How I Words.

Fandom secret: a large part of my motivation to start writing fanfic was simply to force myself to finish a lot of stories. Prior to my fandom debut, I'd written very little for about two or three years, and it occurred to me that, while I had lots of half-finished stories lying around, I had very few actually-finished stories lying around, and I didn't feel like I had a great grasp on how I could brainstorm, outline, and produce something coherent when I did come up with something I wanted to write.

So, thoughtdump on what I've learned about my writing process so far!

Lua's General Algorithm for Story-Writing

1. Have a vague idea for a character or plot point you'd like to write.


2. Write down basically all the possible scenes/ideas/etc you have that are related to that character or plot point.


3. Figure out what the "central tension" is going to be.


4. Write down a bunch of scenes that could plausibly be involved in that central tension.


5. Write these scenes and awkwardly mash them together until coherency happens!

I've subconsciously followed some version of this algorithm for most everything from Remnants of Restoration chapter two onward; I have no idea if it is similar to or different from most folks' writing processes. It's hard for me to "just write" before I have something resembling an outline, and when I'm outlining, I make some effort to make sure that every scene goes toward developing whatever the central tension is (to the point where I'll sometimes make notes in my outline that explicitly describe the point of the scene: "this scene develops Volug's affection for Nailah," "this scene introduces a frightening, previously unknown aspect of Tellius," etc).

You can sort of see the first few steps of this process in the earliest notes I have for "White Like Bone":

( White Like Bone (long) )

( Delicately, Madly )