- Rewrite story.
- Go to step 3.
- Throw out story.
- Go to step 1.
- Rewrite story.
- If yes, send story to beta.
- Get story back from beta.
- Fix beta-marked errors in story.
- Post story.
The Writer-Reader Dialog Beyond OI&E
The relationship I shared with the readers of OI&E is something I treasure. However, I don't think it's entirely unique.
Some of this writing-as-dialog transferred over to other works, namely Salt!verse (SPN), Where We Live, one of my longer SGA WIPs, and to a lesser extent TUNE!verse and Rose!verse, also SGA. This happened mainly because I post as I write, so that readers can comment and I can incorporate that commentary, if applicable and appropriate to upcoming chapters.
I don't have the mental distance or the objectivity necessary to go back and read OI&E from chronological start to chronological finish and see the difference in writing quality from chapter to chapter. Someone who does, though, might be able to see how uneven it must be, since the first piece written is in the middle, and the rest all over the timeline.
That unevenness would be unlikely to show up in a fic written in linear fashion, even with reader input - the writing quality would go slowly, if steadily, upwards, barring a long hiatus.
Which leads me to...
Written Work as Final Product, or Linear Writing (Writer-Reader Dialog Optional)
While OI&E is my largest body of work to date, most of my other work has been written in a chronologically linear fashion. That is, I wrote it in the order the events took place.
Most short fic is written linearly, and to a large extent, most long fic as well (sometimes minus the tricky action/combat bits). This is an impression I get from reading other writers' commentary on their own writing processes, so I don't know how true it holds.
If the above does hold true, most learning of the craft of writing would be done through writing this way. For me, though, after writing OI&E, writing like this is like returning to basic scales after playing Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 at Carnegie Hall.
Linear writing isn't offering me lessons on its own process right now. Its simplicity has shifted my focus away from the techniques necessary to write point-in-timeline vignettes, such as tone, characterization and character development, and mood. In their place, I’ve been able to turn most of my attention to more complex concepts and question my basic understanding of motivation and drive within the writing process; I’ll expand on some of this later.
Work as Dialog with Itself, or Writing Both and Neither Linear and/or Nonlinear
You probably read the section title and went WTF? Is that even possible? Actually, yes. Sort of. I don't know how else to describe it, and it doesn't fall into either strictly linear or strictly nonlinear.
This would include a lot of stories with non-standard structure, including one of the gems I mentioned way back that made my jaw hit the floor. It's a work where the scenes - I use the term 'scene' loosely here, and I'll explain in a minute - are written in the order they appear in the story as much as is possible, but the order they appear in the story is not the order they happen chronologically in the story timeline. It does not include flashbacks, nightmares, visions, or the like.
My own experience with this is We Band of Brothers, an SGA short story I wrote for Rounds of Kink. This story drove me absolutely fucking nuts; I knew exactly how I wanted the beginning, but it wouldn't make any sense whatsoever without background, and trying to explain background in the middle of an action scene is recipe for epic fail.
The answer was writing alternating chunks of action and background. I didn't expect it to work as well as it did. Hell, I didn't expect it to work at all. But it managed not only to get across the story I wanted to tell, but something else that I'll leave for later.
This technique created a dialog between the action, the meat or 'now' of the story, and what I'll go ahead and call the 'memory', or in We Band of Brothers, the background. The memory scenes in other stories might be in-story documentation, such as case files or mission reports, or someone's future reaction to the 'now' either in action or written form (newspaper/blog articles, historical analyses, etc.).
We Band of Brothers was written from beginning to end, instead of simply as two separate timelines that were slotted together. I suspect, though, that most stories that use this aren't - simply because of the drastic style changes necessary between 'scene' voices, and the fact that many forms of the memory would require the use of graphics. They are included in this section more because of the finished product than the process itself - there are other, technical problems that would prevent following the process in its purest sense.
Being a Passenger, or Who's Driving This Story?
Stories are about character, not plot. My stories are character pieces - episode tags, reaction shots, and the like.
Does this mean that character is driving my stories?
In a word? No.
Not until recently, that is.
OI&E, and the vast majority of my other work, are all event-driven. Something happens, either at the beginning of the story, or off-screen just before the story started. The rest of the story is everyone else reacting to it, and sometimes reacting to each other's reactions.
The event is the driver: X happens, and however many characters are in the story react, so my question for this kind of writing is "What's my event?" Sometimes the secondary question is "Who's involved?"
Even my longer stories, whether WIPs (Where We Live, To Cross the Divide) or series (TUNE!verse, Rose!verse, etc), are simply patterns of events and reactions.
Somewhere to Call Home turned that on its head. It's the first piece, WIP or otherwise, that I can claim to be truly character-driven. While I have some events in mind, the only things set in stone for this story have to do with character qualities, growth, and transformation.
The questions become correspondingly more complicated. It's not "What's my event?" It's "What would make sense at this point in the main protagonist's journey?" "What is she ready for?" "What has to happen now as opposed to later?"
This has resulted in a creative flexibility that's as of yet uncomfortable for me to work with, but necessary for me to continue to grow as a writer.
(This section has been sponsored by
sarken's meta essay on the magic question.)Removing the Rose-Tinted Glasses, or Seeing a Technicolor World
I write and read primarily slash; Somewhere to Call Home has the only heterosexual central relationship I've written in the last ten years. However, it's slowly come to my attention that I prefer stories that incorporate relationships as a part of the story fabric, instead of having the story revolve around them.
The real-life chronology of OI&E actually maps that realization out: it began as vignettes around the central pair breaking up and making up, then how their relationship started; it drifted back towards team fic, including two other pairings along the way as well as the only canon relationship (prior to OI&E diverging from the show); and by the time I finished with it, there were no pieces that focused only on any of the pairings involved - all of them had been absorbed as threads in a larger tapestry.
I didn't recognize what was going on at the time. The first time I did was after I'd written By Any Other Name (Rose!verse, SGA), and I said so in my comments:
"You know, it occurred to me, long after I finished it, that instead of the story being about the relationship, and how other events and circumstances affected it, that this was a story about other events and circumstances and how the relationship supported/affected them.
It was a reversal I really haven't given much thought to, or played with."
My ability to continue with this inversion is limited, particularly in very short stories, but I am making an effort to whenever possible.
Everything Else is Just a Bonus
Most stories we read and write have happy endings. We like having happy endings, even if they're not fairy tale-level happy endings.
The question is, "Happy for who? And for what degree of happy?"
Sometimes, in the course of making one person or group happy, someone else breaks (Psychecentric Space trilogy, Criminal Minds), or dies (Peace Comes Bearing Shoes That Dare Not Fit, SGA). Sometimes the point of the story is not to fix something (A Dark World Dreaming, Criminal Minds), or make someone happy at all (The Uniform is Not Enough, SGA).
And in writing these stories, I have to stop and remind myself that it's okay for people to stay broken.
Shall we dance (One, two, three, and!), or Pacing
I never had a chance to figure out, much less understand, what pacing was until I started writing Somewhere to Call Home. It's hard to work with pacing when the story only lasts one scene.
When the protagonists came across the howling things in Somewhere to Call Home, all I knew was that my scene wasn't working. I couldn't see what was wrong, so I couldn't see what I needed to do to fix it.
If I hadn't had a beta reader, it would have been scrapped. Instead, I got hit over the head with a two-by-four with PACING scribbled across it.
Then she had to explain what pacing was. *facepalm*
Equal and Opposite Government Programs
Before I got involved with LJ, beta readers did two things: edit for grammar/spelling, not easy to do for an unapologetic grammar Nazi like myself; and roleplay in mIRC, instant messages, or email. Neither falls within my current definition of 'beta reader'.
It wasn't until I came to LJ that I found people who could, and were willing to, rip my fic apart and tell me point-blank what worked, and what didn't.
Who could rescue fic I was ready to give up on because of issues I didn't understand in one breath, and in the next, gently lay a failed story to rest with the painful, but honest assessment that All fic are not created equal.
"With OI&E, you have the episodes to act as your scaffolding. Here, you don't. That explains the nagging lack of frame and context I'm getting. Honestly? I recommend starting over. I think you've picked over this one enough times that you won't be writing what you think you're writing, so to speak."
One of my beta readers said that about New Books for an Old School, what was to be the second chapter in TUNE!verse. I'd deliberately tried to set the series up as the SGA version of OI&E, without considering the underlying difficulties in translation.
The drawback to having written something as successful as OI&E is the need to duplicate that success; without beta readers capable of seeing the underlying flaws in the attempt, I would be in a very different place.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned on LJ
I'm not a prolific writer, and I can't decide on any given day that I'm going to work on my pacing, or characterization, or action; my learning process for writing doesn't work that way.
I can only write what I have an idea for, and read it and go "Oh. That's what I was doing." Hindsight is ever 20/20.
Knowing and understanding my own learning process is quite possibly the most important lesson I've learned here on LJ; without it, this essay would be a lot shorter.
The other 'most important lesson' I've taken from LJ, and one I'm still struggling with, is to trust my muse. Over the years, it's become a mental construct, a character with moods and personality of its own - that of a grumpy, striped grey cat named Taddpole. Several other authors I've worked with over the years have done similar things; I don't know if I got it from one of them, or if seeing my muse as a separate entity is a tool I came up with out of necessity.
I say necessity, because very little I write down is first 'draft' - I 'rehearse' stories in my head before putting them in writing, running them over and over silently while driving or trying to sleep. They never turn out on paper or screen how they went in my mind; I spent years trying to force the written work match the imagined.
Forced writing doesn't work. I've had to come to terms with the fact that whatever happens in my head probably won't make it on-screen the way I wanted it to, but if I let Tadd do his job, I'll have done something unexpected. For example:
-- if you want to go read We Band of Brothers and try and figure it out on your own, now's the time to do it; I'll wait --
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Earlier, I spoke of structuring fiction as a dialogue with itself. After I went back and read the story several times, I realized that as the 'memory' scenes converged on the 'now' scenes, the dialog in them did the same; by the end of the story, the dialog reads like a single conversation. It may be a standard tool for this kind of writing, but it was new to me.
And I hadn't realized I'd been using it until after it was finished.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Yeesh. That's a lot of stuff. I told
fluffnutter the other day that I wish I'd written this a year ago, because it would have been a lot shorter.But that...appears to be it. Everything I can think of right now, and looking over my fic list doesn't remind me of anything I forgot.
Speaking of which - I didn't want to make this a huge self-promotion, but I don't consciously learn positive things from reading other people's fiction. I learn what not to do, and I have more respect for my fellow authors than to list those things, because many of them would be traceable. However, I did want to share the lessons I've picked up along the way. Thoughts?
