30 days of fanfiction meme (days 16-18)
Jul. 15th, 2011 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaI started writing this massive essay for day 15, but it's stuck on my other laptop. So I'll skip ahead first, since these are shorter.
16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?
No one likes writing summaries. Who likes writing summaries? I've never met anyone who found it anything but a chore. It's up there with punters commenting to suggest you should have ended the fic differently. Summaries are useful, though, so we all keep producing them. It's about 35% factually telling potential readers what the story is about, 65% advertising the fact that you can turn a sentence and that the experience ensuing on clickthrough will not be painful.
I actually got compliments specifically on the summary of the Abberline fic, which was more in the spirit of web comic hover-over text than anything.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Titles are not nearly as hard as OC names; those are the bane of my existence. (I am convinced this is because I'm bad at names IRL - I can quite happily hold an acquaintance in my head as a social entity with a face and history and personality, sans name attached, for years.) I often start the fic with a title in mind, but if not, it naturally develops one by the time I finish writing it. In the meantime, it exists in my mind as "that one in which Homura is an adorable creeper and talks her way into Madoka's bed in a non-sexual sense".
I give chapters titles when it's warranted, but I'm far more likely to use script-like demarcations - time and location stamps, POV changes.
18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?
Arrrgh... so... twee... didn't we stop using words like "bunny" in 2005... anyway, I'm treating this one as short because I've talked about it. Raw data keeps dumping into this giant industrial mixer IN MY BRAIN, of which stuff specifically related to any given fandom or topic is a small part at any given time, and then the blended results fall out the funnel at the other end. My brain doesn't really like to turn off, so in a situation it finds painfully input-deprived eg. I have to walk four blocks down a street with no interesting signage, it turns in on itself and starts building castles with matchsticks. At the end of the four blocks I realize it's on something like, has anyone ever made a "jazz douche Charles Xavier" macro series? ("Honestly, Raven, the simplistic racket of this so-called 'rock and roll'.") And so on. I forget 150% more ideas than I ever note down, let alone build out. It used to do more apocalyptic scenarios, like what would happen if terrorists bombed this metro station while I was sitting in it, but I've been training it out of that... In short I'm very good company for myself. >_>
Coming up with ideas for a long ongoing project is actually much harder - at the brainstorming stage, I have to pick appropriate bits out of the ongoing stream and make sure they're noted, not forgotten. At the writing stage, I have to solve specific problems.
16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?
No one likes writing summaries. Who likes writing summaries? I've never met anyone who found it anything but a chore. It's up there with punters commenting to suggest you should have ended the fic differently. Summaries are useful, though, so we all keep producing them. It's about 35% factually telling potential readers what the story is about, 65% advertising the fact that you can turn a sentence and that the experience ensuing on clickthrough will not be painful.
I actually got compliments specifically on the summary of the Abberline fic, which was more in the spirit of web comic hover-over text than anything.
17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?
Titles are not nearly as hard as OC names; those are the bane of my existence. (I am convinced this is because I'm bad at names IRL - I can quite happily hold an acquaintance in my head as a social entity with a face and history and personality, sans name attached, for years.) I often start the fic with a title in mind, but if not, it naturally develops one by the time I finish writing it. In the meantime, it exists in my mind as "that one in which Homura is an adorable creeper and talks her way into Madoka's bed in a non-sexual sense".
I give chapters titles when it's warranted, but I'm far more likely to use script-like demarcations - time and location stamps, POV changes.
18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?
Arrrgh... so... twee... didn't we stop using words like "bunny" in 2005... anyway, I'm treating this one as short because I've talked about it. Raw data keeps dumping into this giant industrial mixer IN MY BRAIN, of which stuff specifically related to any given fandom or topic is a small part at any given time, and then the blended results fall out the funnel at the other end. My brain doesn't really like to turn off, so in a situation it finds painfully input-deprived eg. I have to walk four blocks down a street with no interesting signage, it turns in on itself and starts building castles with matchsticks. At the end of the four blocks I realize it's on something like, has anyone ever made a "jazz douche Charles Xavier" macro series? ("Honestly, Raven, the simplistic racket of this so-called 'rock and roll'.") And so on. I forget 150% more ideas than I ever note down, let alone build out. It used to do more apocalyptic scenarios, like what would happen if terrorists bombed this metro station while I was sitting in it, but I've been training it out of that... In short I'm very good company for myself. >_>
Coming up with ideas for a long ongoing project is actually much harder - at the brainstorming stage, I have to pick appropriate bits out of the ongoing stream and make sure they're noted, not forgotten. At the writing stage, I have to solve specific problems.
