Meme on the fly

[petronia]

Going to my own birthday party (must not try to be late, as last time I was and my friends made fun of me >_>). But forgot to repost this when I asked canis_m a question:

Ask me any one question about my writing, then post this in your LJ so I can ask one of you.

(Not going to do the Ten Things one. Not because I haven't, but because it takes too long to think these things up. ^^;)

Comments

[worldserpent.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that this is such a popular meme; I always had the impression from what people said that writers hated to be asked things like "so where do you get your ideas?" and so forth.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Professional writers who have to deal with interviews and curious fans, surely so. I imagine it'd get old to be asked the same thing over and over. As I am not a pro no one ever asks me these questions, so I don't know if I hate them. XD

[squidlet.livejournal.com]

Quick and easy one that I wonder all the time about everyone: How long does it take for you to write a fic, on average?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I was going to say several months on average, but it occurs to me that that doesn't give a meaningful picture. So: on a good night (it's usually night) I can knock out between 300 and 1000 words. Thus if the fic is anything between a 100-word drabble and about 1500 words, there's a good chance it will be done in two evenings of writing, give or take a week of edits. Longer than that and all bets are off. Some fics - "Velocity Over Time", "Una Musica Brutal" - I just kept writing every day for about two weeks until it was finished. More often I keep it up for a few days until I can't figure out where it's going next anymore, ditch it for several months, pick it up again, write for another few days, ditch it again for another month, rinse lather repeat. I've been writing "Flor de Yemanja" for a full year at this point, but most of the good part was written in two fortnights separated by six months of word-by-word plodding. ^^;

[arboretum]

Whenever cool writers post this meme, I always want to ask them a question (or five hundred) but when it comes time to open up the comment box and actually ask, I never have any idea what to ask. *peers at other people hopefully*

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, you can always ask later, although there tends to be a statute of limitations on memes of this sort. XD

[nyahnyah.livejournal.com]

Why? I mean, why write?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Because it gives meaning to and allows me to make sense of my existence? XD No, really. For sure this is a family thing, whether by genetics or upbringing, but I've always felt like I'm supposed to create. If it weren't writing fiction it would be painting or graphic design (well, I do a bit of that) or even songwriting. It's what I'm built for; if a car can know it was built to be driven I imagine it must feel something like this. It's difficult a lot of the time but preferable to the metaphysical malaise I get from not doing it. ...Like pooping. =_=

There's another aspect of me that made me choose writing over other forms of creation/expression, that being that I tend not to think of things as real until they're written down. ^^; Hence when minor unpleasantries like arguments happen to me I don't blog about them; usually I forget about them right away, but even if I don't, it's only the act of "composing" it in text (even just in my head) that gives them solidity.

[kickinpants.livejournal.com]

Do you always/often have music going in the background or do you prefer quiet? If yes to music, are there songs that you have that you can't have playing while your write? Do you have songs/bands that you really prefer to listen to while you write? Do you have some songs that have inspired stories on their own, just when you listened to them?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's like any other kind of desk work: quiet makes me more efficient, but I like music too much, so I live with the 80% concentration. ^^; When I get really into it the music fades into the background regardless.

What I have playing depends on what I'm writing. It's not so much the act of writing that calls for a certain genre or band, but that the overall mood of a series or fic matches the overall mood of a set of songs, and the lyrics of those songs will feed back into the fic, and so forth. Or I happen to be listening a lot to bossa nova or Korean pop or EBM, and will write a fic in that emotional register using my fandom du jour. Pretty much everything I've written over the course of the past three years has specific music attached to it, but it's not always obvious from the final text that this is the case, and the connection can appear arbitrary even to me. ^^;

The one exception is when I write sex scenes, and then it's all about working around my own natural reticence. ^^; Most of my sex scenes are written mildly drunk and listening to - I don't know, Marvin Gaye?

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

How has your style changed over the years?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Less punctuation, less gerunds, shorter sentences. XD ...It's hard to quantify changes in style; I suspect the only way to really see a difference is if I were to go back and rewrite an old fic of mine, and compare the two versions. So let's try it.

He stands, not too far into the water, his back to me. He is very still; sometimes he shifts his weight against the pull of the tide, that is all. Too still, for Maxwell. If he is talking to himself, the sound is drowned by the roar of the breakers. He has rolled his usual dark pants up to his knees to keep them from the salt water. I find myself suddenly comforted by that small mark of foresight, as if it were the only proof that he is not going to walk into the sea to disappear forever. But he does not move, and so I simply lie with my cheek against the grass, watching him watch the sea. The perfume of the trees dulls my senses gradually until I no longer detect it, only the scent of the soil and the sharper one of green growth.

This becomes:

He stands with his back to me, not too far past the tideline; very still. Too still, for Maxwell. Sometimes he shifts his weight against the pull of the tide, but that is all. The roar of the breakers drown any sound he might be making. He's rolled his pants up to his knees to keep them from the salt water: the small mark of foresight comforts me, as if it furnished an assurance that he would not walk into the sea and disappear. He does not, however, move.

I lie there, my cheek against the grass, and watch him watch the sea. The perfume from the trees dulls my olfactory sense until it's no longer detectible, only the scent of the soil and that, sharper, of green growth.

...What does that say to you? :P I sense that I'm trying to exchange verbosity for precision, having little patience left for my former "poetic" and "pretty". Crutches and strategically placed veils, all that.

[one-if-by-land.livejournal.com]

Whoa, that's an exercise I hadn't tried before, trying to rewrite an old fic. Mostly, I am afraid to look into the past. ^^; I used to try to be horribly poetic too; I still might be. Thank you for sharing. :)

[redheadtensai.livejournal.com]

What percentage of "writing ideas" become full-fledged writings for you?

(In other words, how ashamed should I feel of my low output? ^_~)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Short ones first: 10% is the hopeful estimate. XD;; I was just saying to someone the other day that every character/series essay I write on lj is me murdering a fic idea in public, but usually I have no qualms about doing so because they're the weak scrawny ones that have no chance of getting written anyway. I'm not absolutely certain how many story ideas pop into my mind, entertain me for a few hours and come to nothing; I know I forget many of them entirely... Sometimes I log them on lj if they're funny, and that's when you get the "someone should write a fic in which Draco and Fuji listen to a lot of old records" spamposts.

OTOH I also have full-fledged ideas that I've started writing only to abandon after a few paragraphs when it becomes clear that I can't do them justice (about half the ones I start), and a few longstanding intricate mental narratives that I never tried or bothered to write down at all.

[dipping_sauce]

Structure. You've mentioned this before, like a few years ago.

How do you do it? Does it come naturally, or do you plan things out?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

(OT: I'm listening to the Scooter Girl soundtrack now. Thank you! It is so fabulous. "Send me a postcard, darling!")

What did I say a few years ago? XD I suppose it depends on what you mean by structure. A story will first occur to me in fragments of sentences and images - "Hao looked at him with something approaching sadness in his eyes. He had been his father's lawyer for nearly three decades." - and I'll know when in the canon continuity the scenes are set, what character(s) it centres on, approximately how long or short the end product will be, and (most times) the narrative person/tense. Those things comprise the fic idea for me, and thus are pretty much set in stone. Everything else changes; often the actual story is several disparate ideas strung together and used to make a point. I usually don't know what the point of the story is until I'm close to finishing it, and a lot of my interest in the writing process is discovering that for myself. XD

There usually comes a point where my sense of the structure of the final product outstrips my sense of what I'm trying to say, ex. "and in this scene they talk and X discovers something, but I don't know what." This isn't the case if I'm trying to write something longer than about 5000 words, though, which is one of the reasons I'm kind of arse at multi-parters. ^^;

[serabut.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to say Happy (Belated) Birthday!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)

Two questions in one, but...

[methodicmadness.livejournal.com]

What do you like best about your writing style, and what do you think you need to improve on the most?

P.S. Thanks for the sample passages a few replies up - gives a new and very verbose writer like myself hope that things will improve.


Happy Birthday!

Re: Two questions in one, but...

[petronia.livejournal.com]

What I like best about my writing: I think I generally have little trouble getting the reader to like my characters, original or otherwise. I have to be convinced myself, though. *g*

What I need to improve on the most: plot mechanics. I also shy away from the portrayal of raw emotional pain, because I have trouble separating my characters' turmoil from my own emotional state. It might be a matter of courage.

[anonentity.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday.

Do you feel the need to edit your writing at least a thousand times (like me?) until it reaches some semblance of perfection?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yes. XD Rather, if I don't see a paragraph is perfect I have trouble moving onto the next one. It feels like building a house on sand otherwise. I'd say I spend more time editing than writing, but the truth is editing is the writing process for me. It's like the street racers in Initial D, always trying to find the "perfect line" to take for a given course.

[starlighter.livejournal.com]

[petronia.livejournal.com]

The answer to both questions is "Oh, lord, so much I can't list it all". XD An example of the first would be humour. My sense of humour - I mean the actual function that allows me to make jokes at parties and whatnot - is completely gacked off books written by Englishmen I read when I was young, from Wilde and Wodehouse down to Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. So I think when I write I go for that type of comedic timing. However I can't do outright stylistic pastiche, either of a genre or a given writer. I love reading pastiche, and in fanfiction I often feel it's necessary - I find it difficult to get into fanfic for, say, Jane Austen's or Terry Pratchett's books if it makes no attempt to sound like the original - but I can't do it myself, so I don't.

[sesame-seed.livejournal.com]

Do you think your writing has improved over the past year? How so? Do you think it's regressed in any way? Again, how so?

(Going around asking this of everyone, obviously. XD;;)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I like to think my writing improved. I think the improvement is subtle, though, to the extent that I can only describe by analogy: it's like in Initial D when they talk about "line". The laws of physics dictate that for a given car-shaped object on a given course, there's one line that will get you from point A to point B in the least time with the least friction and wasted kinetic energy (of course real-life conditions can throw a wrench into the theory - for one, in real life you'd have to contend with another car-shaped object on the course). I think I see the line with a bit more clarity now than this time last February, and approximate it a little closer. The approach to a Platonic ideal is, however, asymptotic, whether it be Ryousuke's Perfect Line or Sai's Hand of God.

It's regressed in volume, though, certainly. x_x

[z107m.livejournal.com]

Happy belated B-day from me, too!

Do you think lj has effected your writing much?

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it has. The obvious being, if I didn't spend all this time blogging I'd probably be writing more fiction. ^^; That being said it's hardly a dead loss in that sense: the fact of keeping a regular diary and continuously engaging in written intellectual discussion has made my prose more precise and my thinking more automatically rigorous over the years, and that in its turn has improved my writing. I'd say my prose style as it currently stands is the spawn of Livejournal more than that of fiction-writing. XD