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

[magpie_fngrl]

My process is very different to most commenters or most writers really: I outline nothing. Outlines have been detrimental to me in the past, and it was through writing fanfic that I learned what my process was.

So, as a pantser or discovery writer as we're called, I have an idea, a mood, a visual, sometimes a sentence and... I start writing with no idea (or only a vague idea) of where it's all going. The crucial thing for me is to get the beginning right. I'll revise and often completely rewrite the first chapter/scene until I feel I've got it right, and once I do, I have my plot. It's all in there.

In Hush Darling, for instance, the first part gave me the character goal, the obstacles, the stakes, the antagonist and a ticking clock. All I needed to do was just keep writing. But I'd rewritten a couple of versions of that first scene until I got to the right one.

In dirtynumbangelboy, I wrote a calendar on paper, which I do with longer works to see whether it's been three days or three weeks since something happened, and I'd written a list of date ideas but not in order, I just wanted to have a pool of suggestions to draw from. In that case I had a song as inspiration and a mood and the whole fake dating trope, and I needed no other planning for 39k.

In the Miseducation, I basically wrote all 37k with no planning at all. I got the first chapter and the voice right, I came up with community service in Muggle London (that wasn't an idea I had before I started writing), and then the rest came to me as I wrote and researched more about London in that time period.

It might sound easy (it's definitely intuitive), but it does require a helluva lot of rewriting and revisions. I usually loop back every a few thousand words and reread what I've written and edit it as I go along. What always happens is that I've got half a fic written/edited/polished to death, and then the rest of it isn't even drafted lol. It used to be scary, but now I know it's part of my process, and I tell myself to trust my brain. It means that when I finish the draft, it's the final draft in terms of big changes. I then reread a million times and edit prose, flesh things out if necessary, cut redundancies (I'm a bit cutter), and check pacing.

As for plotting, when I get to the end of a scene, I ask simply: what happens next? How does the character feel now about this? What's their reaction? How can I make things worse for her?

Idk if this was at all helpful as it's a very idiosyncratic way of writing but I'd say that a final bit of advice is to spend some time before writing researching stuff. Like, for Hush Darling I researched incubus lore, I looked at paintings of Mora and Incubi, I skimmed through poems about it, I looked at kintsugi ceramics bc it was part of the fic, I read passages from fave books with the same mood I was going for (this helps a great deal!!), I listened to songs trying to find one to fit that mood etc. It sounds like a waste of time, but I've come to the realisation that it isn't (unless, of course, you use the research time to avoid writing, in which case it is procrastination).

[malenkayacherepakha]

This is SO interesting, it's so different to the processes I've heard other writers describe. It's interesting too that it's so important for that first chapter/scene to be right - it makes total sense but I'd never thought of it.

So far I've been much more of an outliner, but I'm tempted to try this technique on one of my fic ideas. One of the ideas doesn't really have a plot yet, it's more of an idea, a mood like you describe, so maybe it lends itself more to just writing and seeing where the story takes me. I still haven't yet figured out how to even get Draco into it haha so I've got stuck while outlining it! So maybe I just need to skip the outline entirely and see where he naturally pops up.