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desolateice · 1 year

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HELLO my dearest favourite writer! I heard you were sick, so get well soon <3

Can I ask how you write so much in such a small time? Do you have a schedule to keep you in check, or do you just write as soon as motivation springs? I have wanted to write something for the longest time, I really wanted to write a long story but for I've never been able to do it consistently. Do you plan your stories or is it a more "go with the flow thing"? Or a mix of both :0

Apologies for the amount of questions, and take your time with answering!! I just wanted to learn more about writing and I figured I'd ask you!!

Hello anon!

I seem to be on the mend, thank you for your well wishes! I was definitely under the weather for about a little over a week.

So this got away from me. 😅 It’s massive, there’s mild spoilers for fics as I talk about writing them below this cut and also again...the entirety of it is massive. Thank you for asking anon, happy writing and best of luck on your long story. 💖

I do not recommend what I do. I…do almost nothing else. 😅 Mr. Miyagi would be so disappointed in me. There's like no life balance at the moment. During the pandemic I've become a bit of a hermit, more than I normally was/am and so I threw myself into writing. Pretty much any time I have free time and I’m not working or doing chores, I'm writing.

It is a 0/10 do not recommend. That week I was out sick was going to be my attempt at being social again to sort of re-balance and well that failed because instead I had to stay in my room. You don't want to know the amount of tasks, even creative projects, I'm currently avoiding by burying deeper into fic writing.

Like even when I'm not writing, if I'm doing something that doesn't require my brain whether it's baking or cleaning, I'm daydreaming the story. Or showering. Part of why I take long showers is to like de-stress but I'm also trying to figure out plot holes and trying to solve them and usually I do. 😅I cannot recommend a good shower or bath more. I don't know what it is about them.

I would say when I was younger I'd spend my entire breaks writing and in between classes I was writing, and then I started a blog where I reviewed stuff and I'd read that those style blogs did better if you had a consistent posting schedule. So I'd do a lot of work, cram out as many blog posts in a day as I could and then schedule them and I think that habit I instilled in myself from blogging just sort of became a wildfire. I think that mixed with a pretty good word per minute typing is how I crank out so much so fast. I blame my dad, when I was little he told me learning to type was important and so I got to sit in front of the family computer and just write and write and write and play typing games. He also had an old school type writer and I was allowed to play with that too. When I'm in the zone I'm cruising along because of that, though I misspell a lot and I’ve learned to go back and fix that later, or hope to catch it later. My biggest one is teh instead of the. But I've also been to writing conferences and a lot of interviews with writers and that schedule you ask about is always something they talk about.

Writers with full time jobs will try and find a time in their schedule that works for them to write, even if it's a short period of time. Writers with kids will get up early or stay up late to write when their kids have gone to bed. It's really what works best for you. When are you most creative? When does your mind run wild with a story idea?

One of the recent interviews I watched was with Naomi Hirahara, she said she did the Pomodoro method. A Pomodoro is a tomato timer, you might've seen one in kitchen, their kind of cute. But what she does is she calls a friend and they both set a timer for 15 minutes and then write, no distractions. No looking stuff up, no checking social media or your phone, nothing. No self editing or going back to fix things. Just writing as much as you can.

Because you're rushing, because you're being timed, and you've got a friend keeping you accountable you kind of don't think about the words or if they're good or bad you just write and get it out and onto the page. And then they share their word count and just cheer each other on.

It’s also called sprinting. I didn’t know about it until I joined Discord and joined in on some sprints with a sprinting bot and other writers and it can be a lot of fun because you’re working on your own thing but together and there’s comradely and you’re just cheering each other on.

And I think it's important to occasionally write like that. I put brackets for stuff I have to skip over or research more later. [like this] so that I know to come back to it later, or if I'm struggling with a part and know I can skip ahead I'll do something like [Johnny and Daniel go to the beach and try balancing on the poles(?)] and then skip to the part that I have in my head. And then when I have more time I go back and read that note and then fill in that spot, research and fill in the blanks. And if I'm stuck with a spot I'm writing I try and think about what's needed. Sometimes I can fill in what I'd expect to be an entire chapter with a line, or sometimes I just let the characters talk, or I throw in another, or I go back.

Sometimes there's something wrong a couple paragraphs above which is why I'm stuck. Or, I swap fics. Work on a different one for a bit. Semifreddo exists because I got stuck on "Cherry Cordial". I was like hmm I'm stuck, let's go look at this other prompt oh hey idea, ran with it, finished a draft of it and realized oh, solved the issue I was having with "Cherry Cordial". Schedule or inspiration: Sometimes it's both. I save writing after everyone goes to bed and then I let it eat into my sleep, do not recommend, especially because generally I need 9 hours to function and I love to sleep.

Or I write a lot on the weekends when I don't have plans.

Sometimes I start to fall asleep. With Root Beer Floats and Green Tea I would stay up late trying to write as much as possible because I knew it was going to be long and because I tried to do a chapter a day. I’d also get up early and write before I had work.

So once the posting caught up with me I'd try to write as much as I could when I could at night so I could read it over the next day to publish it and I'd read it over during my lunch break so that I could publish it before dinner and...my sleep suffered.

Now when I get that level of tired I try to go to bed. Because it's not healthy. It was a fun challenge and I honestly needed a distraction from life, but it wasn't sustainable. I will say though that when I'm tired like that sometimes I'll scribble down the skeleton of the idea so that when I have energy I can come back to it, then go to bed after the thought is written down. That balance is important. Like okay, on Saturday I cleaned. I was feeling a bit better and needed to clean and disinfect and I thought this should take just a little bit of time and then I can write. And it took all day. I was so mad and it was kind of a bummer to put away all my Halloween stuff, especially all the baking stuff I didn’t get around to using because I was sick. But I’m sitting here now and it’s so neat and organized and it feels so much better and I’m glad I did it. Even if I lost that time I meant to write. My space needed it, I needed it for my mental health and it was a good thing to do for future me. And I need to work on that more because I kind of feel like a feral cat or something and don’t want to leave and go out but then I do, I go out and meet a friend for a catch up at a cafe, or go to high tea or go to my local library or just spend all day with friends and I feel better. Which again, is exactly why I don’t recommend my style or schedule because oof, my balance and alignment is out of whack and I’m still trying to figure it out. I do think it’s important to give yourself time to write, to find that time, even if it’s 15 minutes once a week. Right now it’s Nanowrimo (National Writing Month, though it’s international) And people challenge themselves to crank out a novel in a month by writing daily. The fun of it is that there’s an official website and there are meetings and a sense of community.

There might be stuff happening near you, and if not there’s plenty of stuff online. I do want to warn you that you can be your hardest critic, especially with a schedule and to not get too upset if you miss a day in your schedule or a week.

Life happens, what’s important is that you enjoy it and have fun and to get back up, take care of yourself and try again. The more you do it, the easier it’ll get. I’m going to share one of their author pep talks with you. This one is from Audrey Niffenegger.

Dear Novelist,

I am sitting at my desk, staring at my computer screen, contemplating National Novel Writing Month with admiration and horror. Admiration for those of you who threw yourselves into writing your novels with furious devotion and a passionate determination to write 1666.66 words per day, and horror at the thought of doing this myself.

I’m a very slow writer. Slow works for me. I have all the bad habits my fellow writers warn you not to fall into: I procrastinate. I write a bit and wander off to think it over and come back two weeks later. I have no schedule, no regular habits, no fetishes, no daily word quota. I incubate ideas for years and once I start to work on them I can spend more years happily researching esoteric bits and bobs that may not even end up in the novel. I am terribly caffeine dependent. I edit while I write.

Surely you don’t do any of that stuff, or you’d be doomed to slowness and would not excel at this National Novel Writing Month thing. My first novel took me four and a half years to write; the second took seven years, though that was because I fell so in love with the research (I was working as a volunteer tour guide at Highgate Cemetery in London) that I had a hard time stopping so I could finish the book. I once spent fourteen years working on a graphic novel.

Why do I let this happen? Because it’s fun. Now that you have created your fictional people and the world they live in, you have probably discovered that they are terrific company and that they are all living in your brain. Suddenly you have a party in your head (a la that old Talking Heads song) and it is hard to make that party happen any faster than it wants to happen. And when the party is finally over, you will feel bereft and alone. So why not slow down and have the maximum experience?

I once studied painting with Ed Paschke, who invited me and my classmates to visit his studio. He was working on six paintings simultaneously. We asked him why, and he replied that he could finish one painting a week or six paintings in six weeks. He preferred to take longer because more things might happen to him in those six weeks, he might have more ideas about any one of the six paintings. He liked to take it slow.

National Novel Writing Month was a chance to jolt your story onto the page, to use the magic of a deadline to whap out your novel. Now that it is December, I hope you will kick back, have a cup of coffee, reread your 50,000 words, ponder a bit, and then… go for a walk. And on that walk I hope your novel will unclench itself in your brain and let you begin the long, slow, delightful work of rewriting it.

With very best wishes for the health of your novel,

Audrey Niffenegger

The reason why I share this is because it’s lovely and because she a bit the opposite of me. She writes slowly, takes her time, and she loves it.

One true piece of writing advice is that everyone does it differently, so you have to take the advice that works for you and figure out your own path.

It might be fixing a schedule, it might be writing every time inspiration strikes and writing like that line in one of the Hamilton songs (”How do you write like you’re running out of time?”) which I fear sometimes is me 😅, or you might just write when you have time. It’s what people do. They write before their kids get up, or after they go to bed, or they write on their train commute, or they give themselves an hour that is devoted only to writing. I took quite a few years off from writing fic, from writing my own stories, but I never stopped writing. I journaled, I wrote poems, I wrote blog posts and I read.

Reading is so important and figuring out why it is can help. I had so many classes try to make me read Moby Dick and I managed to avoid reading it by just reading chapters that we talked about and nothing else, but the point was to understand the way Herman Melville described things and the voice he used.

I had to read the Sermon over and over again and hated it. 😅 It’s so...convoluted. It didn’t work for me, but then one day I didn’t have a lot of options of things to read because I was somewhere where I could get my hands on English books easily but classics are generally free online and I read it and you know what? I enjoyed it and it’s because it starts with the “there was only one bed” trope. But it’s still not one I particularly want to go back to and I got it. I got why I was made to read it so many times. On the other hand for long books I’ve read two massive ‘classic’ books. Ulysses and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Ulysses is great for studying different styles. Each chapter is a parody of a different style. However it’s hard to follow. You can’t just pick it up and float along with the story. It’s full of ye olde memes and pop culture references and all sorts of stuff that James Joyce put in that I just didn’t get. I had to read it with like three different guides and I still hated it at the end, but I respect the different styles of every chapter and the mechanics of the book as well as the books history itself as a banned book that no one would publish for it’s crude content. Meanwhile, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my all time favorite books. The way the Alexandre Dumas planned out his story and layer and laid out such a tale of revenge is honestly just my jam. The only other long form story I love in such a way that pulls this plot layering off that I’ve found is One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. (I’m no longer caught up because I tend to let the arcs finish before I pick them it up again and I’ve let several years worth of arcs build up) But reading is important, you learn so much from reading. Different styles, different ways to write and you absorb so much subconsciously. I’ve been told I need to read The Song of Achilles because it’s a style opposite of mine. It’s succinct and apparently the grammar and the way it’s told would do me some good. 😅 But parody is also a great exercise. Short stories are good place to start. Kafka for example, The Metamorphosis has been studied, torn apart by English classes and writers, and parodied over and over again. It’s not my favorite but that’s because to me reading Kafka is like trying to run through quicksand. But his ability to write the nightmare that is bureaucracy and real life, oof, add to that the idea that you wake up as a bug and are still being treated the same and still have to figure out how to get out of bed and get to work? That hits in a really just poignant and a depressing kind of pessimistic way.

The reason I enjoy writing fic is because there’s a sense of community that is somewhat already built in. When you write your own stuff you’ve got to seek that out, because writing is a relatively lonely hobby. There’s a reason sewing circles and book clubs exist. Because there’s something comforting in knowing you’re not alone. Writing classes can be fun, libraries usually have writing clubs, it can be scary, because writing can be such a personal experience, but I mention it because you never know what feedback on your writing will give you and what advice you might get when you get stuck. Plus they usually give you writing exercises which are a great way to warm up. Which honestly is one of the reasons I love the allvalley100. Being given a prompt and a word limit is a great warm up and it’s a good exercise since I tend to write so much generally. I mean look at this. 😅 I didn’t mean for this to get so long and I’m not done yet... So challenging myself to just 100 words is great for me to exercise my writing muscles. It’s why I also love the Halloween prompts, because I can essentially look at them and think okay what of these sparks my interest? Aliens? I love those sci-fy stories like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, the TV shows like The Neighbors, the early seasons of 3rd Rock from the Sun, and 3Below. I know what it’s like to move to another country where the language isn’t my native one. And then I just had fun with it. A lot of fun, because I hadn’t played with a sub-genre I enjoy so much which are the alien tries to understand what it’s like to live on earth and ends up making great points about culture and life.

That is one where I just went with the flow. I had an idea of where I wanted to go, I mean the goal is always romance, so I kind of know where I’m going, but I like jumping from stepping stone to stepping stone to get there. And I definitely made mistakes and then had to go back and figure them out. Like Daniel’s heart beats in the first chapter and I belatedly after having so much fun with language realized the “lore” of the story and the alien culture and then realized whoops...his heart already beat once, do I go back and fix that? It’d already been published, so I just had to figure it out, how to fit that mistake into the story.

I also totally get nervous before I post things. I write and then I’m like ahhhh, and there have been times where I write a new story or start something and think oh no one is going to like this but me. But I’m working on that. Because it shouldn’t matter. As long as I’m enjoying it and entertaining myself it doesn’t matter. I think the first chapter of Root Beer Floats and Green Tea I had it in Ao3 and I had to like force myself to hit the post button and had squeezed my eyes shut and then like ran away from my computer because I was writing something that was for me. I was entertaining myself and didn’t know if anyone else would like it. I almost didn’t. I started it for myself and was like I don’t have to share this, but then I decided, screw it, I’m going to post it. But I still ran away from my computer and got so nervous.

Usually in my head I have a vague idea of what I want to happen, like in the start of Root Beer Floats and Green Tea I knew I wanted to go through the movies because I wanted the whole point to be a ripple effect, by making one change Johnny changed not just his future, but everyone else’s. So I was telling myself the big climatic fight from TKK2 over and over again and it kept changing while I was writing the first arc and slowly making my way there. Originally I kept it the same as the film but put Johnny in the audience, and then realized he’d never forgive Chozen if he threatened Kumiko and tried to kill Daniel, and that Johnny wasn’t the type of person to just sit in the audience, so I had to move him, I had to change the story. Because I wanted to keep that friendship, that crush and not destroy everything. Because in my mind Johnny was fuming from the audience, comforting Yukie but murderous and holding back because Mr. Miyagi wasn’t panicking and he believed in Daniel and I realized that it just didn’t work.

He had to be a part of it. The whole point of Root Beer Floats and Green Tea is that actions and fixing things changes everything and I had to figure out Chozen better and why, if I wanted them to get along so I could pull Chozen into that third movie as well, I had to keep them friends. I had to bridge a gap that the original plot of TKK2 and the friendship I had for all of them in my mind just didn’t match. So I was toying with the future plot while writing the first arc. There were so many showers where I told myself that fight over and over again until I finally figured out the way I wanted it to go. 😅 I tend to think up where I want something to go, and there’s a scene I want to get to and then I work on the steps it takes to get there. If it’s too far away I will write down a quick list of everything to get there. Like I have done that with Buku Buku Cha because I know where I want it to go and what I want to happen though sometimes I change the route just a bit, but I knew I’d set it aside for all the Halloween prompts and run out of time to work on it so I have a list of everything so I won’t forget. And when I was writing the final arc of Root Beer Floats and Green Tea I listed all the plot points I wanted to hit before I ended the story, and those ended up, for the most part, becoming chapters because the entire thing got away from me.

So I suppose it’s a bit of both. For Root Beer Floats and Green Tea I knew kind of how I wanted it to end. I knew the scene I wanted, to see how everything had changed, all the people who loved them and were a part of their lives still through Daniel’s eyes and what Johnny decided to do, the thing that made him actually happy and that was how I’d kind of wanted it to end from the beginning though I hadn’t decided what Johnny would do at the start. But I wanted to pull everyone in, because I kind of viewed Cobra Kai as lonely. That they’d let go of all these people in their lives for so long, and were just starting to build their communities thirty or so plus years later. And I thought, if we make one change at the beginning the ripple effect could be massive, a moment of mutual kindness that turns into love, a chance to be kind to one another and listen, it might be bumpy, but it could improve everyone’s lives. By letting Mr. Miyagi interact with Johnny, by giving him guiding and care there’s a chance to keep him from becoming a self-destructive alcoholic like he is in the show and maybe he wouldn’t loose touch with those who loved him and Daniel wouldn’t be alone for so long. (I mean he has Mr. Miyagi, but still I wanted to bring them more. I nearly brought them all the Cobra Kai people too 😅 But then decided it was too much and I had to stop because my original idea nearly made Amanda their wedding planner and dear friend, but then there would’ve had to be another arc and I got tired.) It didn’t end up being the end end, I wrote it earlier than the rest of the final arc, before I switched to finishing up other fics like Konpeito, because I needed to get that image down and out and then I worked my way back towards it when I finally sat down to finish the rest of Root Beer Floats and Green Tea. Originally that was the end end.

TLDR: I don’t think I have a schedule but I do, I write whenever I’ve got time and if I don’t I try and take notes so I don’t forget. I also do a mix of planning but usually I’m more of a go with the flow writer. I have plot points I generally want to get to do and then work my way to them.

#writing asks #asks #long post #thanks for the ask #I hope this answers your questions and helps #I feel like I got a little lost in the weeds there for a bit

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