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

[sdk]

I haven't written a TON of long fic, though I'd like to do more in the future. But what I've done with my longest ones is something along these lines. I write in Scrivener, and it helps to have access to multiple documents in one program window. So I create a folder for the fic idea, and then I usually have three documents for it. The first one I just write the general idea down, and pretty much in a stream of consciousness way, just write anything and everything I can think of. As I write about the idea, usually more ideas come to me for it, and I pretty much just ramble until I'm out of steam.

Then I start a second document for a more streamlined outline. It's still pretty rough -- my outlines never look like a formal outline or anything, but it's basically organizing my first document into something more coherent. Making sure I have an arc for the story and figuring out how to get to where I want to end up. It's usually broken up into scenes and I will stick bits of dialogue into the outline or any little details that come to me that I don't want to forget while I'm actually writing.

The third document is for the first/rough draft. I start writing, and refer back to the outline and general notes when I need to. Usually once I start writing, things in the outline will change. I'll get new ideas and I'll have to go rework the arc or add in scenes or move them around, etc. But I like having the separate docs to do that in. If I get a random idea while writing but I don't know where it will go, I'll stick it in the first messy doc. Any research or stuff I need to look up in canon, etc., goes in that first doc too.

I tend to write chronologically unless I know I'm going to be writing something that skips around in time. Usually I end up writing in the order that the scenes are laid out in the fic though in that case. So it's always from beginning to end.

Even for shorter fics, I usually have at least two docs. One for the messy ideas and random thoughts and snippets of dialogue etc. And then one for the actual draft. I think the only time I haven't done something like that is for drabbles and really short ficlets. But otherwise, I always use at least two docs.

I'm curious to see how you decide to approach your long fics! I do find people's writing processes fascinating and am always looking for things to try myself too.

[malenkayacherepakha]

Scrivener seems really useful for longer fics, the ability to have those multiple documents sounds really helpful. I guess there's nothing stopping me recreating similar documents in gdocs though.

For my erised I ended up creating a spreadsheet with each scene numbered, a bit of info about the vague events of that scene, and a guesstimated word count. I'd never outlined that way before but because I didn't have much time I needed to know exactly where I was going so when I had time to write I could just sit down and write, rather than faff around thinking about what the next scene would be. I might try mixing that approach with yours, I like the idea of the multiple docs. I especially think that first stream of consciousness doc might help me right now, when I just need to get started.