sholio | How about a writing process post?

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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

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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God, I never know how to explain my writing process. I just make stuff up. And if it's too small I make it bigger. And if it too big I make it smaller. And then I order another coffee. ;)

I find it difficult to talk about as well -- mostly because there *isn't* really a process; it's more like "whatever works for this story at this time". Usually I skip around, writing scenes at any point in the story that they occur to me, and at some point start working through from the beginning, nailing things together into some semblance of a story. *g*

This is why they are considering you for a Pulitzer..lol..Sarah

I don't know if I am eligible for a Pulitzer, actually...but I appreciate the sentiment. :)

Seriously, though, people are all "Where did you get the idea for that?" and my answer is usually something like "I needed a reason for the house to burn down. Then I typed the letter P. Then I invented the pyroant."

That's an awesome icon. :D And it's SO TRUE.

It (and the editing one) are both care of

melyanna.

*hums "It's a Small World"*

haha! Small world indeed! :D

I never,ever suggest this, but you should talk to somebody about this.
Not for long, but get the burning house thing worked out. I'm off to read
your fiction.. lol

Heh, the Darwath triology was the series I... er... was vaguely ranting about in my post a while back ;)

I think a major part of the learning-to-write process is learning how to, I guess you would call it, "pre-write." I've come to realize that with long stories, outlines are my best friend. With short stories, just get the beginning and the end and let the story write itself.

I'll admit that outlines do have a way of sucking some of the fun out of writing a story. But for me, an outline is just a map to fall back on when I feel lost and to keep all the complicated bits and pieces straight (in fact, once I have the outline written, I barely ever look at it again). There's still plenty of room for any thing to happen during the actual writing process, and that's what I get myself to focus on should I start feeling bored with the story.

Heh, Darwath, really? I had assumed you were talking about the Sun Wolf books, which I never could get through. I liked Darwath a lot when I was a teenager, but haven't read them since; actually, I just loaned them to my mother-in-law, and she seems to be liking them.

They were Hambly's first published fiction, so I expect she's gained skill as an author since ...

That's an interesting idea to me, to have an outline and never refer to it! I think you've mentioned in the past that that's how you work. I guess that I do a similar thing where I keep making character info sheets and then never looking at them again, because all that information is already in my head -- but I'm always afraid I'll forget something important. (I'm sure I do forget things, but apparently not plot-critical things.)

And, hee, I've been watching White Collar lately -- not systematic at all, just random episodes here and there, but I really liked the last couple (episodes 2 and 3 of season three). Anyway, I'm enjoying it enough that I will probably watch the next few episodes and see if I continue to like it.

I liked Darwath a lot when I was a teenager, but haven't read them since; actually, I just loaned them to my mother-in-law, and she seems to be liking them.

I first read them when I was in middle school, at that tender age where my reading was rusty and I kept reading books not even remotely geared toward that age group. I did like it (thus why I tried rereading it recently), and the things that bother me now I didn't even notice then. But, again, because I wasn't a good reader I eventually gave up on them.

I think you picked a good season to get into White Collar since so many interesting things are happening. I find the overall arc rather unique. And there's been so much to squee about.

Yeah, White Collar is really fun. :) I think one of the big reasons why I'd given up on it with the first couple of episodes I watched is that I didn't realize it would be as ensemble-based as it is (at least, judging by the later episodes I've seen). I wasn't really interested in a buddy show if it was just all going to be about the two main characters. But they seem to do a pretty good job of developing their whole cast, and the main guys' relationships with everybody around them, too. I also love how they're all pursuing their own agendas; it really produces a fascinating mix of emotions and events.

(Edited because now I have a couple of WC icons to use!)

Edited 2011-06-24 21:35 (UTC)

*Iz jealous* I really need to get a paid account and get more icons but since I'm not the one paying for the Internet I'm extremely hesitant.

The problem, though, is that no matter how many icons you have, it never seems like enough. *g* When I got my paid account, I couldn't imagine how I could ever fill up 100 icon slots. And now I keep having to delete them to make room for new ones!

I think you've given the serious writers here a great gift. It's one way
to develop a story and you've done it quite successfully but it is only
one way. It focusses on the story, the narrative.
But people write stories for many reasons, i.e. making character develop-
ment most important, or politics, or lessons learned, or philosophy etc.
There are many roads to Rome, you know>
But you've provided an excellent template for the story..I would start
from the outside and work my to the middle.
But then I don't write stories.. I read them.
So what would you do if you write a song?
xxxxxSarah

Thank you! :) I think every writer has a different way of working, and different writers even work differently from story to story (I know I do!). But it's really interesting to me when other people talk about their working process -- how they come up with ideas; how they go from idea to finished story -- and I thought this might be interesting to others.

I don't think I've ever written a whole song, really -- just incidental lyrics to be used in stories. I used to write poetry as a teenager, but I don't thing I would recommend my working process, which was mostly a) have a fight with your parents, b) write incredibly emo poetry about it. *g*

On a serious note, I think writing workshops or any arrangement where
people who want to write are together has to be a worthwhile enterprise.
As we all know, Mikey's boyfriend, was it Paul (oh, memory!!) attended
the Iowa State Writers Program and look how far it got him.
Seriously, different groups are organized around writing style, fiction,
news..etc.
I would think that a group of people who do QAF would be great fun. But
nobody should steal anything. We've had enough of that, right?
Getting back to serious, I think some writers here are incredibly
talented and have made me very, very happy. I would gladly read everything
they write. Even though I'm cross-eyed.
xxx Sarah

One of the things I love about the Internet, and LJ specifically, is that it's a big writing workshop of sorts! I get so much creative inspiration, and so much exposure to new people and ideas online.

That is actually a pretty cool way to work out a story...I might try it sometime, see how it goes!

I've always written by coming up with a beginning and ending and then figuring out the middle bits as I go along - I have a fair amount of unfinished stories, but they're usually stuck because I lost inspiration somewhere in that middle (especially with fanfic, if the chars stop speaking to me then it's pretty much a lost cause unless/until I can get them back). It's rare for me to start work on a story unless I know where it's supposed to end up; pretty much every WiP I have I know how it would've concluded (though I've been trying to get in the habit of actually writing down those endings, because sometimes I forget them after the fact and then flip out trying to remember!)

Though for short stories (especially fic, again) - drabbles and flashfic - I sometimes will just start writing and keep writing until I reach the end. Which at times can completely fail, but other times leads me to happy surprises.

(...and now I actually have to write. In this case write an ending that I have had in mind for 6 years, but now that I'm here I have no idea how to work a last line out of it...endings are easy, but final lines are impossible!)

That is actually a pretty cool way to work out a story...I might try it sometime, see how it goes!

That was exactly my thinking, actually - "let's see how this works!" And it worked pretty well! I think it might be too detailed for me to use in general, but the whole idea of starting with a rough idea of the story's overall shape and expanding upon each individual section -- that has a lot of promise for me, I think.

I start out most of my long stories without the foggiest clue where it's going, actually. It's almost invariably a general idea ("What if John and Rodney were Runners?") and, if I'm lucky, an opening scene ("John, with amnesia, in a field"), or if I'm not so lucky, a scene in the middle; and then I just start writing and see what happens. A vague idea of how it's going to end usually occurs to me as I go along -- it's quite rare for me to be completely in the dark about the ending for very long, but I almost invariably start out that way. "Running on Empty" I suppose is a bad example to use here, since the ending is a foregone conclusion from the beginning (somehow they get back to Atlantis) but I think I'd written up to chapter 7 or 8 before I started working out the final segments with the Wraith dart and John "dying". What usually happens as that as I'm writing, my brain is working on several parts of the story at once -- this bit here suggests this other bit somewhere else, and I bounce around between different parts of the story, writing scenes or snippets or just vague suggestions of scenes to write later, until it takes shape into something coherent.

Somebody on my flist once described her similar writing style as "grasshopper on crack", which is fairly accurate. *g*

But what seems to have happened to me over the last five or six years -- the period of time when I've been really active in SGA -- is that I've become less of a grasshopper-on-crack writer and more of a linear writer with more planning beforehand. It's been very interesting to me to observe the process.

...endings are easy, but final lines are impossible!

TELL ME ABOUT IT. I think the last line is the hardest sentence to write in the entire story (with the first line coming a close second ... but at least I've had more practice at those! *g*). It's definitely an art form, and the best ones, like the best chapter transitions, are the ones you don't even notice.

This looks useful!

For longer stories I often start with a world or setting I want to play in (both my genficathon fics, for example.) Then I sketch a vague plot idea, and the rest is just "stuffing holes": x doesn't make sense, I need to add y, that means that in this part of the story I need to change z and so on.
Not a very linear process, and prone to ending somewhere completely different than where I started. It's fun! But not exactly easy, and it takes a long time until I can start actually writing. And I have to be very careful not to lose the thread.

But I think that without that initial idea of the world, or that one thing I want to show/express, I wouldn't have enough motivation to actually finish. I could develop a plot with that method above (maybe - I bet it would still be full of holes), but probably not a longer story. (Of course, your definition of "long" is probably very different from mine ^^)

*nods* This makes sense to me! Most of my long stories have started with some kind of basic plot idea and either an opening scene, or some sort of vivid, concrete image from the middle. (In "Killing Frost", for example, it was the snowswept landscape that was my guiding image for the story.) Like I was saying to

xparrot above, I tend to work out the ending as I write, which often leads to stories that trail off into nowhere -- or, at the very least, require a lot of rewriting to get the end and the beginning to match up!

That is an immensely helpful post, thanks! I really think I'm gonna try that!

I'm a visual reader, and the two comics I've written so far started off a single image; I wrote the rest around that image. But that has its limits and the method you describe might work for a thing I'm working on where I'm stuck in the middle part... hm.

Glad to be helpful! :)

I don't think I would do this on every project. But it definitely helped me a lot, in this case, to get from a very general story idea to a more specific and detailed plot. It's a good tool to have in my writer's toolbox, anyway!

This is really interesting... and helpful, I think. I'm working on an original novel and I'm a bit plot-stuck at the moment and this looks like a good way to work out the issue without getting wrapped up in too much detail.

I tend towards the 'see where it goes as I'm writing' with only the broadest of outlines. Which worked with my big-bang SGA-fic, but I'm realizing now that I did a similar outline in my head. (It helped that I was stealing from a fairy-tale plot - a lot of the heavy lifting was already done.)

I think I'm going to snag this from you. At the very least, the sentences-into-paragraphs should serve as of stepping stones. But hopefully it'll also give me an easier way of working through my plot block.

So thanks! :D

I hope you get some use out of it! I've been having good results with it on the level of shorter stories, not so much with novel-length ones for me -- even though that's what it's intended for! But it's a good thing to add to my writers' toolbox, anyway.

Wow this method is awesome! So simple - but it works

Glad to help! :)

Yo, this snowball method works! I'm trying it out right now and I've already solved half the problems I had with my script, in just about an hour. Now I'll see if I can beat that middle part into shape.

Oh, fabulous! I was really surprised at how well it worked on this one particular story - trying to use it on longer (novel-length) works has been less successful, but with short stuff I've had good results.

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How about a writing process post?

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