How do I even do this writing thing?

[malenkayacherepakha]

I've got a couple of long fic ideas rattling around in my brain - one Drarry and one Hinny. They've been lurking in the background for months now, and now that I'm free of fest deadlines, they're getting noisier and it feels like the right time to start exploring them further.

I'm excited about them, and they feel like they could turn into long fics, but as a result, I have absolutely no idea where to begin with planning them or writing them. I don't really have an established writing/planning process, and I've never written a fic like these ones before or written a longish fic without a fest deadline to make me get on with it as quickly as possible, so I'm way out of my depth.

So, I thought I'd turn to the experts and ask you all, how do you go about starting a big fic idea? Do you have any top tips? I love hearing about people's writing processes and all the different tricks we use to get the words out, so feel free to tell me as much or as little as you want!

Comments

[ravenclawsquill]

How exciting! If you want any support / cheerleading / commiserating while you write, hit me up!

I'm a mid-length fic writer (my longest is just shy of 50k) but I find anything longer than 5k needs a good outline. I tend to plan the order of all scenes and put the scene titles as headers in my gdoc, then tick them off as I write. Also, a separate planning doc with worldbuilding, character bios, etc, is a godsend when you're writing a longer fic, as upwards of 50 pages tends to crash gdocs.

Oh! And keep reminding yourself that there's nothing wrong with the odd short scene to describe passage of time". I got so stuck when writing The Full Four Seasons and almost abandoned it, until one of my betas said "you don't have to make every scene meaningful - fillers are fine". It was the best piece of writing advice I've ever received.

As for incentive to write without a deadline ... I have no idea, as I'm terrible at it. My long WIP is collecting dust without a deadline. I'm hoping posting a weekly word count update on DW will help to push it along. XD

[malenkayacherepakha]

I would LOVE support/cheerleading/commiserating, and of course am always happy to do the same for you! I'm going to try and get at least a vague outline/ramble written over the next few days and then might drop you a message once I actually have something tangible! Feel free to do the same whenever.

Definitely agree that anything more than 5k needs an outline - to be honest most of my fics, even short ficlets, have some form of outline, even if that's just a 'this is where the fic starts, this is where I want it to get to'. The worldbuilding/character doc is a great idea, it's details like that which I want to get in these fics more than I have in my previous ones. I guess really I'm a mid-length writer too - these fics will be like max 50k too, which seems long to me but isn't really in fandom!

That's so true, that was a very wise beta. One of my discord servers regularly talks about writing 'glue' which refers to those kind of scenes, the transition scenes etc which aren't the most exciting but need to be written, even if they are short.

I find chatting to people about my fics can help with the no deadline thing, as then you've kind of committed to doing it in a way, and I'm also thinking of just randomly setting myself one, to at least give me something to aim for. I'm sure weekly word counts here will help, and it gives people a chance to cheer you along which is really helpful.