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

[malenkayacherepakha]

Anything over 20k is long to me, I'm envisaging these ones as being somewhere between 20 and 50k, but I find it really hard to judge fic length before I start writing. I'm certainly not planning a 100k+ epic!

One of them doesn't need to be super long - I guess the actual plot will take place over a couple of months, 6 months max, and a lot of that time doesn't need to be fully written out. The other fic feels like it could go longer, even though it has less of a formed plot in my head, just because it has the potential for some in depth character exploration and world building, which I haven't yet had the chance to do much of so I'd like to try and do it properly.