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ceterisparibus116 · 1 year

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4. What’s a word that makes you go absolutely feral? 7. What is your deepest joy about writing? [this one made me laugh, so I'm sending it too lol] 14. Do you lend your books to people? Are people scared to borrow books from you? Do you know exactly where all your “lost” books are and which specific friend from school you haven’t seen in twelve years still possesses them? Will you ever get them back? 19. Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going? 24. How much prep work do you put into your stories? What does that look like for you? Do you enjoy this part or do you just want to get on with it?

Thank you so much for these!

4. PERFUNCTORY.

It's such a fun word! Say it out loud and tell me it isn't amazing! One of my friends say I use it too much in my writing but I don't care? It's amazing?

7. Already answered here. 💖

14. I do not lend books to people because they're MINE. My "lost" books are all truly lost books and I alone am responsible for their fate. Will I ever get them back? Probably not.

Actually, I'm not solely responsible for all my lost books because some of them were destroyed when my parent's house caught fire and yes, I grieved the loss of my books more than the loss of anything else (except one (1) thing).

19. Ooh, I love this ask, and since the prompt is "tell me a story about your writing journey," I'm gonna get blatantly self-indulgent here.

I vividly remember when I started writing which makes me so happy because my memory is crap.

Okay. So. I was 8 years old. I was sitting at the kitchen counter. My mom was making lunch. And I said: "Mom, I wanna write a story about our guinea pigs." And she said: "That's great."

I then proceeded to get blank yellow-ish paper (because it looked cool) that didn't have lines, and I exclusively wrote with the paper turned horizontally (why???), and I almost exclusively wrote in a tiny little "studio" I built in my closet that was just me sitting cross-legged in front of a box turned upside-down.

That said, I started storytelling even sooner. I don't even remember how young I was when I started. But I'd play with toys (mostly stuffed animals, but also Barbies and Star Wars action figures), and I'd narrate everything they did out loud. The fun part for me was choosing the right words (I'd even re-do a "scene" if I didn't narrate it "correctly") and hearing it out loud.

I was, however, absolutely enraged to discover that one of my brothers had been sneaking into my room and hiding under my bed to listen to me. In hindsight, I realize it was actually a compliment. He just liked my stories.

The main "bump" in writing was that I was initially writing stories the way that I narrated playing: literally just recording whatever the characters did, with no real intentionality and no real vision. Which is fine, except that it made it really hard to build to anything within the story, and made it almost impossible to find a satisfying ending.

But eventually, I started reading books about writing, and that really helped me figure out the mechanics of storytelling. And far from turning writing into something boring and technical, it gave me the tools I needed to actually write a story from start to finish. I completed my first story when I was 10 years old: it was called "Betsy the Pug" (inspired by my grandparent's pug) and it was a solid 40k words.

(My dad had this thing where he'd read stories out loud to my brothers and me when we were kids, and he was still doing that for us at this time, so he got really excited over the idea of reading "Betsy the Pug" out loud to everyone. I was mortified.)

I also owe a huge debt of thanks to the Warrior Cats books, which inspired my first series. I wrote five books on dog tribes and some of the later ones in the series were actually decent. This was also a great lesson for me because I sent the first book to the editor of my grandma's books (she's an author), and the editor graciously gave me feedback. Obviously it sucked to hear "this isn't publishable" (which...duh, I was like 12), but I turned right around and started trying to implement her advice. That memory probably wouldn't be so meaningful to me but for my dad (thank you, Dad) regularly bringing that moment up as an example of a time when I received discouraging news and not only didn't quit, but sought to find something good in the situation (by taking the advice).

Where am I now? Nearing the 2 million word mark of fanfiction. (I am absolutely going to throw myself a small party when I hit that milestone.) Also working on publishing some original works. More on that to come. ;)

24. TOTALLY DEPENDS. Okay, well, with all stories, I think it's important to know generally how the story ends. You want to be able to say "This is what the story is about," and it's hard to do that without knowing how the characters change. And even with short one-shots, I care about leaving characters in a different place than they started (otherwise I wonder why the story "mattered"), so I still try to know something like: "Matt accepts help" or "Foggy learns to help Matt in a different way."

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Ella series, or my Trust fic, both of which were incredibly complicated and required very detailed outlines. Trust specifically required a lot of research as well. The whole time I was writing it, I was also researching the related issues.

That said, a lot of the things that might be considered "prep" work are things I do as I write the story. Like with Trust, where I researched both before and during the writing process. Or with the Ella series, where I'm still fleshing out the outline for Redeemed.

I find that when I force myself to do all the "prep" work up front, I run into two problems: the first is that I lose all inspiration for the story (having spent it all on prepping, instead of on writing); the second is that I get too locked into ideas that sound okay initially but are just less good than the ideas I come up with later as I'm getting to know the characters and plot elements better.

Do I enjoy the prep work? Eh. Not a ton, lol. I enjoy moments of connecting dots, which sometimes happens in prep work. But I'd rather just be writing.

#personal #writing #writing ask game #asks #ask me things i'm friendly

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