#youpumpkinhead

9 questions with fallintosanity

This week: @fallintosanity​ talks being concise; finding out how a fic makes readers feel and why you should steal from everything.

ASS: What do you most enjoy about writing fanfiction?

fallintosanity: I love getting to explore the characters and the world in a new situation - whether that’s a crossover, which I do rather more than my share of, or just putting the characters in a situation they haven’t encountered before.

What aspects of writing do you find difficult when you write fanfiction?

Being concise! I’ve discovered that if I think something’s going to take, say, three chapters, it’s actually going to take five or six. I still haven’t figured out why I do that or what causes my word count to balloon so badly, and I’m planning to do some strict 100-word drabbles to see if I can train myself to be more succinct.

Also, making sure characters stay in character is difficult sometimes. It’s not usually a case of “why is Stoic Stuart suddenly busting out laughing, that’s not his thing”. It’s more insidious, where I usually have to go back a chapter or more to figure out where I took a wrong turn with one small reaction that then leads to much bigger out-of-character moments.

Have you ever received hateful comments on your fic and how do you deal with it?

I’m lucky enough to have never received flat-out hate! (Shoutout to my wonderful readers for making that so <3) I did have one reader who became absolutely furious about a cliffhanger in my MCU fic La Legende Eternelle; he left a harshly-worded comment that amounted to “I’m upset that you did that!”. I left a neutral reply since I didn’t want to spoil anything for anyone else reading the comments, and he responded more calmly, saying he’d read it at an emotional time so it hit him harder than he was expecting, and he didn’t feel up for reading the rest of the story after that. I felt bad, because it was meant to be a tantalizing cliffhanger, not something that would drive a reader out of the story. But I also totally understand his reaction - if you read something you’re not emotionally prepared for, it can be a gut punch.

Conversely: what’s been some of your favorite feedback on your fanfic?

I love when readers tell me about the emotions they felt while reading my fic! I write in large part because I enjoy making people feel things, so knowing that I succeeded is a huge thrill. I also like it when readers leave comments with meta or theories about the story - why they felt a character did something, what made a scene so poignant, where they think I’m going with something. Not only does it help me understand how my readers perceive the story, it sometimes gives me ideas. }:]

How do you handle writer’s block?

Depends on what’s causing it. I usually get writer’s block either as a result of something wrong with the story, or something in real life that’s stressing me out. For real-life stress block, if I have the mental spoons for it, I’ll sometimes try to power through. Even getting just a sentence or two down is helpful, and it lets me feel like I’m making progress, however slight.

If it’s something wrong with the story, I reread what I’ve written, try to pinpoint a spot where things start to feel off, and experiment with a few different ways it could go. I keep a “notes” doc for all my longfics, and if I think something isn’t working, I can cut big chunks of text out of my fic and drop it in the notes doc. That way I don’t feel like I’ll irrevocably lose a bit of writing I like if I make a change, but I can still get the thing that isn’t working out of the way so I can try something new.

Which Supernatural fanfic of yours are you most proud of and why?

Oh man, that’s like asking me to pick my favorite child! I’m proud of all of them for different reasons. Cross Cases, obviously, is huge and epic and I really enjoy how I’ve been writing Harry and Sam and Lucifer and Dean interacting. Search and Rescue I’m proud of for how much it feels like a monster-of-the-week episode, pacing and all. Behind Black Eyes and Grow Miracles are both strong emotional pieces and I’m proud of the stylisms of each of them. When Did We Forget and There’ll Be Peace When You Are Done both gave me a chance to (let Sam) address some of the things Sam has suffered - in particular, I’m proud of There’ll Be Peace for the parallels in Sam and Ashley’s stories, and for giving Sam closure for the Trials storyline that he never got in the show.

What/who has had the biggest influence on your writing?

I read a lot, so there’s a lot of authors and series who’ve had a big influence on both how I structure stories, and how I put words on paper. In particular: Martha Wells, who has lush worldbuilding, fantastic character relationships, and a very straightforward writing style that I try to emulate; C. S. Friedman, whose shades-of-grey characters and plots helped me understand how to write moral ambiguity into my stories; Jim Butcher, from whom I learned a lot about how to drive action and plot. And others have taught me things about how not to write (looking at you, R. A. Salvatore and your love affair with epithets like “lavender orbs” and “the short halfling”). I’m kind of a writing sponge - I pick up stylistic elements from the author(s) I’ve read the most recently, and absorb long-term things that I really like and want to emulate.

What are you currently working on?

Cross Cases (ed: now complete), mostly. I had to drop out of the SPN AU Big Bang due to real-life obligations, but I have a couple chapters’ worth of a Witch!Sam AU to show from it that I’d like to finish someday, and I’ve also been poking at a Season 11 AU where S11 Sam and S1 Sam swap temporal places. And my current head-fic, which I don’t think I’ll ever write on paper but which is fun to play with in my head, is a complicated mash-up of SPN, Books of the Raksura, the Fall of Ile-Rien, and the Cal Leandros series.

If you could give one piece of advice to a new and/or struggling writer, what would it be?

Read! It’s a commonly-given piece of advice, but it’s so, so true. If you don’t read (or watch shows/movies, or play story-heavy games) you won’t be exposed to enough different writing and storytelling styles to get a good feel for what works and what doesn’t. Read fic - original and fan - read comics, watch movies and TV shows, play video games for the story. Think critically about everything you read/watch/play - why did this story beat strike home for you? Why did that one fall flat? What did the author do here that kept you breathlessly turning pages at three AM on a school night? What about this writer’s style makes it so hard to read? Why does this story work so well as a book, but not a movie (or vice versa)?

Also: Steal everything. Turns of phrase, story beats, ideas, characters with the serial numbers filed off. By the time you’re done writing it, it’ll be yours enough that no one can tell you stole it, and you’ll have had a strong foundation of things you really liked to build your story from.