long fic issues
Feb. 2nd, 2006 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321Thank you for such wonderful recs! I have been wallowing. I am still not over the alchemical febulousness of SGA fandom; it quite boggles my mind. I mean, I was 150 per cent immersed in lotrips and gave my soul to that fandom (my entry fandom!) but lotrips was huge and had a LOT of teenieslashers in it and people who couldn't string two beagels together but at one point I read almost everything and knew everything and waded through dross to get to gold.
Now, the thing about SGA is: there seems to be so much gold it's hard to detect the dross. The level of the quality just continues to astound me. It is phenomenal!! I mean, the things I have been reading take my breath away and beat a lot of published fic I've read over the decades. I will make a juicy shiny rec post soon! When I've digested it all.
Long fic
What is it with long fic that it torments me so? I have been labouring away at this HP opus for close to two years now. It reminds me of my pre-slash days; I had a long story in my head then, a kind of novel, and I kept writing bits and pieces of it here and there and filing them in a ringbinder, but I never finished it. In fact, I never finished anything until slash which is why I loved getting into fanfic so much (and because I discovered I could write in English). But now I seem to be back to that square one: writing bits and pieces, filing them into a ringbinder.
My origfic was about a boy called Felix. He was in his early 20s and his girlfriend had just left him. The whole fic was plotbunnied by a sentence from a Mental As Anything song 'And if you leave me, can I come too?' (I think it was Mental as Anything...) He then starts hanging out with a girl called Rubin who wears masculine clothes and meets a guy called Leon who looks like his ex-girlfriend, and they all stay at a beach house together (because my fics must all have beaches in them). And what do you know, never having heard of slash, the thing about the story that engrossed me most was the part where Felix and Leon shag on the beach. Woohey. When I go back and read those parts (and I re-wrote them frequently, the m/m beach sex being a cathected moment for me, as anyone who's ever read a story of mine will already know, *g*), I am astounded at my coyness. I simply did not dare to write explicit sex! What a long way I've come!!
Maybe one day I will return to that origfic, who knows. It ate my brain for 10 years.
But now my brain is eaten by my HP opus. This features Draco whose father is a criminal mass murderer evil Nazi-type. I read memoirs of the sons of evil Nazi-types in t'reference library! however, the real sons-of-Nazis are so fucked up they are not fic material; they are seriously fucked up. One of them was astoundingly forthright: he told his interviewer that on the night his father was executed for war crimes, he masturbated as a kind of 'fuck you, dad' symbolic act. Another one went to his father's grave every year to spit on it. These people were seriously damaged and couldn't get away from their damage. Most of them ended up as drug addicts of one kind or another. None had families. One of them became gay just to spite his parents in exile in Argentina.
I digressed just now, didn't I?
Anyway, without going into the plot of my HP opus which is a threesome of sorts and long and has plot (a new thing for me!): what do people do when faced with their own long fic? What are the tricks of the trade, that is, of getting the fic finished and enjoying yourself while you do it? I remember![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
resonant8 once telling me that it was good to have betas and others to egg you on, talk about the fic to people in chat -- but nobody I know seems to chat anymore, or do you?
Is it seriously demented to be working on a fic for so many years? I think it waspippinspeach who told me how she'd worked on a fic for 8 years or something. How do people do this? How do you stop it from being so bitty?
Do you want to know the plot outline? I keep wanting to talk to people about this fic, and then I keep thinking, nobody wants to hear half-baked plot outlines, what they want is a finished fic.
Now, the thing about SGA is: there seems to be so much gold it's hard to detect the dross. The level of the quality just continues to astound me. It is phenomenal!! I mean, the things I have been reading take my breath away and beat a lot of published fic I've read over the decades. I will make a juicy shiny rec post soon! When I've digested it all.
Long fic
What is it with long fic that it torments me so? I have been labouring away at this HP opus for close to two years now. It reminds me of my pre-slash days; I had a long story in my head then, a kind of novel, and I kept writing bits and pieces of it here and there and filing them in a ringbinder, but I never finished it. In fact, I never finished anything until slash which is why I loved getting into fanfic so much (and because I discovered I could write in English). But now I seem to be back to that square one: writing bits and pieces, filing them into a ringbinder.
My origfic was about a boy called Felix. He was in his early 20s and his girlfriend had just left him. The whole fic was plotbunnied by a sentence from a Mental As Anything song 'And if you leave me, can I come too?' (I think it was Mental as Anything...) He then starts hanging out with a girl called Rubin who wears masculine clothes and meets a guy called Leon who looks like his ex-girlfriend, and they all stay at a beach house together (because my fics must all have beaches in them). And what do you know, never having heard of slash, the thing about the story that engrossed me most was the part where Felix and Leon shag on the beach. Woohey. When I go back and read those parts (and I re-wrote them frequently, the m/m beach sex being a cathected moment for me, as anyone who's ever read a story of mine will already know, *g*), I am astounded at my coyness. I simply did not dare to write explicit sex! What a long way I've come!!
Maybe one day I will return to that origfic, who knows. It ate my brain for 10 years.
But now my brain is eaten by my HP opus. This features Draco whose father is a criminal mass murderer evil Nazi-type. I read memoirs of the sons of evil Nazi-types in t'reference library! however, the real sons-of-Nazis are so fucked up they are not fic material; they are seriously fucked up. One of them was astoundingly forthright: he told his interviewer that on the night his father was executed for war crimes, he masturbated as a kind of 'fuck you, dad' symbolic act. Another one went to his father's grave every year to spit on it. These people were seriously damaged and couldn't get away from their damage. Most of them ended up as drug addicts of one kind or another. None had families. One of them became gay just to spite his parents in exile in Argentina.
I digressed just now, didn't I?
Anyway, without going into the plot of my HP opus which is a threesome of sorts and long and has plot (a new thing for me!): what do people do when faced with their own long fic? What are the tricks of the trade, that is, of getting the fic finished and enjoying yourself while you do it? I remember
resonant8 once telling me that it was good to have betas and others to egg you on, talk about the fic to people in chat -- but nobody I know seems to chat anymore, or do you? Is it seriously demented to be working on a fic for so many years? I think it was
pippinspeach who told me how she'd worked on a fic for 8 years or something. How do people do this? How do you stop it from being so bitty?Do you want to know the plot outline? I keep wanting to talk to people about this fic, and then I keep thinking, nobody wants to hear half-baked plot outlines, what they want is a finished fic.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 05:15 pm (UTC)Of late, it takes me FOREVER to finish something, so I know of whence you speak about all these stupid BITS you end up having. I find that a) even short things end up five times longer by the time I get everything straightened out and b) probably not the best idea (for me, anyhow) to set out on anything epicly long, since, see a)
but, bits! sticking bits together! This I can speak on with some authority, since I've been doing it for three effing weeks on my current story, and I tend to write in bits and then mash them together anyhow, not in one chronological binge.
1. get everything in more of less the right page order (this might change.)
2. go through and put little brackets between each part that isn't stuck together. Sometimes mine say [Something here!] or sometime they're more detailed, like [John = confused/unreliable narrator] or whatever. Notes if you've got them, placeholders if not.
3. Pick a bracket and try to write it. My problem is that if things get hard, my first instinct is to go write a more fun bit - this can be useful, to a point, bue EVENTUALLY you do have to buckle down and start sticking.
4. I used timed writing a lot. I'll write for 25 minutes, during which I'm not allowed to check LJ, etc. etc. Then I get a break. Lather, rinse repeat. Usually, by the time I've worked for 25 minutes, I'm involved, and keep going. [This is also highly useful for housework. Some Saturdays I kill the whole afternoon writing for 25 minutes, then cleaning for 25 minutes, then taking a break for 25 minutes, over and over.]
5. Um, that's it. Oh, the other thing that's difficult is that when sticking together, it sometimes becomes necessary to cut out whole long bits I like - or, sometimes bits I really DON'T like, but slaved over, and so am loathe to cut. Cutting = v. necessary to make it work. and it sucks.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 03:10 pm (UTC)Thank you for reminding me of this option! I know absolutely what you mean because I have experienced the loss of story-telling-energy once I had told someone because the telling had tricked my brain into thinking, well, I've been there, done that now. On the other hand, I feel so isolated with a long fic, all on my own with the fic for years on end -- but maybe that's just part of the human longfic condition? And has to be endured? And if so: what strategies to use to endure it better?
Okay, and thank you so much for the advice about bits! That is such good, hands-on advice. I don't even have my bits in one document; they're in files all over the place with weird names, and then I print them out and file them in a ringbinder, in rough plot order. So I can't put brackets but I can put post-its! Or something cognate.
Haha, and the housework thing: I'm doing that the FlyLady way, of course, haha. So I'm never allowed to do 25 minutes at a stretch, only 15 minutes, except for Saturdays when I do five lots of 10 minutes. *stops self from boring on for three hours about domestic strategy*
Oh, and the cutting you mention. I hate the cutting! And yet, I know that the cutting is so necessary because the kinds of fic I love to read are written in a spare, terse style and the fic I tend to write is voluble and blathering. Argh. On the other hand, cutting something is still better than having nothing. So I think I'll go on bleurghing onto the page or screen, and then resign myself to future cutting.
I'm so happy to note that you are writing!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-02 09:02 pm (UTC)I'm a very linear writer, because I write in that kind of progressive, iterative thing. I can't do the bracket thing, or the go-back-and-fill-it-in-later thing, because the story has to go in order or else it feels wrong. (There are always exceptions for things like Nondisclosure Agreement, which I wrote entirely out of order, found the ongoing theme afterwards, and then re-ordered the bits. But that's a special-format type of fic.)
I use talking with people to help expand the ideas I have on the story. I don't write in a vacuum; I pick up bits and pieces from everyone I chat about it with. My usual late-night writing partner doesn't write herself, but she has a great eye and a great sense of character and we think a lot alike in our interpretations, so sometimes she'll say "and then they'd do X" and I'll be like "yes" and sometimes she'll say "tell me about Y" and I will, etc. (Sometimes I pretty much just lift AIM conversations and rewrite them a bit and drop them right in, becasue when I'm babbling about something I get it right.)
I usually wind up finishing about half the things I start. If I get really, really stuck at 60,000 words of a story, it means one of two things: the story is boring as hell and isn't really going anywhere, so it doesn't deserve to get finished, or the story has a major, serious flaw (plot or theme) that I can't put my finger on yet, and I can't keep going until I figure it out. I have a couple hundred thousand words of unfinished stories lying around waiting for me to figure out what's wrong with them :)
I second the "set yourself writing time". Even more than that, I suggest getting comfortable with your writing pace -- for instance, I can comfortably write between 2000 and 4000 words an hour, depending on how "on" I am that day -- and setting yourself timed writing goals. Like, "I'm going kind of slowly on this, so I'm going to write 750 words in the next half hour," or "I'm going really well so I'm going to write 2000 words in the next half hour." I usually set them so it'll be a bit of a stretch, but utterly achievable. That's a good method for when I'm doing NaNoWriMo and need word count fast, or when I'm stalled on a story because I'm sick of it and not because it's boring or there's a plot problem. Sometimes the challenge is what I need. (Sometimes it pisses me off, too.)
...Wow, this got long. o.O
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 02:59 pm (UTC)I am envious of everybody who has a feedback community; I don't seem to have those sorts of beta. Or maybe it's me? I don't know. And yes, I am also sensitive about critical comments at this stage of my ficbaby! So I guess that must make it a bit difficult for beta readers, to be muzzled.
If I get really, really stuck at 60,000 words of a story, it means one of two things: the story is boring as hell and isn't really going anywhere, so it doesn't deserve to get finished, or the story has a major, serious flaw (plot or theme) that I can't put my finger on yet, and I can't keep going until I figure it out.
Yes, that is interesting. I'm not bored by my story (although the rest of the world might be but then I won't know that until I've finished it and posted it!!) and it does seem to be going somewhere (as I said, I know the ending) but there is just such a whole lot of it; it overwhelms me with its a-lot-ness.
I like the setting targets, thank you for that suggestion.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 11:02 am (UTC)But for some reason, I HAVE to write in a linear way. I'm sure I could jumpstart myself so much more easily if I could start writing the stuff that really interests me now and come back and fill in the gaps later. And being a fandom of one can be problematic; it's more like writing origfic, with long, long spaces between feedback from betas or any kind of reader, for that matter.
But I'm so glad you're still working on your epic, despite the twists and turns it's taken. If you'd like, I'd be happy to look over your latest draft, if that will help move things along for you. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 02:54 pm (UTC)Unlike you, I cannot, for some reason, write in a linear way when it comes to longfic. I started to, I honestly did, but then it got out of control and I jumped ahead of myself. I keep thinking that if it's long I need to know where I'm heading, I need to know the ending! And then it's a matter of 'how the hell do I GET to that ending from this beginning?'
Are you sure you'd be happy to look at stuff? You have quite a lot of it already; I don't want to overwhelm you. I wrote something day before yesterday; could I send you that? Or flock it for you? It's already on LJ, as a private post (one of those ones with an eye, I love those, I'm constantly sending myself reminders via LJ; as in 'Don't forget to send proposal to conference'.)
I often don't look at my email, that's why. While LJ is my intravenous lifeline!
A year since FlyLady!! Remember when you first told me about her??
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 10:00 pm (UTC)That would be so perfect. I'm a total airplane h0r, thanks to my father. It would provide me with great inspiration!
Well, see, that's my problem as well. I started knowing the ending of A Lonely Impulse before I knew anything else. The problem is, I wrote right through that ending several chapters ago! So now I need another, temporary one at least, before I get into the sequel. Alas, I was having too much fun with the girls and got side-tracked, much like our heroes!
Yes! Even though things are still crazy, I'm starting to feel more like reading and writing again. It probably helps to be off all of those horrible medications. Heh. I seldom look at LJ, while I'm constantly in e-mail. I tend to get bogged down in BSG-related discussions, fic and icons and it becomes a huge time-consumer.
Has it really been a year since FlyLady? I'm so glad it worked for you, because it's done nothing for me, so far. It's been encouraging to read some of the testimonials the past few days, from the people it hasn't worked for, so I know I'm not the only one. I'm not giving up, though!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 10:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-03 11:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-05 06:05 pm (UTC)http://lobelia321.livejournal.com/402691.html?mode=reply
You will possibly not have a clue what's going on. This is early on, shortly after Draco has arrived at the youth hostel in Germany with his class trip and before he's had that first mystery blowjob. Miss Honey is the new Defense against the Dark Arts teacher. Um, need you know more? Please, no detailed beta at all at this stage! Just some encouraging murmurs!! And a 'I don't understand this' is fine, too.
Yes, it's been a year since FlyLady! *falls down on clean and shampooed carpet* I'm telling you, it has transformed my life and I am so grateful to you for alerting me to it. It's transformed the house but it's also transformed me. It's been like a sort of behavioural therapy. I think of those inspirational phrases all the time now when depression threatens to lurk and my rl writing is getting stuck. 'You are not behind, jump in where you are.' 'Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong.' All those mantras. I've got post-its with these mantras written on them over the house!! I am a sucker for this. Recently, I've not read the testimonials nor the emails much but I stick to my routine, I do my weekly homeblessing, I do my weekly shopping and post the menu on the fridge, I swish and swipe!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 11:06 am (UTC)I'm just thrilled that FlyLady worked so well for you. And here I was hesitant to pass the info on to you because it seemed you were the last person who would want or need such a thing! I think I know what's keeping me from working with it, sort of in general. It's probably depression combined with a fear of success. Which I never used to have! I used to expect success! In everything! But the past few years have been so filled with setbacks, that I've become afraid of myself, thinking that anything I touch will go sour. I know this is ridiculous and defeatist, and probably becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point. So I'm trying really hard to tell myself that baby steps are enough, and that even a little bit every day is enough. Somehow, I'll get over myself and get this to work for me!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-09 10:07 pm (UTC)