Why Sholio, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump too?

[sholio]

Why yes, yes I would. Apparently.

Meme ganked from several different people.

Writer questions (for convenient copy-pasting):

Ideas. Where the hell do they come from? Can you make those little fuckers show up?
Wild horse-bunnies. When a story just gets pulled right out of you. Do you get them?
Writer's block. Have you been scourged?
Clean up duty. Do you like editing?
The ending. Is it hard for you to find the ending?
The title. Where do you get yours? Do you have yours when you start the story?
Plot. If you plot out your stories first, raise your hand.
POV. How do you choose your POV for a scene? For a story?
Challenge. Do you like them? Do they inspire you?
Sex. Do you like writing sex?


My answers:

Ideas. Where the hell do they come from? Can you make those little fuckers show up? I get ideas from everywhere: from news stories, magazines, other books and movies, episodes of the show, other people's fanfic. I pretty much have ideas all day long. I've rarely found myself brainstorming for ideas -- usually the trouble is sorting through them to find one I think I can stick with for a whole story.

Wild horse-bunnies. When a story just gets pulled right out of you. Do you get them? Oh yes! I love those. I wrote "Old Soldiers Die Hard" in one (rather long) day and "Long Road Home" in a weekend; those are the stories that really jump into my head as ones that I sat down and just had to write, but there have certainly been others.

Writer's block. Have you been scourged? Yes, sort of. It's really rare for me to be stuck on EVERYTHING I'm working on. I suppose that's the advantage of having a million WIPs. I guess I've never hit a point where I really couldn't write ANYTHING (even if it wasn't very good), but the way that writer's block manifests in me is by turning me into a total scatterbrain -- I'll surf the net or wander around starting a dozen little projects rather than buckling down and writing. I've also abandoned an awful lot of projects because I lost interest in working on them, unfortunately, which I suppose is a form of writer's block, even though I went on to something else.

Clean up duty. Do you like editing? Sort of. I do enjoy having the story all laid out before me "like a patient etherized upon a table" and going through and polishing it, but I also get impatient to move on to the next project, so I sometimes get lazy and don't spend as much time editing as I really ought to.

The ending. Is it hard for you to find the ending? Not usually -- I generally have the ending in mind when I begin writing (at least the gist of it).

The title. Where do you get yours? Do you have yours when you start the story? As is also true of character names, I seem to have two different kinds of titles -- the ones that just come to me (usually at the start of the project) and the ones that I struggle with and labor over and am never quite satisfied with. When I'm having trouble, I'll often resort to Bartlett's Quotations, the thesaurus, song lyrics and other such sources of inspiration, and cover sheets of paper with variations on different titles that might work. In some cases, the title suggests an aspect of the story. For example, I was horribly stuck for a title on my Yuletide femslash story, "And All the World Made New". What I really wanted was a line of poetry, approximately contemporary with the characters, having something to do with new beginnings, but I hunted through many, many pages of Romantic-and-earlier poets without coming up with anything, so I ended up writing my own ... which meant I felt I ought to incorporate the poetry into the story (or else the title felt like a bit of a non sequitur, because I'm basically quoting ... me, which is a little odd), and ended up going back to an earlier idea for the story, which was to have a correspondence section that developed the womens' relationship through letters and such.

Plot. If you plot out your stories first, raise your hand. I almost always have a general idea of where I'm going, but it's mostly in my head; I don't have an outline. I tend to write out of order, so in the early stages of a project, I'll scribble notes or write scenes from pretty much anywhere in the story; later, going along linearly, I link them up.

POV. How do you choose your POV for a scene? For a story? I have no good answer for this, because it isn't usually something I think about consciously -- most stories, and most scenes within them, seem to have a "right" narrative voice, and I go with that. Sometimes I'll have to rewrite a section that isn't working in someone else's POV. For me, giving conscious thought to POV is usually a troubleshooting measure -- if the story's not working, POV is one of the things I look at in trying to figure out what's going wrong.

Challenge. Do you like them? Do they inspire you? Yes and yes. I really like writing for challenges and I've come up with some stories I really liked that I'd never have written otherwise. (I've also written some I'm not at all happy with, but I guess you win some, you lose some.) Some kinds of challenges work better for me than others -- I like vague challenge prompts rather than specific ones, and I really don't like challenges that specifically give you some verbage that has to be used, e.g. a "first line" challenge where your story must begin with a specific sentence. I want the words in the story to be my own, even if the idea isn't.

Sex. Do you like writing sex? In fanfic, I feel uncomfortable writing sex scenes, to the point where I haven't actually finished any. (This probably sounds really odd, but feels kind of like writing a sex scene about my mother. Technically, I could; I'd just feel vaguely squirmy if I tried.) In my original fiction, I wouldn't say I like or dislike it -- it's just another kind of scene, no different in the grand scheme of things from writing a car chase, a tea party or a death scene: a way of developing the characters. However, people tell me I write very disturbing sex. This is probably because I don't usually write sex scenes to titillate; I write them to explore various facets of the characters' personalities, often their darker aspects. People who keep suggesting that my fanfic needs some sex scenes should probably be careful what they wish for, judging by the ones I've written in the past. :D

Comments

[flingslass.livejournal.com]

I'm going to put this in my memories for when I actually write something. Not because I want or need to copy but because it's inspiring. I have my glass of wine to celebrate Australia Day. Cheers!

[sholio]

Cheers! *raises cup of tea*

I'm glad you found it inspiring! It's actually given me the urge to go write something, which is what I'm usually avoiding when I'm wasting time online (see: Writer's Block. *g*).

[leesa_perrie]

Excellent answers! I think I might be doing this meme sometime (but not today, I'm feeling a bit drained and limp...but will be watching Harmony in a little bit, so that might give me some energy!!!)

Always interesting to see what inspires you and how you write. Nice to know I'm not the only one who has a tendency to write a story out of order!! I've even been known to write a series out of order - The Cousins Series springs to mind, where part two was finished before part one, and part four before part three!!!

[sholio]

Yup. Done that too. *g* Not necessarily fanfic, but my original series Kismet (a bunch of loosely connected short stories and comics) is ENTIRELY out of order. It covers approximately a 30-year time span and I just write whatever story along that timeline arouses my current interest. Which means I have characters who are dead in one story and alive in another, or thirty years old "now" but five in the story I'm working on. Fun! (I just KNOW I'm going to utterly contradict myself at some point, though.)

[leesa_perrie]

*wipes brow in relief* Not the only one, see everyone, I'm not the only one!!! You have no idea how good it is to know this!!

In the case of Cousins Series I have to post them in order or else give away spoilers for the one not posted yet. But at least I know I can post out of order if the series is suitable for it...! Like maybe the my Kitten Series... that's a good one to write all out of order if I want to!

Hmm, thinking now...!

[sholio]

It's actually kind of fun to post things out of chronological order, and think about what you've already revealed to your readers and kind of play with that a little bit. In some ways, fanfic is that way already, because your readers already have a good grounding in who the characters are and how their world works, so the fun thing as a writer is to play with that -- if you already know who Rodney is, a story about Rodney's childhood is completely different than if you first meet this sullen little kid and don't find out what he's like as an adult until later. When you're writing a series out of chronological order, each additional part becomes sort of a riff on what's already been established, rather than building a logical progression of events (if that makes any sense).

[leesa_perrie]

Yep, that makes sense!

[ayumidah.livejournal.com]

Huh. Interesting meme. I'll have to answer it on my own journal. After thinking a bit. lol

[sholio]

I don't do memes very often, but this was kind of a fun one!

[naye]

Writing meta is fascinating to me, so this was a fun post to read! Except now I'm oddly curious about your sex scenes - they sound fantastic. Err. Hopefully that doesn't sound too perverted - I once had a whole conversation with a smut-hating friend about how avoiding any sex in fic can make you miss out on the excellent stories that can sometimes only be told body to body. That's still my main motivation for reading any sex at all - exploring the characters; exploring relationships.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind, though - if it's something the person is bothered by, something that disturbs them, makes them uncomfortable or just plain ill, then they're still missing out on the story even if they do read it.

*Cringes* sorry for jumping in like this. I'm not normally one to do so. It's just that I was reading a story that had something in it that made me really, really uncomfortable (not a sex scene, but something else) and it made the story difficult for me to read, and therefore difficult for me to enjoy. Which is a pity as it was an interesting story.

[naye]

Oh, that's something I can sympathize with myself! Really - the main point of the discussion was to explain why I read the stories at all. Also, it is possible to avoid something just on principle - and if you're afraid of trying new things, you never know if they might not actually be something for you.

At the same time I have enough things that I'm bothered by myself to think that you can just ignore that sort of thing, and I completely agree that they can make the rest of the story difficult to enjoy.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

"Really - the main point of the discussion was to explain why I read the stories at all."

Oh, I know. It was the example you gave - about talking with your friend - that I reacted to. I had just finished reading said story and it left me a little on edge. So when I read your comment and the example, my reaction was rather hair-trigger.

And I totally agree - you never know what you like or don't like until you try it.

[sholio]

I don't mind you jumping in.

I know that, the more controversial or hard-edged or bizarre you get with a story's content, the more you run the risk of alienating readers. I do believe that many of the best stories, the most brilliant stories, are those that the writer writes for themselves, without taking the reader into account at all. However, I also know that I've alienated readers with the content of some of my original stories, and have correspondingly toned down some of that content. If a significant number of my readers are getting hung up on one small aspect of the plot that I could remove while still telling the story I want to tell, then it seems to me that it's in my best interests to make the story a little more accessible, if I can do that without compromising its integrity.

On the other hand, I also don't consider myself a gatekeeper for my readers -- for one thing, because everyone is squicked by something different. I have a good friend who refuses to read anything in which an animal is hurt or killed. If she encounters a scene like that, she'll stop reading. As I understand it, that's a pretty common squick with people ... but it's not one of mine, so I'm not going to shy away from including animal deaths in my stories. But knowing that there ARE a lot of people who are really bothered by that, I'd think about whether it was really necessary to the story before including a scene like that.

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

"I do believe that many of the best stories, the most brilliant stories, are those that the writer writes for themselves, without taking the reader into account at all. However, I also know that I've alienated readers with the content of some of my original stories, and have correspondingly toned down some of that content."

I totally agree with that. My best stuff has alway been the stories that I wrote for myself. Once you become aware of what the audience wants, and try writing for them, then it turns what you're supposed to be enjoying into a chore.

At the same time, if balanced right, it can make for good motivation in establishing a few limits. I'm big on using unpleasent situations (torture, imprisonment, survival) to influence the personality of my characters and so, at times, have gone a little overboard with it when I didn't need to. The story I'm trying to get published had such a scene that I tried to tone down (and am still trying to tone down) because everyone who'd read the story felt it a little too much.

So it's one of those things that's both a blessing and a curse.

[sholio]

Heh, I don't think you sound perverted -- and, yes, I know it sounds awfully highbrow of me, but the main reason I read sex scenes is for whatever else is going on, character- and plot-wise. (Not that I haven't enjoyed a sex scene occasionally just for the sex, and not that I have any problem with people getting off on the porn, but it isn't my usual thing.)

I don't think any of my porny stuff is online anywhere, although I did find a link to a review of an erotic comics anthology that I had a piece in, several years ago. "Coyote's Wife" was mine. It's a difficult one to describe to people without sounding really kinky and terrifying, but it's about a woman who is "wedded" to a coyote spirit as a young girl, and sheds her human body and becomes a coyote after she dies, in this sort of ... orgy with a pack of coyotes. Actually, maybe it IS as kinky and terrifying as all that, but I enjoyed drawing it. :D

There's a LOT of sex in myth and legend and human storytelling in general. It's a basic human drive, and some stories can only be told through the vehicle of sex.