hockey illness

generally i come up with a concept first or a specific scene that spawns in my brain like an annoying song i can't get rid of. in the case of whistle-stop it was two scenes—first off, butthole pictures and then a scene with sid imagery of a train on a track going around and around in circles. i first got this idea way back in november, but was finishing up another fic so i couldn't quite get started on it yet. so i marinated for awhile.

from there, i got into the google docs and started outlining. typically i do a bullet point outline where i map out the order wherein things happen, to get the basic beats of the story down. my outline is a living document that frequently changes throughout the writing process. originally the outline for W-S was only about 6 chapters. i realized through the outlining process that tanger's b-plot needed a lot of fleshing out for the payoff to work, which is partly why the scope of the fic grew so much.

the other reason is because i was having so much fun writing! i haven't had this much fun writing a fanned fiction in a long time.

with writing technique, something that comes with a lot of repetition and also study of other writing (in tv shows/books/games/fic/and also reading about writing theory) is that you learn to pick up on the natural ebbs and flows of tension and release. when writing something, my natural feeling during a scene is that the reader should both learn something new but also have a new question in place for the next chapter. at the end of a chapter, i always want there to be something unresolved that picks up in the next. generally speaking, i like leaving the reader always wanting more when waiting for another chapter.

anyway, something that actually happened a lot while i was writing is that my characters didn't necessarily want to adhere to the outline once i got into it. so i became more flexible and moved a few beats around. originally, the train metaphor was not going to show up until close to the end, and sid certainly wasn't going to tell geno he loved him that early, either. but it felt like a natural move once i fully understood the version of the characters i was writing. the flashback was also originally entirely it's own chapter, but it got merged into another because it needed some framing around it.

this is very stream of consciousness because i had too much espresso today. regardless, after outlining to about the 75% mark where there's a skeleton of the plot with some muscles and chunks of fat on it, i start writing the first chapter—this came in april after yapping at @kazzedizov about the fic and workshopping some ideas with them.

(other writers are heavily involved in my process. i love to yap while writing. most of the time when i'm writing, i have discord up. i multitask always.)

the first chapter is where i learn the characters' voices, the tone/style of the fic i want to write (W-S is very on the utilitarian prose side of things for me, but the tone is almost... mid 00s judd apatow hang out movie.) i, as a writer, can tell in a re-read where things started to click for me. tanger's voice was actually the easiest for me to find, and he continues to be my favourite character to write.

but here's the most annoying thing i am going to say. discipline and adhering to a word count goal is the best way to become a better writer. i did nanowrimo 2 years in a row, and it's annoying, but having an arbitrary word count made me much more efficient. i also don't write and edit at the same time. just blast it all out as fast as you can, and go back and do rewrites if you need to. if you've properly outlined in advance and updated your outline as you've gone along, you don't need to do a ton of editing (in a fanfic, at least.)

also just building a community. have some pals that you can bounce ideas off of and also have edit/read your fics. get comfortable with them and giving each other feedback. you improve a lot faster if you're willing to be vulnerable.

i actually don't know if this will be helpful to anyone and i can likely polish this up at some point into actual advice. but bullet point:

come up with an idea that you're obsessed with and build the entire story around that moment

i write linear so that i can build up the excitement naturally to that moment -- i know a lot of writers who don't, which i respect, but that cannot be me

outline your fic so that it has a beginning/middle/end and leave room for creativity inside of that

write at least 400 wpd - my ideal is 1000 wpd on workdays and at least 400 wpd on weekends

have writers/friends whose opinion you respect and bounce ideas off of them

do not try to write and edit at the same time. they are two separate steps

ingest a lot of different media (books/movies/tv/games/music) so that you build up a big cultural barometer and have the ability to pull influences whenever you require them

touch grass and have real experiences with real people that are wildly different from you. travel if you can swing it. get outta your comfort zone. research the shit out of things if you can't do this