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dolimir_k
If anyone's read them (and anyone cares! Hee!) I thought this would be an interesting li'l meme - Bit of a tall order, I know; especially as I've only written 3. I'd love to see other writers doing this, so please, pass it on.
Ask me anything you want about any of my stories: how I thought of the idea, what I did to write it, what I was thinking when I wrote it, what I feel about it now, what I wish I'd done differently, etc. Or ask any of the characters from particular stories something you want to know, and get an answer from them. Or both.
dolimir_k If anyone's read them (and anyone cares! Hee!) I thought this would be an interesting li'l meme - Bit of a tall order, I know; especially as I've only written 3. I'd love to see other writers doing this, so please, pass it on.
Ask me anything you want about any of my stories: how I thought of the idea, what I did to write it, what I was thinking when I wrote it, what I feel about it now, what I wish I'd done differently, etc. Or ask any of the characters from particular stories something you want to know, and get an answer from them. Or both.
sleepy
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Do you scribble bits in a notebook and hope/know it'll all come together eventually, or maybe start at the beginning and work through to the end... how do you go about the nuts and bolts of getting the idea to your reader?
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Me too!
I practically never write anything longhand – I’m so unused to it, now, I actually find it physically hard!
I always start with the idea. The ideas just come – as I told Arnie; the gypsy story came out of an existing description of Gypsy Blair, and the sheriff Richard played in a film. The rest just grew as I wrote.
But I do plan! I don’t just start writing and see where it goes – I just don’t plan very far ahead. I usually have the skeleton of the story sketched out (but rarely the end – I hardly ever know how a story’s going to end till I’m at least half way through, and often not till right on the last chapter itself). I usually know where I’m going for the first three or four chapters and I sketch those out in detail…
Because the plot’s the hardest thing for me. I’m fine on characters and dialogue, but the actual story… never know what’s going to happen! That’s why my stories are not terribly plot oriented (o: It’s the characters, and the way they interact, that floats my boat. To me, the plot is just a device for people to talk to each other.
So, when I start, I make sure I *more or less* know where I’m going, so the thing doesn’t just ramble off into the ether. I sketch the thing out in scenes, or chapters (however you wanna look at it) and, once the bones of each chapter are sorted out, the rest is just writing; all the filling in of nuance and character, locations and the underlying ‘feel’ (are the people tense, are they happy – what’s going on in this scene?) – which is the easy and pleasurable part. TBH, Half the reason I decided to try and write Wind Whispering as a WIP on LJ, was to gain a little more discipline in the way I write, but it didn’t really help - I wrote that one the same way I wrote all the others – including all the Alias Smith and Jones stories I used to write before I discovered TS.
The story I thought I’d planned always changes as I write. Characters take on a life of their own – stuff happens I hadn’t accounted for. In Rainbows, for example, I’d THOUGHT I was pretty much at the end, when suddenly Blair/Star spotted a lecture by Eli Stoddard and we were off on a whole new tack that took that story to places, and an ending, I hadn’t envisaged at all.
So all the new stuff that comes to me as I write, has to be fitted in – which is why I never plot in any detail more than 2 or 3 chapters ahead of where I’m writing at a given moment.
So, yeah, I do start at the beginning and go through to the end, and the story that develops is often a total surprise to me. I especially love it when characters just get up and run away with the story and I have no idea where it’s going; I’m just along for the ride.
Hope that answers your question! TBH, this has been a really interesting exercise for me; I’ve never sat down and thought about any of this stuff before. I’m really hoping other writers take up this meme cos I’m FASCINATED to read what they have to say and THEIR thoughts on the matter.
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I'm so fascinated by the creative process of writing - it seems slightly different for everyone, well it would be *g*, but I mean that everyone seems to come at it from a slightly different angle, with different methods or sets of rules for themselves, and even different motivation. Wonderful ;~)
And thanks to LJ, I now get to ask people how they came up with an idea, or do they write in the bath... yep, I'm in danger of becoming a pest!
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Ooh, the gypsy tale! There’s a bit of a story behind that.
My partner, Mark, is a bit of a joker. Before he knew Garett’s name, he used to refer to him as ‘the little gypsy chap.’ This sort of developed into this whole little world, in which Garett/Blair lived in a caravan and sold pegs and heather ::hee:: The way Mark would described it, in tremendous detail, had me in stitches every time. So I passed the idea on to a couple of friends, along with a mildly erotic description of ‘Gypsy Blair’, sitting on the steps of his caravan (this was a traditional, painted, horse-drawn Romany caravan, of course). Said description seemed to do something to Sue’s circuits and she kept demanding more (o: When she didn’t get anymore, she bid on my ‘AU of your choice’ and demanded I write the story.
So, with all that in mind - to get back to your actual question ::G:: - I struggled for a while, trying to find a world to put Gypsy Blair in. The original idea was a WW2 story set in Amsterdam, but I couldn’t make it work and gave it up.
Then I caught a clip of a film Richard was in – don’t ask me which; the clip’s on The Wonder Tape – where he plays a hard-ass sheriff intimidating some poor guy in a diner, and the idea of Sheriff Jim came to me. I so saw Blair, in his old hippie van, breaking down in some small town, somewhere… Thinking ‘Cascades’, I was reminded of all those twee little ski resort towns full of 6 bedroom log ‘cabins’ and up-market stores, and - it all started to come together then.
So – it was very different from the WW2 tale I originally envisaged, and actually, quite different in the end, from the small town story I started out with. All I knew when I started, was that Blair would have been ‘shamanised’ by his trip to The Other Side and that he’d go to work in a little alternative coffee shop. I’d already planned for Jim to be this aggressive type of Sheriff, who just didn’t want Blair in his town, but that he’d grow to love him ::G::
But the whole story of Marla, Sugar and the coffee shop, Red and Marla’s abuse, the nattering Ghost of Naomi and all that had happened to her and Blair - all of that just arose as I wrote it. I had no plans to take the story that way at all.
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I keep getting asked for sequels to Wind Whispering. I never had any plans for one, but now the idea of small-town Sheriff Jim does have huge appeal for me, so you never know. Maybe Blair will get into some sort of trouble; you know how he tends to do that. (o:
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Thanks,
Jen
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I’ve probably already answered your Q. in depth in my post to Snailbones! – See? I can’t even write an LJ post without it turning into an epic!
But, no, I don’t write a DETAILED outline; I have a vague idea where the story’s going to go – but I rarely know how it’s going to end. I sketch the ideas out, and fit them as best I can to a scene/chapter structure. Then, I detail the first couple of chapters – maybe to chapter three - and start writing. Usually, the story will take itself where it’s going to go and I adapt my overall plan as it does. For this reason, I never detail more than a couple of chapters in advance.
My stories are long – always have been, even when I wrote in other fandoms. I don’t know why, exactly, except that I love to develop characters, and the interaction between characters is very important to me. There are no supporting acts in my tales. I like to think the original characters in my stories are as rounded and recognizable as gen-oo-yne human beings as are Jim, Blair, Simon, Naomi etc.
And all that tends to take a lot of writing! - not that it can’t be done in a short tale. One of my favourite TS stories is the ones who love you best, by Crowswork, which is very short, but beautifully descriptive of both Lash and Blair. So, it can be done, just not by me! I need space, man!