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How about a writing process post?
I haven't posted much lately ... so how about a writing process post?
I love reading posts and blogs and books that talk about writing, all the more so as I get more analytical about my own writing process. I used to just write without thinking much about how I was doing it. I'd just throw words on the page. On the one hand, it was fun and exciting and I wrote a LOT, and learned a lot just by sheer trial-and-error. On the other hand, I started a ton of stories that ran into insurmountable plot problems or fizzled out into nothing. The vast majority of my writing time was spent on projects that never came to anything because they were impossibly flawed from the start, or because I ran out of ideas and stopped writing halfway through.
Over the last five years or so, I've gotten a lot more analytical about the way I write. And one thing I've been trying to do is to learn to outline. I've never liked it or been good at it. Writing for me is a process of discovery, and knowing exactly where I'm going takes a lot of the fun out of it. However, it got to the point where I was utterly sick of starting stories that I ended up unable to finish. I have SO MANY abandoned starts in my writing folders -- fanfic, original, short, long ... SO MANY. It was getting so bad that I was reluctant to start anything new because I had no confidence in myself to finish anything. I'm probably never going to manage to be the kind of writer who outlines in great detail, but I do seem to work better when I have a clearer idea of where I'm going.
Last year I read about the snowflake method, where you start with a one-sentence description of the plot, then expand it into a paragraph, then expand each sentence of the paragraph into a new paragraph, and so on. I kinda wanted to try it on something, and decided to use my SGA Santa story, because I had NO IDEA what to write about, and I figured that it would be a good idea to put it into practice. Since I kept all my notes, I basically have the whole process documented, so why don't I share it?
The request: "Rodney centric het ust (pre-ship) where they're awesome together. Rodney and Jennifer preferred. Rodney h/c with lots of blood and pain. Female POV if possible. Higher ratings and action stories (give Jennifer a P90!) make me very happy!"
Starting off, I had no idea what to do with this prompt. NO IDEA AT ALL. So I decided to use the Snowflake Method and start out by plunking down a one-sentence, very generic description of a story that I thought I could plausibly enjoy writing. All the specific stuff was left out for the time being.
One-sentence description of story:
When Rodney is captured and severely injured, Teyla and Jennifer must free him. Along the way, they work through some of their lingering issues from "Missing".
(okay, two sentences, so sue me)
Basically I was just writing up a terse story description that plays to my strengths. Rodney h/c? I can do that! At this point, I had no idea what the danger actually was, just that I couldn't come up with any sort of Jennifer/Rodney plot that worked for me, but I love writing Teyla and Teyla/Rodney as well as Teyla + Jennifer, and I know that my recipient wrote in![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sticksandsnark last year, so I hoped that she'd be okay with me throwing Teyla in there. So, I thought: let's add Teyla to the mix and see what happens! So I paired off the characters in the way that I thought would be easiest for me to write, and used that as a starting point.
I also tried a different idea:
An evil version of Jennifer attacks and captures Rodney; Teyla and Jennifer must get him back.
I must admit that one thing I keep wanting to use in a story and never have actually managed is a sexy, evil-mirror-verse, dominatrix-ish sort of version of Jennifer. So I toyed with the idea that the "evil" in this story might actually be Jennifer -- perhaps she gets split by the SG-verse equivalent of a transporter accident into good and evil halves? But that strays too close to a lot of fanon cliches that I'd rather avoid. So, while still keeping the idea of evil!mirror!Jennifer in the back of my head, I thought about what might attack Our Heroes in such a way as to cause what my recipient had asked for, which was "blood and pain".
Here is what comes next in my notes.
Okay. So far so good: I have a basic plot and a bad guy. The next step in the Snowflake Method is to expand out the one-sentence plot to a whole paragraph, where each sentence describes one of the major events in the plot ("three disasters plus an ending" is what they suggest). Since I was already sort of ripping off Barbara Hambly's Darwath books with my bad guys (not to mention Simmons in a major way), I liked the idea of some kind of giant fortress/keep set into the side of a cliff, a la The Time of the Dark.
(The "edit" is part of my plot outline ... I tend to do this in my notes, adding new ideas while leaving earlier stages intact in case I want to go back to them. In this case, I actually did -- I abandoned the idea of Jennifer going down alone and gave her a team of young OCs to go with her.)
The next step is to expand each sentence out to its own paragraph, so I did that. Here's where the plot really takes shape. I also tried to guess at how many words it would take me to write each chunk of plot. If you've read the story, it might be interesting to read the following and see how much of the plot was already there at this point ... as well as the minor points of deviation in the finished version.
And there it is, actually -- the whole story! What really surprised me is that I was able to write the story in super-quick time (just a few days) and stayed very close to the outline the whole time. In the early parts of the story, I was even able to keep on track with my estimated word counts, give or take a bit. As it went along, I ended up needing a lot more for the fight scenes and finale than I'd thought I would; it ended up coming out about 26K words, which is significantly over my estimate. But then, I tend to write long in general. *g*
The only places where I really went off the plan were in expanding the role of the OCs, and in developing the finale, which is really sketchy in the outline. I was going to send Jennifer down alone or with a single OC, but quickly realized once I started writing the Hunters in action that there was no plausible way to have Jennifer survive on her own against them. She was going to need a lot of help and a lot of heavy firepower, so I gave her a whole team of OCs armed with Genii guns and all the portable weapons in the jumper.
I also handwaved the ending a lot in my outline. I had only the most vague idea of what the Hunters were, why they'd taken Rodney, or how everyone was going to get out of this. As I worked on the story, I found that the ending was taking shape in my head, including Jennifer and Teyla's final Butch Cassidy-esque last stand, which is my favorite part of the finished story and something that I hadn't planned from the beginning at all.
This was a very interesting exercise for me, because this is completely different from how I normally work -- but closer to what I'd like my process to eventually develop into. Like I said earlier, I doubt if I'll ever manage to do detailed, chapter-by-chapter outlines for my long stories, but I do think I was able to write faster and more tightly than usual -- and minimize rewriting -- by giving myself a very clear idea of where I was going at each stage of the story.
I love reading posts and blogs and books that talk about writing, all the more so as I get more analytical about my own writing process. I used to just write without thinking much about how I was doing it. I'd just throw words on the page. On the one hand, it was fun and exciting and I wrote a LOT, and learned a lot just by sheer trial-and-error. On the other hand, I started a ton of stories that ran into insurmountable plot problems or fizzled out into nothing. The vast majority of my writing time was spent on projects that never came to anything because they were impossibly flawed from the start, or because I ran out of ideas and stopped writing halfway through.
Over the last five years or so, I've gotten a lot more analytical about the way I write. And one thing I've been trying to do is to learn to outline. I've never liked it or been good at it. Writing for me is a process of discovery, and knowing exactly where I'm going takes a lot of the fun out of it. However, it got to the point where I was utterly sick of starting stories that I ended up unable to finish. I have SO MANY abandoned starts in my writing folders -- fanfic, original, short, long ... SO MANY. It was getting so bad that I was reluctant to start anything new because I had no confidence in myself to finish anything. I'm probably never going to manage to be the kind of writer who outlines in great detail, but I do seem to work better when I have a clearer idea of where I'm going.
Last year I read about the snowflake method, where you start with a one-sentence description of the plot, then expand it into a paragraph, then expand each sentence of the paragraph into a new paragraph, and so on. I kinda wanted to try it on something, and decided to use my SGA Santa story, because I had NO IDEA what to write about, and I figured that it would be a good idea to put it into practice. Since I kept all my notes, I basically have the whole process documented, so why don't I share it?
The request: "Rodney centric het ust (pre-ship) where they're awesome together. Rodney and Jennifer preferred. Rodney h/c with lots of blood and pain. Female POV if possible. Higher ratings and action stories (give Jennifer a P90!) make me very happy!"
Starting off, I had no idea what to do with this prompt. NO IDEA AT ALL. So I decided to use the Snowflake Method and start out by plunking down a one-sentence, very generic description of a story that I thought I could plausibly enjoy writing. All the specific stuff was left out for the time being.
One-sentence description of story:
When Rodney is captured and severely injured, Teyla and Jennifer must free him. Along the way, they work through some of their lingering issues from "Missing".
(okay, two sentences, so sue me)
Basically I was just writing up a terse story description that plays to my strengths. Rodney h/c? I can do that! At this point, I had no idea what the danger actually was, just that I couldn't come up with any sort of Jennifer/Rodney plot that worked for me, but I love writing Teyla and Teyla/Rodney as well as Teyla + Jennifer, and I know that my recipient wrote in
sticksandsnark last year, so I hoped that she'd be okay with me throwing Teyla in there. So, I thought: let's add Teyla to the mix and see what happens! So I paired off the characters in the way that I thought would be easiest for me to write, and used that as a starting point.I also tried a different idea:
An evil version of Jennifer attacks and captures Rodney; Teyla and Jennifer must get him back.
I must admit that one thing I keep wanting to use in a story and never have actually managed is a sexy, evil-mirror-verse, dominatrix-ish sort of version of Jennifer. So I toyed with the idea that the "evil" in this story might actually be Jennifer -- perhaps she gets split by the SG-verse equivalent of a transporter accident into good and evil halves? But that strays too close to a lot of fanon cliches that I'd rather avoid. So, while still keeping the idea of evil!mirror!Jennifer in the back of my head, I thought about what might attack Our Heroes in such a way as to cause what my recipient had asked for, which was "blood and pain".
Here is what comes next in my notes.
Title: The Hunters
The Hunters are vaguely similar to the Shrike in Dan Simmons' Hyperion novels -- fast-moving, sleek, black spiky things with long limbs tipped with scythelike claws. (Maybe they're being controlled by evil!mirror!Jennifer?) Light kills them -- so sort of like the Shrike crossed with the Dark from the Darwath books.
Okay. So far so good: I have a basic plot and a bad guy. The next step in the Snowflake Method is to expand out the one-sentence plot to a whole paragraph, where each sentence describes one of the major events in the plot ("three disasters plus an ending" is what they suggest). Since I was already sort of ripping off Barbara Hambly's Darwath books with my bad guys (not to mention Simmons in a major way), I liked the idea of some kind of giant fortress/keep set into the side of a cliff, a la The Time of the Dark.
Three disasters plus an ending:
Rodney, Jennifer and Teyla are overnight guests in a fortress set into the side of a cliff. As darkness falls, the fortress is attacked by the Hunters -- creatures of darkness who rip apart their prey -- and Rodney is captured and taken into the catacombs below the fortress. Teyla goes after him while Jennifer helps the wounded, staying in touch via radio, but when Teyla is ambushed and sends a desperate message, Jennifer goes to her aid with a small group of fighters from the fortress (edit: no, she has to go alone, because no one will dare the catacombs -- except perhaps a female OFC? an older healer lady, maybe?). Jennifer & co. join up with Teyla, break out Rodney, and discover the secret the Hunters are protecting. As dawn breaks, a jumper from Atlantis comes to collect them.
(The "edit" is part of my plot outline ... I tend to do this in my notes, adding new ideas while leaving earlier stages intact in case I want to go back to them. In this case, I actually did -- I abandoned the idea of Jennifer going down alone and gave her a team of young OCs to go with her.)
The next step is to expand each sentence out to its own paragraph, so I did that. Here's where the plot really takes shape. I also tried to guess at how many words it would take me to write each chunk of plot. If you've read the story, it might be interesting to read the following and see how much of the plot was already there at this point ... as well as the minor points of deviation in the finished version.
Each sentence in the previous summary expanded to its own paragraph:
Rodney, Jennifer and Teyla are overnight guests in a fortress set into the side of a cliff. The fortress was built by Ancients, so they are going as a group to employ their separate talents -- Rodney is investigating the tech (and flying the Jumper); Jennifer will be doing medical checkups, and Teyla will be exercising her diplomatic skills and negotiating a trade agreement. When they arrive, they are warned of lethal creatures that come out at night; Teyla, who has either been here before or knows of these people by reputation, has already told them this, so they plan to stay the night -- Atlantis will check in with them in the morning. Meanwhile, Rodney gets busy studying the tech stuff, while Jennifer makes friends with an older healer lady (let's call her Izar). Might also introduce a couple other OCs. They also learn of catacombs under the fortress, but no one goes there because they are said to be forbidden and dangerous. (est 4000 wds)
As darkness falls, the fortress is attacked by the Hunters -- creatures of darkness who rip apart their prey -- and Rodney is captured and taken into the catacombs below the fortress. The fortress is all shut up and it's understood that no one can get in or out until dawn, so the Atlantis characters are exploring the fortress in all its torchlit glory -- very Darwath -- when some kind of warning siren goes off. There is a brief, violent battle with horrific, impossibly fast-moving four-legged creatures wielding sharp blades on their forelimbs that can cut through anything, including weapons and armor. They maim and kill a number of people. Rodney recognizes that they are machines, and he is wounded in front of Teyla and Jennifer before the creatures seize him and retreat into the catacombs. (4000)
Teyla goes after him while Jennifer helps the wounded, staying in touch via radio, but when Teyla is ambushed and sends a desperate message, Jennifer goes to her aid. In the stunned aftermath of the fight, Jennifer helps the wounded. Teyla does not hesitate; after a brief conversation in which Jennifer tells Teyla (or vice versa) that Rodney thought the attackers were machines rather than organic, she takes her gun and pursues them into the catacombs. Jennifer stays in touch with her via radio, but then she gets a desperate message from Teyla, who has been attacked. And then the communication is cut off. Jennifer struggles with her conscience vs. fear, but there is only one thing she can do. She goes back to the jumper and gears up, taking all the weapons they have -- her P90 and Rodney's, plus a few things from the jumper -- and loads herself for battle to go down into the catacombs. She tries to get the fortress people to come with her, but they are so terrified of the catacombs that they won't come with her (and really, after what she's seen, she can't blame them). However, Izar agrees to come with her (maybe; see how this works out in the actual writing thereof; is it useful to have an OC or just a distraction?). (4000)
Jennifer & co. join up with Teyla, break out Rodney, and discover the secret the Hunters are protecting. They discover that Teyla is alive; she was struck by one of the creatures and fell into an underground river, losing her radio and gun. Pursuing the creatures, the women find their way to an underground control station, where it turns out that the creatures are an automated defense system that views the humans living in the fortress as invaders. It was built as a weather monitoring station (?), but the humans moved in much later, and at some point, the automated defense system was tripped. They took Rodney because they recognized, belatedly, from either his ATA gene or his behavior, that he was kin to their creators. Rodney had started to disarm the control room, but passed out from blood loss. Jennifer holds off the somewhat confused creatures with a P90 while Teyla finishes disarming the control room. (4000)
As dawn breaks, a jumper from Atlantis comes to collect them. The women stabilize Rodney and wait for dawn, when they miss their check-in and the cavalry, a.k.a. Sheppard, Ronon and a jumperful of Marines, show up to help. (est 2000 wds)
(~18,000 wds)
And there it is, actually -- the whole story! What really surprised me is that I was able to write the story in super-quick time (just a few days) and stayed very close to the outline the whole time. In the early parts of the story, I was even able to keep on track with my estimated word counts, give or take a bit. As it went along, I ended up needing a lot more for the fight scenes and finale than I'd thought I would; it ended up coming out about 26K words, which is significantly over my estimate. But then, I tend to write long in general. *g*
The only places where I really went off the plan were in expanding the role of the OCs, and in developing the finale, which is really sketchy in the outline. I was going to send Jennifer down alone or with a single OC, but quickly realized once I started writing the Hunters in action that there was no plausible way to have Jennifer survive on her own against them. She was going to need a lot of help and a lot of heavy firepower, so I gave her a whole team of OCs armed with Genii guns and all the portable weapons in the jumper.
I also handwaved the ending a lot in my outline. I had only the most vague idea of what the Hunters were, why they'd taken Rodney, or how everyone was going to get out of this. As I worked on the story, I found that the ending was taking shape in my head, including Jennifer and Teyla's final Butch Cassidy-esque last stand, which is my favorite part of the finished story and something that I hadn't planned from the beginning at all.
This was a very interesting exercise for me, because this is completely different from how I normally work -- but closer to what I'd like my process to eventually develop into. Like I said earlier, I doubt if I'll ever manage to do detailed, chapter-by-chapter outlines for my long stories, but I do think I was able to write faster and more tightly than usual -- and minimize rewriting -- by giving myself a very clear idea of where I was going at each stage of the story.
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I am the absolute mistress of starting things and then not finishing them. I made a personal rule that I wasn't going to post WIPs unless I'd already written the ending (even if the intermediate chapters had yet to be written) after I got 70,000 words into a WiP and then completely stalled out. Yes, I'm one of those people. *g* No idea where to go, no will to finish; I ended up withdrawing it from the Internet and slinking shamefacedly out of the fandom. I still feel guilty about that one...
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