17 for the writer ask game? I’m always curious how other people work (or honestly find the time to work!
17. talk about your writing and editing process
Oh gosh, this one's going to be a bit of a mess, because it's changed a lot! I'll limit this to more recent stuff, but thank you for the opportunity to babble!
Conceptually, I 100% just daydream fics on the bus or before bed (incidentally, that process is so much easier since I banned screens from my bedroom a few months ago, ugh how dare that actually work). For writing shorter fic (less than 10k-ish), I usually sketch out ideas in a document - if it has some sort of structure, like the dream sequences in Darkness Had No Need or the Five Things in A Place at the Table, I list out each component so it doesn't slip my mind, but it's not so much a detailed outline as it is an unstructured list of things I don't want to forget. I've been making liberal use of the tabs feature in Google Docs to do this, so I'll have a separate outline tab where I keep these details. But especially for much shorter stories (~5k words), I usually know ahead of time which beats I want to hit and how they're going to end, so I can ride the energy of one or two writing sessions to knock it out. While I'm writing, I generally avoid editing as I go, just to get words on the page and try to capture that momentum.
I also keep a separate tab with anything I delete, because you never know when you might want to take some of that carcass and chuck it in a soup to make decent stock for next time.
For editing shorter fic, it depends on how happy I am with that first draft. If I think it needs a lot of work, I do a splitscreen where I retype it from scratch in one window with the original fic on the other side - that seems to help me pick up large-scale stuff like "this emotion happens too fast" or "this sequence is confusing". Then, once I'm happy with the draft, I either read it slowly aloud or run it through a TTS, which helps me catch things like poor word choices, awkward phrasing, typos, grammar, overuse of words, etc. etc. etc. Then it goes to the amazing @loquaciousquark, who leaves incredibly helpful comments and suggestions and will 10000% call me out if something doesn't follow structurally or emotionally (and her knowledge of canon and voice is so much stronger than mine that I really lean on her knowledge base!!!). Then I make changes and read through it again (sometimes throwing chunks of it back to quark for her wisdom), and it's ready to post!
For longer fic (I'm thinking of How the Light Gets In, which is 70k, and its sequel, which is shaping up to be about double that), I start by sketching an overall shape/scaffolding the same as I would with a short fic. This "outline" is by necessity way more detailed for earlier parts of the fic - for instance, HtLGI is broken into four "acts", and I had all five chapters of Act I pretty well planned out from day one, but I only had a vague sense of the ending and no particularly strong idea how we'd get there. Then, as I write the first act, I start daydreaming scenes for the next act and iteratively fill out that outline as I go. By the time I was down to the last ~15k of the fic, I had a document with an extremely detailed chapter-by-chapter outline that helped me keep track of the mystery even in the midst of these twenty really, really beefy chapters.
I did a fair amount of editing while writing on this one, by necessity, but generally only when I finished a particular act - I sat on all of Act I for a few weeks without touching it, then jumped back in to edit it and changed a lot. It was always helpful, after taking a break, to listen to audio from the game to recapture voices (I had a work trip where I remember just listening to companion banter for the entire flight). When I finished, I went through and re-typed the entire fic, editing along the way, which let me snap the early stuff into alignment with the later stuff.
Quark was incredible with her comments on this, digging really deep, and highlighted some unsatisfying moments in the final couple chapters that I really agreed with but wasn't quite sure how to fix. I took a couple weeks off to think it over, then came back to the fic and retyped the whole thing again, making changes along the way, and that retype wound up culminating in a complete rewrite of the last three chapters that I was really satisfied with. I sent it back for one more beta-read, made those changes (with the new ending approved by quark!) read through it again, then posted it chapter-by-chapter - I would do one last read-aloud/TTS edit on each chapter before posting it, which helped me catch a bunch of small stuff last-minute. My cut-material document wound up with about 15k words in the end!
Now, the sequel to this fic has been a Thing. I've been using Scrivener for the first time, which I think works quite well for my outlining approach (I can switch between higher-level outlining and writing pretty effortlessly and keep the bigger picture easily accessible at all times), but I've also been way busier with life in general and haven't had as much time for writing. I made it through the first 2/5 of the fic, approximately, and had to set it aside because I couldn't see a way through to the ending. I've also been a little more ruthless than usual with cuts, so uh. I basically have ~50k written with ~90k in cuts. But! I'm on a much more clear shot now and have at least a loose outline that goes all the way to the end, so now I just have to take the time to sit down and write (I've been working on a rewrite of what I've already got so I can properly include/foreshadow certain stuff I'll need later). It's definitely a messier process, but I'm enjoying it a lot!
Anyway, that was way too much detail. Just happy to be writing again!
