Get to know the writer 2 13 19 27 75 💞
2. Do you plan each chapter ahead or write as you go?
I try and have a general plan of where things are going, but I don't necessarily plan individual chapters, I just put in breaks sometimes if it feels like a good moment (which is why Sweet Defiance is over 25k all in one chapter, I just kept writing and didn't really stop and think I need a break at any point, and I didn't realise how long it was until it was done. The Night Shift is also over 25k all in one chapter, and that's mostly because I didn't pick a point to break it up while I was writing and partly because I did actually consider splitting it into chapters when I looked at the word count part way through and during editing, probably three chapters, but the chapter titles that made sense from where I probably would have split it for the first two were Overground and Underground and then I couldn't think of a third title because I just kept getting the Wombles stuck in my head instead, so I scraped the chapters).
The exception for planning individual chapters was the Milk and Sugar 'verse, but that's because I used the episodes from canon as a lay-out for the chapters, and I planned all the fics out as I was going, though some still changed at the last minute because I had a different idea that fit what I had already written more.
13. What’s a common writing tip that you almost always follow?
Use said. It's definitely something I've been trying to add more and more- when I first started writing fic I was still using the way we learnt in school where you only need the dialogue tags at the start and you just alternate paragraphs and you should be able to make it clear who is speaking from that, but throwing in extra saids every so often makes it much clearer, so it's something I have been consciously working on trying to do more for a while.
19. What is the most-used tag on your ao3?
Alternate Universe- Canon Divergent. It's the one I find most fun to play around with, how will changing this part of the story here ripple out to change the rest of it
27. What is your most and least favorite part of writing?
I enjoy writing, that's why I do it, so it's actually hard to pick a favourite and I tend to have a different answer every time I get asked, but when you first get an idea and sit down to write and know this one's going to be fun, that's pretty good.
I guess least favourite, maybe editing when there's a lot of it? I use the read aloud function to edit, because I've found before I've clicked the wrong correction on spell check and not noticed until someone else has told me before, and it's a lot easier to hear when words are wrong than it is to see. And because I like to be able to jump back and forth as I write a little, I will write the whole thing then post it, so my last big fic, Gone in a Flash, is 78k and 29 chapters, which I ended up splitting so I would edit one chapter fully, then post it the following day (reading the whole thing again when I copied it into the AO3 text box), and after posting I would go and listen to and fully edit the next chapter. Which did work as a system, and I don't mind editing, I think it's just I had been working on it for a year, I was excited to finally share it, and there was this part still to do even though it felt finished, and because there was a lot of doing that there were a few parts it felt repetitive.
75. What scene in [Fanfic Name] took the longest to write? What was difficult about it?
Sticking with Gone in a Flash, it had a few sticky moments, but I think when I got to Chapter 13/14, it felt like I was writing myself into a corner, there was only one option for where the characters could go from here but it wouldn't go their way, so I rewrote a few parts from Chapter 12 onwards a few times and it still kept circling back to this is where the plot wants them to be.
Luckily time travelling is a common thing in any Flash media and it was already part of the fic, so shifting the end of Chapter 14 to have some time travel meant they still ended up at that point, but there was a way to take it forwards from there (by going backwards again)
