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

[aralias]

i can tell you... how i... am failing to do to it? which is just to write it as you go along and hope that people are still interested in the end. perhaps doing it in a more alive fandom than doctor who - on the other hand, the people who are still in who are perhaps more likely to be hardcore types, so... perhaps it would be ok.

the reason i like to post as i go along is - people comment, which i like. that's why i have an LJ rather than a diary. on the other hand, i do see the advantage for the reader to have it all posted at once (and also, perhaps, for the writer). but if you don't finish it for ages and the fandom has sort of waned... it might never reach as many people as it would have done if the first chapter had been posted years ago (and comments are important to me, clearly).

i may be failing to finish 'meanwhile' right now, but i did finish 'kept man' a few years ago - and i posted it as it was going along.

i also did it within a year, probably, rather than whatever meanwhile is now. two years? which might be why it seemed less annoying/unending.

with 'kept man' i had a good structure already, to be fair, which i'd taken from the show. so maybe that helped, whereas with 'meanwhile' i'm sort of floundering around with a vague idea of the ending.

regarding secondary characters... the world of pairing fic, i tend to have pretty narrow sites, so the secondary characters never get all that much to do, no matter how much i like them. so that hasn't really been a problem, but i agree - it could be. and it sounds like it would help you if you plotted out what you were doing, at least roughly so you could be sure that things felt about right.

in conclusion: i would post the three/delgado edwardian thing, as you edit it, and with long gaps if there are them. and/or whatever else you might be writing.

but also: don't necessarily follow my advice.

[regndoft]

Comments are a very good motivating factor, agreed. I wonder if it's considered bad fandom etiquette to admit that so freely? But it's true. It's not like I'm getting paid in anything but love for my efforts. :P Hadn't considered the thing about a demographic, but that too seems sensible now when you mention it.

I think I'm leaning towards posting chapter per chapter because it does feel like there's an awful lot of work ahead, and maybe actually finishing and posting one chapter at a time would make it feel like I'm Getting Shit Done? Though the main problem I have is related to research, which can't be alleviated so easily...

Re: secondary characters, I'm writing from one single character's PoV, which understandably narrows it down a bit, and it's not like they just hang around in the background... so perhaps it'd be more accurate to say I worry about focusing too much on the main pairing (there's a slight distinction, I promise!).

But plotting out is a good idea; I usually do, but in this case I sort of dived into the fic without one... it's a wonder this fic happened at all.

I think it is sound advice; I might be more hesitant to follow it if I hadn't already written most of it already, but as it is it seems like the best approach, both in regards to personal motivation and actual writing.

Thank you very much. <3

[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.)