Writers' Salon!

[isana]

All right, guys, let's get this started.

This is a post for members to post their burning questions to each other. They can be simple, like "when is Character X's birthday," or not so simple "how would you define the relationship between Character X and Character Y?" If there's a story you want that author to talk about, throw in the title (and some points you'd like covered!) and if said author's willing, they can write their answer in a separate post, since I have no idea what the comment word limits are.

Here's how it'll work: an author who's up for answering questions/writing commentaries about stories will leave their name in a comment. Readers who want to ask questions or request stories reply to that comment, and hopefully we'll have some good conversations going!

If you guys request stories, it may be best if you limit them to rainbowfic for the time being, unless the story you've got archived outside the comm is in a public entry.

EDIT: If it's not already obvious, you can ask authors more than one question in however many comments you like. The point is to have a discussion, and it wouldn't be very lively if it stopped at one question per author! Just give the author a chance to finish answering your previous questions, of course.

Comments

Re: Sit on the couch with SWL.

[shipwreck_light]

You bet! But, you so totally have to tell me back then.

You know how in the postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco was all "I woke up one morning and I felt like killing a monk"?

That's how all of my stories come about. I wake up one morning and I feel like doing a thing. The original impetus for what I'm posting here was "write slice-of-life about assassins". It developed a point beyond this, which doesn't usually happen, but anyway. I like to have a point I can reference in times of directional confusion.

A lot of the plotting takes place in my head. Oh, I'll gather notes and scrawl down ideas, but the mental film of what happens has to stick together or coalesce internally. My "outlines" are these rambly OneNote dumps of conversation fragments and evocative phrases. Inadequate to some standards? Wouldn't doubt it. But, I've written three novels this way. Two of them are pretty OK XD.

Mostly, I let them hang out and do their own things until I need them, so to speak. It's rare I have to rush one along. "Contes Barbares", I basically stuck my head in a bucket of chillout music for an evening and scrawled for a few hours, running with the bare bones idea of "Seb and Roa go on a mission; this is entertaining for about 7K words".

Fun fact: you can usually tell how long I was planning a thing by how many scene cuts it has. More scene cuts = less planning. If I let things sit around, you see, they develop more bridge sequences.

When I sit down to write, I throw all of my notes either onto their own page in OneNote (if it's long) or right in the document file (if it isn't), put them in order and start filling stuff in. Usually, conversations first since I like to poke those a lot. Sometimes, I talk to myself to accomplish dialogue/scare the 'rents.

But, I don't talk to my characters. I think about them about the same way I think about my BJD collection. They're interesting, they're fun, but they're /things/. You can still love a thing all you want, but a thing it remains.

I just sit my butt down and start describing what I've seen happen. My drafts tend to be very impressionistic. Sometimes I can edit that out, sometimes I can't. My goal with prose is that the words themselves should fade away, leaving the audience with as little space between what I've seen and they see now as possible. Stupid words. Get out of there! No, seriously. That's my ideal when it comes to revising.

I don't think you could say I go from beginning to end, it's more a question of sticking the parts I have together.