Writing advice

[regndoft]

Because I need to stop procrastinating as well as add some organisation to my increasingly busy life.

For someone who has been writing for almost as long as she's known how to, I recently realised that I've actually never written a proper chapter fic. Sure, I've tried, but never successfully. Or I've deliberately avoided it because I've been under the impression that without knowing the ending I can't write a proper beginning, or manage an overall plot/theme.

So if my fellow fic writers have any advice, I'd love to hear it. Do you finish the entire story before publishing separate chapters? Do you keep notes while writing, or have you done avid planning beforehand? Do you even know where the story is going to end up when you start writing?

I keep worrying I'll somehow lose sight of the overarching plot if I focus on separate chapters, or not give the side characters enough to do, etc (especially since I usually write from one character's PoV). On the other hand, I worry about never finishing at all, as I tend to be easily distracted by new shiny plot bunnies.

I'll probably look for a bit of advice online as well, but fic writers have a pretty unique experience in that they can publish several chapters at separate times. And... I just don't know how to go about managing an epic!fic I've mostly finished already, but have a lot of editing to do and some key parts left to write (most notably the beginning).

Comments

[doctorpancakes.livejournal.com]

There's a good chance I'm not the best person to ask about chapter fic, however: I tend to jump around a lot from chapter to chapter, writing the things that first spring out to me as important bits, or turns of phrase I think work, or whatever scenes come to mind. Then I go back and start filling in stuff as needed, putting things in the right order, and all that. Sometimes I'll write a few paragraphs of what ends up being chapter one, then the next day I'll find myself writing what ends up being the second last chapter, and then I'll spend a while going back and filling in various scenes that connect the two bookends of the story. Since I've never been able to write start-to-finish in chapter order, it'd be a right disaster for me to post chapters as I write them. I usually only start posting chapters once I'm almost, if not entirely done the story. I'll usually keep tinkering with later chapters as I go, but by the time chapter 1 is posted, it'll have to be a good 90% finished as a whole.

In my experience, you do sort of get some people writing chapter fic, posting chapters as they go, where they seem to have a solid beginning, and then the story starts to sort of meander as it goes along, and either ends up taking WAY too long and going on too many tangents or getting distracted before reaching its resolution, or on the other hand, fizzling out before it ever gets resolved because the author's realized they know longer know how to end it. Sometimes your writing takes you in directions you might not have predicted when you started chapter 1, so I think it's a good idea to at least have a really solid map of where you're going/how you're going to get there before you post anything. These details may change as you go, and that's fine too.

(As for bunnies - I usually have at least 6 stories on the go at any given time, and most of them eventually end up getting done, so...)

[regndoft]

That's how I tend to write, too; normally I wouldn't even consider posting anything before finishing, but I've hit 50k and not even finished two thirds of the story (as far as I can tell, at least) so I'm sort of... trying to figure out a method that will be both efficient and motivational.

*Nod* True. I hope to avoid that, as I don't have a very tight overaching plot; I have TV episodes to use for inspiration. I worry more that the emotional development won't make much sense, or that I'll become too repetitive. So I'm definitely going to try for a plot map of some kind.

Thank you for the advice. C:

(Ahaha, I'm just... really bad at writing longer fic. Even the small ideas somehow end up blown out of proportion.)