lilolilyr asked:
4, 8, 18 for the fic ask? 🙂
Thank you!!! 🙂
4) How do you choose which fics to write?
When I was writing fanfic it was mostly by prioritising.
I’ve said before about my lists. I get an idea – it goes on the list. Say I get an idea for an event – it goes straight to the top, everything else has to wait. When I finish a WIP/there’s no events etc. I can then pick off the list. Invariably though what happens is I don’t pick the oldest idea, I usually pick whatever is newest because it still has the shiny quality. In some ways the list is a bit of a death sentence for ideas.
8) Post an out-of-context spoiler from a wip
I can’t really do this because I’m not writing fanfic anymore. Sorry. I post a line off my art the other day about “librarians win with what they know – not magic” but that’s all I have for you.
18) Do you enjoy research? Which fic of yours required the most research?
Answered here 🙂
You get two bonus questions because of the repeat/skip 🙂
3) Do you share your fic ideas, or do you keep them to yourself?
This is tricky. There is honestly nothing I like more than talking about my ideas. I can exhaust anyone and everyone. I remember back in the day when we did TMI Tuesday I used to be desperate for people to ask me. I would try and bait the question sometimes. It was probably kinda attention seeking and I should be more sorry than I am. I don’t know if this also tied into how I always feel like an outsider. Although I shouldn’t be claiming I feel invisible when I’ve had so many wonderful asks lately (I seriously do appreciate you guys so much).
The trouble is though, what happens if you never get round to writing the idea? Having talked about it, that feels a bit like a promise made, and a debt unpaid. It’s never my intention to tease. I just genuinely love my ideas and wish I could will them into existence. I want to read them!
All of this is about fanfic ^^ and I mostly don’t talk about my doomed ideas anymore. Sometimes I’ll make a reference because I’m nostalgic, because I wish I had got round to writing it. Also because I wish it could live somewhere other than in my head.
For my original novels I’ll make vague references sometimes, and I would love to talk about them, but I’m hesitant to share. I’m protective I guess.
24) How do you choose whose POV to write in?
(in which I apparently have a lot to say)
Ah POV. AO3 will show a clear divide. Probably most of my Once stuff was back before I trained myself out of ‘head hopping’. It’s… can I say frowned upon in original writing? I don’t want to sound judgemental. Having a clear POV and not shifting within a scene, is recommended best practice, put it that way.
Anyway, initially once I stopped I found it very confining. I see stories in my head like they are TV episodes. If there are multiple characters in the scene, then each has a perspective and sometimes with conflict I wanted to see all of those sides. But I couldn’t with maintaining POV.
Except you can.
It’s magic that I have only just discovered (thank you to the ridiculous number of writing craft books I got last summer). So you are in the head of Character A who is talking with Character B. Now Character A is going to be an unreliable narrator because what they see is flavoured by their perspective. So they can observe that Character B is frowning, and distracted looking out the window rather than at them, and they think they sound terse. So Character A concludes that they are mad at them about X that happened earlier BUT compare those noticed cues with the words that Character B chooses. Perhaps an off-hand mention that the post is late today. You can make enough suggestions that perhaps Character B has something else going on.
Next scene the post drops on the mat and Character B is about to hurl as they sort through the letters, and it becomes clear what their POV was in the previous scene. You don’t need to recap and have Character B think over the past scene to do their thoughts on it (I was terrible for this when I first stopped headhopping). The reader is smart and you can infer a LOT.
As for choosing what POV to go with, a few factors play in. First does the character have a unique take on the scene? Something that can’t be inferred so easily. What about the surrounding scenes? As the example I just made up above, by switching POV in the next scene you can add depth. So there’s balance to consider.
If a character is a POV, generally speaking they are a main character and they will have POV given to them more than once in the story. Now this isn’t always true because POV is a technique and you can play with it. Also I just realised I’m making assumptions about the POV being limited, and of course you can do omniscient narrator and the like but I don’t personally. A good rule of thumb though is that readers will tend to bond with POV characters more (makes sense, we’ve been in their head, it’s a closer relationship), hence the number of POV’s in a story should be limited, and the characters need to prove they are worthy of getting a POV.
When writing a romance it’s quite common to split POV in half between the couple. I have to be honest when writing any of my fanfic I never counted scenes to make sure the division was equal. POV is something I tend to assign by feel. I want to make sure the pacing is correct. That a character doesn’t get forgotten in say the back half of the story (this is especially important when the POV shifts due to subplots).
Anyway yeah basically I pick the POV based on who I think we need to hear from at that point in the story.