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