[Meme] Forty Questions for Fic Writers

[edenfalling]

I've seen slight variations of this floating around both Dreamwidth and Tumblr, and I'm bored, so why not?

Pick no more than three letters and I will answer those questions.

1. Describe your comfort zone — a typical you-fic.
2. Is there a trope you've yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
3. Is there a trope you wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole?
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
5. Share one of your strengths.
6. Share one of your weaknesses.
7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you've written and explain why you're proud of it.
8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.
9. Which fic has been the hardest to write?
10. Which fic has been the easiest to write?

11. Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?
12. Is there a section of canon above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?
13. What's the best writing advice you've ever come across?
14. What's the worst writing advice you've ever come across?
15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
16. If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?
17. Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?
18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?
19. Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.

21. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?
22. Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).
23. If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?
24. Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?
25. What do you look for in a beta?
26. Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?
27. How do you feel about collaborations?
28. Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.
29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?
30. Do you accept prompts?

31. Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?
32. How do you feel about smut?
33. How do you feel about crack?
34. What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?
35. Would you ever kill off a canon character?
36. Which is your favorite site to post fic?
37. Talk about your current WIPs.
38. Talk about a review that made your day.
39. Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?
40. Write an alternative ending (or the summary of one) to a fic you've written. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions.)

---------------

Answers!

--2, 14, and 18, for akatsuki210

--8, 29, and 38, for lady_songsmith

--5 and 7, for rthstewart

--13 and 37, for heliopausa

Comments

[rthstewart]

5, 7 and 8!!!

[edenfalling]

I already answered #8 over here. Would you like to choose a third number?

Anyway!

5. Share one of your strengths.

One thing I am good at is maintaining a consistent and non-self-contradictory world. Which in fanfiction terms means I am good at canon-compliance, both in the sense of acknowledging events and places, and in the sense of making sure my character interpretations are plausible extrapolations from canon knowledge. (In original fiction terms, it means that I abide by the rules I set up at the opening of my own story-universes.) This is not necessary for fanfiction, of course, and in AUs obviously some things get thrown aside and other altered, but I like putting things in order and building coherent structures, insofar as possible. World-building, timelines, you name it. I will make things make sense. (Even if canon itself didn't!)

7. Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

This is from Knives, a story wherein Ginny Weasley captures Lucius Malfoy at the end of the war (it was written before the publication of Deathly Hallows) and keeps him as her prisoner for several years:

-----

He winces as you draw the knife along his bearded cheek; a narrow line of blood wells up through the gap in his skin and trickles through the tangled golden hair. 'I was under the impression that the righteous didn't lie. Then again, you did shelter and conceal the Dark Lord's soul for nearly a year, so I suppose--'

You're not listening anymore.

He's accusing you of helping Tom. He's accusing you of opening the Chamber, of Petrifying Hermione, and Colin Creevey (who died screaming and you couldn't save him), and Penelope Clearwater (who spends her days locked in the closed ward at St. Mungo's), and Nearly-Headless Nick (who faded with the other ghosts, holding the castle wards during the final battle), and Justin Finch-Fletchley (who betrayed the Order and died at the end of Harry's wand while you kept the other soldiers from interfering).

You are not like Tom. You are not like Voldemort. You are not like him. You can't be. You refuse to be.

And yet...

The knife is heavy in your hand. Blood coats your fingers, thick and tacky as it dries. Guilt and shame stab into your stomach, and he's breaking you. You have all the power, but he's winning. And you can't let him go.

You freeze him with a spell, while his mouth is open and dark. You haven't asked him any questions; you aren't looking for answers. He won't have to stand trial.

He doesn't really need his tongue.

-----

Ginny's been torturing Lucius for nearly a year by this scene, but I think this is where she really tips over the edge.

"Knives" was a combination of three things, really. First, I had wanted for a while to try writing a story about torture from the torturer's POV, to see if I could make the reader feel complicit the way Lolita makes the reader feel complicit in Humbert Humbert's pedophilia. Second, there's the story of the captured fly that Ginny tells Lucius much later in the story; that is directly taken from my own life. And third, I wanted to write Ginny going dark for her own reasons instead of suffering residual possession evil-by-proxy or whatever.

It was a weird fic to write, in a lot of ways. I tried to write it in third-person. I tried to write it in first-person (and I don't like first-person). But the story insisted on being second-person, and it has a very mannered, patterned style of prose. The scenes aren't directly connected to each other; they're more like a slideshow than a smooth narrative. Sometimes the sentences and paragraphs pull a similar trick. That jump-cut effect is deliberate. So is all the color symbolism, and the Snow White imagery, and the paralleling of Harry and Lucius.

"Knives" is a dark story, and it's a pretentious story -- second-person, outside of Homestuck fandom, tends to make readers jarringly aware that they are reading a story -- and it's a story that doesn't have a proper ending because I'm not always a very nice person. But I think it's one of the best things I've ever written, and the scene above is one of the key moments.

[rthstewart]

I so agree about your solid views of canon, internal and otherwise and Knives is positively chilling. The 2nd person is so interesting here too - definitely not something I read much from you.

[edenfalling]

I have actually written a lot of second-person stories over the last two years, but they've been almost entirely for Homestuck, so... *shrug* The canon for that series is told in second-person -- it's mimicking the form of a text-parsing computer game -- so it feels natural to continue the style in fanfiction. I would go so far as to guess that the majority of Homestuck fanfiction is written in second-person. But that's a weird case. Generally speaking, second-person is going to read as weird and offputting, so unless you're aiming for a specific effect, it's best avoided.

With "Knives," I was deliberately trying to be unsettling, and to draw readers in and make them feel complicit -- to say, "What would YOU do in a situation like this?" -- which I think is why the second-person version worked so much better than my aborted attempts at writing in third- and first-person.

[heliopausa]

13, 18 and 37. :)

[edenfalling]

I already answered #18 over here. Would you like to pick another number?

But moving on!

13. What's the best writing advice you've ever come across?

Ursula Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," which I encountered printed in her book The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. The whole book is worth reading, but that piece is the one that has stuck with me the most. It's superficially about appropriate language for fantasy dialogue, but it's also about knowing what kind of story you're telling, and learning to trust your own voice.

37. Talk about your current WIPs.

All of them? We'd be here all night! *wry* I have never had under a dozen technically "in progress" stories in my life... but that doesn't mean I'm actively working on most of them at any given moment.

The ones that have been most "alive" most recently are my unexpected love Cotton Candy Bingo fill, which has been driving me up the wall for over a month now. The thing is, I decided to answer it via a prompt from somebody on Tumblr, which means I am writing about Mary Pevensie (from my Narnia genderswap AU) finding something to love after she's banned from Narnia at the end of PC. And I decided, because of Reasons, that she gets into nuclear chemistry (which is her father's passion) and goes to America during VDT, because it would be socially awkward to have her stay alone with Professor Kirke. (Stephen stays instead, since he could use the intensive tutoring; like Susan, he's not good at school. (My headcanon is that Susan is dyslexic, btw.)) But I've gotten hung up on Mary's sense of duty and her notion that going to America while her siblings stay home would be a return to her old habits of running away from her problems, and I can't figure out how to get around that block. Gnrgh.

I'm toying with some ideas for my NFE assignment, and in fact checked a couple books out of the library today for background research. *zips lips for anonymity rather than say more*

I have a half-written response to a Homestuck kinkmeme prompt about Jane Crocker writing to either Rose or Dave to verify that her friends are actually related to the famous people they claim as their family. That one stalled out for lack of an obvious and coherent endpoint, though I think I might be able to combine it with a really old prompt about Jane going to one of Rose's book signings and talking about Roxy without Rose giving away the secret that Roxy and Dirk live four hundred years in the future. I just need to shift some dates around a bit.

I added a few hundred words to an old GI Joe: The Rise of COBRA WIP, which is titled "Five Things That Never Happened to Rex and Ana Lewis." Three of the five are finished in rough draft. The fourth is the one where the siblings' backstory is made explicit, though I've hinted around it in the first three sections. But right now I'm sorting through some logistics before I can get Ana and Rex to talk -- it's tricky because he broke into her apartment intending to drug and kidnap her (this is canon, btw), but she woke up and shot him. Whoops!

(I am fully aware that maybe three people on the planet will have any interest in that story. I don't care. I'm writing it mostly for my own satisfaction.)

I've been poking a little at "Harvest" again, which is an original story about Ekanu Thousandbirds and Denifar Rollesdun at the Ileara Chapterhouse on Na'eraelu in the Gwynorae Archipelago. It's basically the story of how they attempt a serious romantic and sexual relationship, and it falls apart spectacularly; the secondary plots are Ekanu coming to terms with being an adult despite not having undergone the adulthood rites of passage of her people, Ekanu learning how to be a teacher and mentor, and Denifar assisting in an irrigation project.

And there's that story about lesbians saving the world with shades of Sleeping Beauty I posted about a few days ago. I'm still hashing out world-building stuff there, but I think I finally found the right opening scene for when I start writing. \o/

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

2, 14, 18

[edenfalling]

2. Is there a trope you've yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Hmm. Mostly stuff to do with power? Like, I have a serious power kink. I wouldn't say that massively overpowered characters are a bulletproof kink of mine, because they are sadly very hard to do in an emotionally and logistically convincing way, and also without rendering the rest of the cast into a useless cheering section, but when done right... oh god yes.

The problem is that hits so close to the live wires of my id that I am terrified of doing it wrong in fanfiction. And also my original work tends to be very low-magic for fantasy, so unless I'm aiming for political/social power -- which is also very good, but not quite as good as "I can vaporize you with a stray thought" superpowers -- there's no real opportunity.

But I'm working on it. :-)

14. What's the worst writing advice you've ever come across?

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. That book. There are not words for how much I dislike that book. I am sure it works just fine for many people, but I had a high school English teacher who practically took that book as gospel, and it is pretty much diametrically opposed to the way my mind works, and I just... I have a lot of bad memories, okay?

18. Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?

Depends on the length of the work. For ficlets, I have a vague idea and start writing, adjusting as I go. Once I reach the end, I go back and make sure the beginning matches it, and there's support for events and characterization in the middle.

For longer work, I tend to make a background file, which contains everything from generic world-building thoughts, to a brief (can be several paragraphs) statement of the story's point -- what I'm trying to say about the characters, or about some general theme, or about the canon, or whatever -- to character sketches, to timelines, to scene-by-scene outlines, to actual ultra-rough-draft sketches of the story itself (without dialogue and with lots of "and then stuff happens" handwaves). These files can get quite long, and are organized more by date -- I add to them as stuff occurs to me, or as the story takes unexpected turns -- then by any coherent and easily searchable structure.

[lady_songsmith]

Hmm, I was gonna pick 14, but I see that's been picked. 8, 29, 38

[edenfalling]

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

Huh. Well, I'm going to disqualify all Homestuck chatlog fics on general principle, though they're excellent exercises in maintaining character voice. They tend to be very rambling and context-dependent, and also I don't want to deal with the color-coding.

Actually, when looking through my work, I noticed that I rarely found any exchanges I wanted to quote, chatlogs or no chatlogs. Generally my dialogue is written across an entire scene, and interwoven with a bunch of tight third-person POV narrative. I don't really do snappy exchanges. But I do like a bunch of my bantery scenes, since teasing-amongst-friends is a favorite narrative kink of mine. I also like more serious exchanges where people communicate without always saying all the relevant words, but those, again, are dependent on lengthy scenes and don't excerpt well. That said:

Here is a brief conversation from early in To Every Thing There Is a Season:

-----

He began reciting poetry in his mind as a distraction, which had the unfortunate side effect of letting Corradin and Ilvari sneak up on him yet again.

"Have you named her yet?" Corradin asked, nearly startling Ilgamuth into wheeling his horse around to face the unexpected threat. But he had not grown up in the heart of Calavar's horse country for nothing. He controlled himself and the mare before they could disrupt the column.

Corradin was laughing at him nonetheless.

Ilvari simply shook his head and sighed. "It is said that taking a nameless steed into battle brings misfortune on her rider and his companions," he said. "You must give her a self so the gods can see her."

"'They run like wind, like lightning, like a storm-tossed sea on dry land; who can count their number, any more than drops of rain or grains of sand? But beware, O man, before you think to steal a single hoof; their master knows them all,'" Ilgamuth quoted.

Corradin laughed harder.

"Just because Sokda knows every horse in the world doesn't mean Tash or Achadith do. You have to bring them to the right gods' attention," Ilvari said patiently. "What is the mare's name?"

In Calavar, horses were not named until they were known, so the word would not interpose itself between beast and master. Ilgamuth had not yet learned all the moods and habits of his new mare, nor had she grown accustomed to him and able to respond to his slightest shift of attention. But she did remind him of a folktale his elder sister Hunariyyah was fond of: the sullen girl who sat by the oven all day and would never help her family with any of their chores, nor offer the fresh bread to any guests, until one of those guests revealed himself as a prince in disguise and bought her for his slave because he found her sharp tongue amusing.

"Hareena," Ilgamuth decided, and poured a tiny pool of water into his right palm, letting it drip through his fingers onto the mare's neck.

Ilvari nodded in satisfaction.

-----

I like it because it gets across some important things about all three participants in the conversation -- Corradin is friendly and easily amused; Ilvari is more deliberate and takes religion seriously; Ilgamuth is awkward with people, more comfortable with quoted words than his own, and lives in his head; etc. It also gets across some background world-building without going into acres of info-dumping. And I find Calormene formality interesting to write, particularly when also trying to make teenage boys sound like teenage boys. *wry*

I will answer the other two points in a separate comment.

[rthstewart.livejournal.com]

I do so love that story.

[edenfalling]

29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

Oh god. Um. *ponders*

There was this one fic by MarbleGlove, wherein Methos (from Highlander) wound up teaching Jack O'Neil's teenage clone, and ended up leaving Earth to be a System Lord with Jake as his First Prime. A Square Peg in a Round Hole, or Junior Year of High School, Revised, A Clones Tale. I always kind of wanted to write a scene wherein Daniel Jackson realized Methos had been Death of the Four Horsemen, not just an obscure god of knowledge.

I really like revelation scenes, okay? It's a weakness.

38. Talk about a review that made your day.

I have received a lot of really amazing and thoughtful reviews over the years, but the one that immediately jumps to mind is Jade Rozes's review of Undertow, over on ff.net. My betas got slammed by life and I ended up posting the story with only cursory edits, since I was too close to it to have any perspective left. Jade Rozes -- while also telling me the things she liked about the fic, and complimenting me more than I probably deserved -- basically did a beta job for me in the guise of a review. She pointed out some discrepancies between "Undertow" and "Tides" (the former being a sequel to the latter), some places where the sequence of actions was unclear, some character motivations that had gotten lost between my brain and the page, and a few other problems. I revised the work and it is much better for her help!