#hghcfdotr

@waspabi 's fanfic, 'Hermione Granger's Hogwarts Crammer for Delinquents on the Run' might just be possibly my very favourite drarry fanfic ever.

I started reading published books again in the YA genre after the fic and I am shocked by how this unpublished fanmade piece outdoes some published ones in style, wit, ease of reading, fluidiy, characters etc.

The story is absolute bomb. Such an interesting take on the books, and finally a fic with such a story focused take!!! The romance is a side story almost and it tangles so well together with the main arc, it grows organically and beautifully. It's just - IT'S SO ENJOYABLE.

The characters live and breathe and move and you can SEE THEM ALL SO CLEARLY. They are so real you feel like you can reach out and touch them in the scene. It truly is magic.

This is the first time in a long while when I read a book and I could actually picture a character's every single feature. Harry especially felt so real, so solid to me, I very clearly saw him in my head and miraculously managed to render that image onto a canvas. So there you go.

HGHCFDOTR style Harry.

i work in scrivener! i would highly, HIGHLY recommend it for anyone who likes to write sprawling heavily researched piles of nonsense; it has been my saving grace for lo these past many years. 

this is what my doc for crammer looked like, there are a billion folders that range in content from 

to

i don’t give a toss about fonts, so i write in the standard for my scrivener (times size 14), and single spaced with a space after paragraphs. i super care about the spacing but not at all about line length. sometimes when i’m writing and feel really stalled or am about to do a round of heavy edits, i’ll change the font in my doc and read it anew – HOT TIP!! 

apparently this was a super important note for me to have alongside chapter one

i just, like, write some stuff down and hope for the best. sometimes what i’ve written is really clean and fine and doesn’t need any editing at all, and sometimes it’s just the fucking worst and needs to be entirely scrapped. it’s a crapshoot! here is my vague Beginning A Story process: 

come up with a DOPE IDEA, or read a DOPE IDEA that someone else wrote, and steal it (with credit) 

write ONE SCENE. this is sometimes the first scene. more often than not it is a later scene. for crammer the first thing i wrote was hermione et all approaching hazza on the tube platform. i thought this would be the first scene at the time but i was wrong, all wrong. 

make a few little notes about my narrator(s): what do they want? who are they? i usually include a few key adjectives so i can keep that in mind for their voice. 

carry the momentum of that One Scene as far as possible. i just keep writing, whatever, i usually knock out a few thousand words at the start of a project with minimum agony. 

get totally fucking stalled. now is OUTLINE TIME. possibly also RESEARCH TIME. now is the time for notes. i usually have about 2-8k written, so i have a basic idea of what i want this story to be, the tone, the characters. this is when i accrue massive amounts of notes.

just fuckin. work. on it. usually i start a writing sesh by going through some of what i’ve previously written and fixing it. i tend not to do a laborious final edit at the end because i’ve been editing as i go. the story changes a lot as i’m writing – for example, there was a period during which crammer did not have hermione as one of the narrators – but it’s not important to me to have a fixed outline from which i never waver. i like to have the basic idea and then sort of follow it, see where it goes. 

at the start of every section, chapter, whatever, i tend to do a mini-outline but more importantly i make a list of beats i want to hit.

rinse ‘n repeat. 

i’m not especially precious about drafting because this is fun time fanfiction zone, but of course i want things to be, you know, fairly decent. i’m an as-i-go editor, although i do a big read through at the end for tone and narrative gaps and also to fill in all the scenes i skipped writing. huge swaths of my notes are totally useless but are fun to look back on for example

my outlines are always stupid garbage