Seven Things About my Writing Process meme

[amberfocus]

 

1. I procrastinate for at least an hour before I can settle down into a long writing session. And I have to be procrastinating with something mindless like playing FB games or solitaire on the computer. It can’t be productive stuff like laundry or dishes or something. It has to be mindless in order for me to shift sideways into writing mode. It’s like it gives me the ability to access the creative areas of my brain, whereas just sitting down and facing the computer does not.

 

2. I cannot actually sit down and write to music. In fact I will turn the fan up to high when I write to drown out most other noises, like the TV from the other room. White noise works very well for me. However, I plot in my head to music. Usually the same song stuck on repeat, too, but a different song for each fic or each important moment in the fic. I remember when I was first seriously sitting down to write my first sci-fi epic as an adult and playing David Bowie’s Future Legend and Diamond Dogs* over and over again, which wasn’t easy because it was on vinyl. Eventually I just played the entire side of the Glass Spider album over and over, but life got so much easier when CD’s were invented. When I get stuck on something that I need to write but am resisting for whatever reason, like character death, I try to find a song that hurts enough to let the words out. I played I Would Die for You by Jann Arden* (thinking of it from Lumin’s viewpoint) when James Lumin saved Donna, Jonathon, and Rose from the Caligo on the roof of her apartment building and Breathe Me by Sia* incessantly when Donna was grieving and Never Alone by Barlow Girl* when J and R were comforting Donna in the aftermath in A Sky Without Zeppelins and she has the pregnancy and that bit of James to hold on to. Those were the hardest scenes I’ve ever had to write and probably the best I’ve ever written and it was definitely the music that got me there.

 

3. Scenes spring fully formed into my head. When wiggiemomsi gave me the prompt for Third Time’s the Charm, my mind immediately went to the wedding scene and John having to tell Rose the truth about really being the Doctor. You don’t see the full detail of that in the short story, but you will in Leap of Faith, the expanded version. But I saw it down to every single detail, the flowers, the candles, the overturned tables in the reception hall, the Family being restrained, and John-now-the-Doctor-again sitting with Rose in front of the fireplace and telling her in halting words that he didn’t know if the man he now was still loved her. I could smell the perfume of the wedding flowers and the too sweet sugary smell of the wedding cake, the richness of the prime rib being served, and hear the quiet tinkling of a fountain in one corner. I could see Jackie crying quietly off to one side on Pete’s shoulder as she watched her daughter’s heart get broken and Toshiko observing from nearby with tears in her eyes. It was like being there, being in the scene and watching it in real life. This happens a lot with every epic that I write, usually it all springs from one scene bursting into my mind.

 

4. I can handle hurting most of the characters for storyline purposes, I can keep Rose and the Doctor in misery for chapters and chapters and chapters, but hurting Donna Noble makes me physically sick to my stomach. That doesn’t stop me from doing it, but it hurts. I think this is because of the raw deal Donna got never being able to remember her life with the Doctor, never got to remember being fantastic.

 

5. I can’t write smut in one go. In fact I can usually only write three paragraphs maximum at once. Usually closer to one. Then I’ll go empty my head for ten minutes, either by watching a bit of a show I’ve downloaded or playing a game or fixing a snack for the kids or taking the food prep scraps out to feed the ducks and chickens. So it can literally take me a whole day to write a smut scene. I don’t really get this, because I can sit and write for a couple of hours at a time for action or fluff or simple romance or baby!fic, or what have you, but smut follows its own rules. Maybe it still embarrasses me a bit to write it so I have to keep making my mind retreat a bit before I can get the next part out. I don’t see sex scenes vividly like I do regular scenes so that may also contribute to this phenomenon. Once the smut has been posted I don’t tend to reread it, even though I reread other parts of my fics quite a bit. I just sort of skim.

 

6. In the beginning I wrote a lot by the seat of my pants, including the big epics. I would just sit down and start writing and the words came out and usually the stories wrote themselves with very little input from my conscious brain. This is true with the first three Time Eternal stories, Wolf Moon, and the first half of Zeppelins. It remains true for any of the shorter fics. But these days with the longer fics I tend to outline and have a good sense of where things are going from the beginning. This is because I don’t have the amount of time to write in a day that I did when I started with fanfic so I have to be far more organized with the time that I do have. I think it makes for tighter plotting to be organized, but I still sort of wish I could be more free-spirited about it. I do still have stories that write themselves, but I often have to interrupt the characters because they have inconvenient timing.

 

7. My characters argue with me if they don’t like the direction I’m taking a story in. A lot of times they are right and I find that it’s much better if I listen to them and do what they say. On rare occasions, like with Donna in Zeppelins, they are wrong and simply don’t want to go through the pain I’m about to inflict on them. To have given in to Donna and not done what I did to her would have made the last several chapters of the story incredibly weak instead of giving them an impact that resonated through the end of the fic and into the first chapters of the sequel. Plus, that part was planned nearly from the beginning. And she was fine with it until she fell so desperately in love. Okay, okay, I see my characters a little too vividly, but this is writer’s brain and I just don’t have a choice.

 

*Music Referenced

 

I Would Die for You by Jann Arden: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LeVXictHpE

and lyrics: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/j/jann+arden/i+would+die+for+you_20069934.html

 

Breathe Me by Sia with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqyEzFzkJWs

 

Never Alone by Barlow Girl with lyrics: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVwbrGCWic0

 

Future Legend and Diamond Dogs by David Bowie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-xuBbCPGcE 

and FL lyrics: http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Future-Legend-lyrics-David-Bowie/245E44C4B5753735482568A200106BD8

and DD lyrics: http://www.lyricsdepot.com/david-bowie/diamond-dogs.html

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[londoca.livejournal.com]

Rather interesting post. I appreciate it very much. I have some ideas milling around in my head that I might put to type if I can ever find the time. It is interesting heraring from others

[jellybean728.livejournal.com]

7. My characters argue with me if they don’t like the direction I’m taking a story in.

Thank goodness, I was afraid I was the only one.

It hasn't happened to me yet with the Doctor/Rose, but probably because I've never written anything long for them. But when I was writing for House MD, it used to happen to me all the time. He's really very disagreeable, and never had any trouble forcing me to write stuff a certain way because he simply refused to do what I wanted.