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nuts and bolts writing of longfic
Feb. 3rd, 2006 03:11 pmSo some of you so kindly wrote really helpful things re writing the looong fic. Now:
if you write longfic, do you tend to write it in longhand first?
And once on your computer, do you store it all on the same document, or on different ones? And how do you keep track of them all, especially of the different versions and drafts? Do you print them out?
Do you write out the whole thing in linear chronology, and later shuffle it round? Or do you start out with a flashback-whatever structure?
If you have several povs (and I find this is more of an issue for me with longfic; shortfic survives very well on one pov only but in longfic I have the urge to delve into more people's minds), how do you manage those? Do you write character A's pov first, and then character B, and so forth? Or do you shuttle back and forth? And do you organise the scenes into povs at the end, or as you go? Do you ever write the same scene from different povs to see how it will work better, and how do you decide which one works the better?
Do you work in chapters? Or sections? I find that I tend to write in chunks; so when I'm finished with one 'session', that will be one document and a sort of self-contained 'chapter' kind of thing. On the other hand, I have not yet (to use![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
helenish's term, done all the 'sticking' together of the different chunks. And sometimes a scene might need to be longer than one chunk so after the end of my session, that scene just gets abandoned half-finished. What do you do about that?
Do you try to remember everything and get everything right as you write? Or do you write blahblah or somesuch alert and go back to fix plot holes when you've written the whole thing up?
At what point do you start to involve betas, if at all? And do you find involving betas early rather than late (i.e. when the whole thing is still an unstuck-together monster) helpful or a hindrance?
What do you do when you find that the story has run away into one direction, and then you check bits that you wrote earlier (which by now is possibly 15 months earlier...!) and you realise that the characters and the plot were quite different back then. Especially the characters because plot is easier to fix, I find, but characters...! How do you keep track of what characters are like?
Do you make up whole backstories for everybody, in order to make sense of how they behave now (at the time of your story), and how do you stop yourself from turning these backstories into stories in their own right that threaten to take over and insinuate themselves into your already massively-long fic? Do you just allow them to do that, or do you ruthlessly trim?
What do you do about exposition? Short fics, I find, can survive very well on hint and suggestion and evocation but longfic, for some reason, needs (for me, anyway) more spelling out of the way things stand.
How do you do the planting-clues-in-chapter-one thing, and then the resolving-the-clue-in-chapter-538 and not the forgetting-that-I-had-planted-this-clue?
Do you write shorter fics alongside the longfic? Or write two or more fic in parallel? I am finding that once in longfic mode, I can't do anything else. I am a fic monogame. I can't dance at two weddings at once, as they say in Germany. Sometimes I would like to because I think it would be liberating and get me some much-needed interim feedback but I just can't get myself interested in writing anything but the longfic I am obsessively inhabiting. Is that bad?
How do you prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed by the sheer longness of it?
Do people get sick of writers moaning about their longfics and think, oh just get on with it and post already? Or is that me feeling diffident and paranoid?
Those of you (and may you be revered forever) who have indeed managed to finish and post a longfic (not I, alas, I have never finished a really long thing): did you post the longfic at the very end in one big splodge? Or did you post it as a WIP, in chapters or chunks? Did you upload it to your website and link to it from LJ? Or did you post it straight to LJ, in a zillion posts, and how long did it take you to format all that?? And how did you collect your feedback? Chapter by chapter, or all at the end? And if you uploaded to your website, did you plonk it all onto one massive page or separate it out into chapters with a 'next' link at the bottom? And did the knowledge of how you would format and upload the fic influence the way you wrote it, i.e. did you write in chapter-chunks of approximate LJ-post-length? Or did you have some really short chapters and some long tapeworms?
And did people even bother reading? Or was it all too loooong for them?
if you write longfic, do you tend to write it in longhand first?
And once on your computer, do you store it all on the same document, or on different ones? And how do you keep track of them all, especially of the different versions and drafts? Do you print them out?
Do you write out the whole thing in linear chronology, and later shuffle it round? Or do you start out with a flashback-whatever structure?
If you have several povs (and I find this is more of an issue for me with longfic; shortfic survives very well on one pov only but in longfic I have the urge to delve into more people's minds), how do you manage those? Do you write character A's pov first, and then character B, and so forth? Or do you shuttle back and forth? And do you organise the scenes into povs at the end, or as you go? Do you ever write the same scene from different povs to see how it will work better, and how do you decide which one works the better?
Do you work in chapters? Or sections? I find that I tend to write in chunks; so when I'm finished with one 'session', that will be one document and a sort of self-contained 'chapter' kind of thing. On the other hand, I have not yet (to use
helenish's term, done all the 'sticking' together of the different chunks. And sometimes a scene might need to be longer than one chunk so after the end of my session, that scene just gets abandoned half-finished. What do you do about that? Do you try to remember everything and get everything right as you write? Or do you write blahblah or somesuch alert and go back to fix plot holes when you've written the whole thing up?
At what point do you start to involve betas, if at all? And do you find involving betas early rather than late (i.e. when the whole thing is still an unstuck-together monster) helpful or a hindrance?
What do you do when you find that the story has run away into one direction, and then you check bits that you wrote earlier (which by now is possibly 15 months earlier...!) and you realise that the characters and the plot were quite different back then. Especially the characters because plot is easier to fix, I find, but characters...! How do you keep track of what characters are like?
Do you make up whole backstories for everybody, in order to make sense of how they behave now (at the time of your story), and how do you stop yourself from turning these backstories into stories in their own right that threaten to take over and insinuate themselves into your already massively-long fic? Do you just allow them to do that, or do you ruthlessly trim?
What do you do about exposition? Short fics, I find, can survive very well on hint and suggestion and evocation but longfic, for some reason, needs (for me, anyway) more spelling out of the way things stand.
How do you do the planting-clues-in-chapter-one thing, and then the resolving-the-clue-in-chapter-538 and not the forgetting-that-I-had-planted-this-clue?
Do you write shorter fics alongside the longfic? Or write two or more fic in parallel? I am finding that once in longfic mode, I can't do anything else. I am a fic monogame. I can't dance at two weddings at once, as they say in Germany. Sometimes I would like to because I think it would be liberating and get me some much-needed interim feedback but I just can't get myself interested in writing anything but the longfic I am obsessively inhabiting. Is that bad?
How do you prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed by the sheer longness of it?
Do people get sick of writers moaning about their longfics and think, oh just get on with it and post already? Or is that me feeling diffident and paranoid?
Those of you (and may you be revered forever) who have indeed managed to finish and post a longfic (not I, alas, I have never finished a really long thing): did you post the longfic at the very end in one big splodge? Or did you post it as a WIP, in chapters or chunks? Did you upload it to your website and link to it from LJ? Or did you post it straight to LJ, in a zillion posts, and how long did it take you to format all that?? And how did you collect your feedback? Chapter by chapter, or all at the end? And if you uploaded to your website, did you plonk it all onto one massive page or separate it out into chapters with a 'next' link at the bottom? And did the knowledge of how you would format and upload the fic influence the way you wrote it, i.e. did you write in chapter-chunks of approximate LJ-post-length? Or did you have some really short chapters and some long tapeworms?
And did people even bother reading? Or was it all too loooong for them?
