I’m sick, it’s NaNo so I will laughingly call it the NaNo plague but right now it’s just a really nasty sore/swollen throat. I’m procrastinating on writing so I figured I would ask myself some of those questions from earlier because why not? It’s all good fun.
Feel free to ask me any others if you are curious 🙂
H: How would you describe your style?
I write third person and I’m most at home with an ensemble cast. I like to be able to move between plot and subplot, and have a few different POV characters, so that I can tell the story from multiple angles.
K: What’s the angstiest idea you’ve ever come up with?
Warning Major Character Death!
Basically Rumple wakes Belle with true loves kiss and that breaks the curse of the dark one, rendering him powerless. A short time later Hook finds out, perhaps from Henry as the author, that Rumple threw Milah into the river of lost souls. Rumple is just crossing the street when Hook kills him. Emma and the rest of the ‘heroes’ say that Rumple had it coming, no matter that he was powerless now and vulnerable, it was justice not murder.
Anyway, Belle has their child and when it’s just a few months old Storybrooke is hit by disaster – again! Belle goes to help the ‘heroes’ defend the town because it’s the right thing to do and she gets killed. That kid is now an orphan and only a few months old, nobody wants it because it’s the ‘spawn of the dark one’ but they do at least take it far enough over the townline to ensure that it’s found.
The kid grows up in the system and when they are 18 Henry finds them, because he thinks that the kid should know where they came from. However, that is some legacy. From the kids point of view, their dad was murdered before they were even born, and their mother cared more about playing hero than about them. They ask if their parents left them anything, that might sound mercenary but they have nothing right now. Henry admits that there was quite a sizable estate (Rumple had owned most of the town) but that there was now nothing left. No-one paid rent to a dead man and everything else had been ‘seized’.
I never know quite how to end this. I’m quite partial to time travel. With Wicked Witch 2.0 (Zelena’s daughter) kidnapping the kid to use as leverage against Rumple in the past (it’s a spare kid, could be an easy way out of that pesky second child contract) and takes the kids heart so if Rumple doesn’t play ball, can kill them at anytime. This also means that the town gets to see how screwed up the future could be and fix it and make for a happier ending (see I suck at angst, I like my happy endings) but to be honest, it could just end with Henry leaving the kid with knowledge of their origins.
That would be sad – no more happy endings.
O: How do you begin a story–with the plot, or the characters?
Characters – always! Characters drive plot. I mean there is obviously a certain amount of ‘both’ with this question because it’s “Put Character into Plot = see what happens” but it’s about the characters journey, it’s about their actions, their emotions.
If the plot doesn’t start and end with characters then I personally feel it’s quite shallow, there’s not much depth to it. Like watching a movie and it’s all special effects, there would be nothing memorable about it. When I watch something, for me to be a real fan, a character has to grab me.
P: Are you what George R. R. Martin would call an “architect” or a “gardener”? (How much do you plan in advance, versus letting the story unfold as you go?)
I do full scene by scene outlines of any long story. For a short oneshot, I just write and do scenes as I think of them, one after the other until the end. However, if something’s complex, I would write myself into a corner if I don’t plan it out.
That doesn’t mean I’m completely married to the outline. I can add in extra scenes if I realize that I need to do that when I start writing. Sometimes I combine scenes and of course for any serious work I do multiple drafts. That means after I’ve gone through and found all the problems, brainstormed all the fixes, I write up a new outline. That would have the new, changed, moved scenes in the right places.
I need my outline. It means when I sit down to work I always know what is coming next. I’m never sat there thinking “I don’t know what I’m writing.” because if I have questions about the plot and I don’t know them when I’m planning, I’m sure as hell not going to know them when I’m writing. Planning it all out, lets me solve problems before they become issues in the draft.
U: A pairing you might like to write for, but haven’t tried yet.
Swanfire! I love Neal and so it seems like a natural thing. I am hoping to include Swanfire as a side pairing in Nightwalkers. I haven’t planned that fic yet, though I’m itching to do so. I hope I can include it, if I can’t then I might need to think of a Swanfire oneshot or something.
