What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

rinseandrepeatzero-deactivated2 asked: Hi! Sorry to bother you. I've been reading your Destiel fics and I've been wondering, how do you write so quickly and smoothly? How do you formulate plots and stories so seamlessly? I AM AMAZED. Do you have any tips for aspiring writers? Cause seriously, I have trouble getting farther than a fic prompt (PS: I love your Anna I am in love with her).

You’re not bothering me at all, and thank you!

Creatively, I’m finding fanfiction very freeing, and it’s definitely having a positive impact on my writing ability. There’s something about knowing that you have an immediate, eagerly-waiting audience that blows away some of the mental cobwebs I can otherwise get around writing - I want to finish the story so that people can read it, which they can do literally as soon as I’m done, and that gives me a mental incentive to solve plot problems quickly.

As for formulating plots, I think it comes from fanfiction being a highly character-driven form of writing. One of the hardest things about writing original fiction is trying to invest readers in characters they’ve never met before - describing them, setting up backstory, relating them to the plot - while simultaneously telling a new story. In fanfiction, because your audience already knows and cares about the characters, you have something of a head start, but when you’re writing an AU (for instance) there’s still a need to establish your version of the characters. Which is basically an exercise in armchair psychology, and therefore warms the cockles of my gossipy writer heart.

As for advice for aspiring writers, I have three main tips:

1. Never be afraid to scrap and start over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stalled on a story just because I was too stubborn to admit that a portion of what I’d already written wasn’t working and that I needed to redo it, or because I was clinging to the presence of one good line in an otherwise crappy passage as a reason to keep it, even when it was hurting the story. Never be afraid to delete.

2. You can’t publish what you don’t complete. Writing is intensely psychological: you have to be egotistical enough to publish, but humble enough to accept critique; confident enough to endure criticism, but flexible enough to learn from it. That being so, it’s easy to psyche yourself out with overthinking whether or not something is good enough, whatever that means - and while I’ve said you shouldn’t be afraid to delete, the necessary corollary of that is not being afraid to persist, or to start again. You can’t publish a story you don’t complete, so while you’re writing, don’t worry about what other people will think: write for yourself foremost, for your own enjoyment, and take it one chapter, or paragraph, at a time.

3. Pay close attention to conversational trees; that is, to the flow of dialogue. This might seem like an incongruous piece of advice, but bear with me: even those of us who read heavily have still generally grown up with TV and film as our primary mode of engagement with storytelling, and while there are heaps of great lessons to be learned from them, it’s also important to acknowledge that there are fundamental structural differences to how stories are told across different forms of media. In addition to books, films and TV, I grew up listening to a lot of radio shows and watching a lot of theatre, which has - I think - been enormously helpful to me as a writer; not just because it exposed me to different types of stories, but because radio and theatre are two mediums in which dialogue is continuous.

In TV and film, you can cut instantly between scenes with ease, which means you can use snippets of dialogue without having to show how the conversation evolves and changes. In books, you can do both, but because a lot of new writers, either consciously or unconsciously, take a lot of learned cues from TV scripting, it’s easy to miss opportunities for character development and plot progression by assuming that conversations have to be short, pithy and banter-laden, rather than more naturalistic, rambling, or conducted with pauses while the action moves on. And when you’re paying attention to conversational trees, you’ll notice that even a slight word change can completely alter the way a conversation progresses, which can have a huge impact on how you tighten or lengthen a scene.

For instance: imagine two people are having a conversation about how the dog escaped from the yard. If Person A says ‘Did you leave the gate open?’, Person B can reply with a yes or no answer, or outrage that person A would even ask them that; but if Person A says ‘Why was the gate open?’, this can lead to a whole different set of speculative answers. This might seem like a small, pedantic detail, but trust me: when you’re trying to use dialogue to convey information, develop character and move the action along all at once, even small changes to how questions are asked, or a different choice of where to end a discussion, can have an enormous impact on the story. Dialogue is a central expression of character, and whereas visual mediums can rely on an actor’s cues and interpretation to convey meaning, in books, you have to work harder; cutting dialogue short might get you some good banter, which is always fun, but it means you have to work harder for characterisation in other ways, and at the end of the day, characters are what drive the story.

So: focus on what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, why they’re saying it, who they’re saying it to, and under what auspices. Pay attention to word choice, inflection and syntax. On screen, you can give everyone similarly witty dialogue and the fact that the actors have different voices and physical mannerisms will aid in individual characterisation; on page, you need to work harder to make the reader hear different voices in their heads. Fanfiction is a great way to learn to do this, because you already have a sampler for the different spoken mannerisms of individual characters to draw from; in Supernatural, Gabriel is distinct from Crowley is distinct from Dean, and on page, absent their accents, that should still be apparent from dialogue.

And WOW that turned into a long answer. Um. Hope that helps, and thanks for reading!   

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