How I Words.

[queenlua]

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

These are all taken from my first notes file for "White LIke Bone," and like all my notes/proto-drafts, it is very stream-of-consciousness:

crossing the desert
crossroads
cross your heart

could make nailah kind of a bitch: oblivious to volug's private feelings
        maybe volug tried once to be king?

I jotted down a couple potential titles, and pretty much from the get-go, I knew the story was going to be, in part, about Nailah accidentally-being-a-bit-of-a-bitch. "Volug was once a competitor for the crown" is an interesting idea—though it didn't really fit with my current headacanon-personality-stuff related to Volug.

Volug, my loyal servant

nailah pushing him to learn the common language

rafiel & nailah talk common to each other

Early scene ideas. If I'd had more space, I probably would've ended up playing this theme more—where Nailah and Rafiel chat to each other in the common tongue, and Volug gets annoyed at the two of them, or something.

told her he would follow her anywhere—but through the desert of death?
        sees their relationship as unequal and awkward

When Nailah made her decisions, she announced them as if they were obvious, as if they were foregone conclusions. ___. But when she came to him announcing they would be traversing the Desert of Death—why, even he was forced to balk.

"We cannot," ___. "No one has ever crossed and lived to tell of it."

"Oh, don't tell me you're frightened, Volug," ___. "And besides. Rafiel's home is there."

An early version of scene one, ohey! This is really common in my proto-drafts and drafts, these little pseudo-scenes with giant "__"s and random scraps of dialogue—often, dialogue is the first thing I write, and I build the scene around that. (I suspect this may be a holdover from my play-by-post roleplaying days; the convention was that speech got boldfaced, and I often suspected that the boldfaced dialogue was the only part you could guarantee that your roleplaying partner(s) would read, so I got in the habit of writing that first.)

focus on preparations for leaving?
focus on journey?
do that dippy flashback thing that i do in every damn short story i write?
        is the conflict rafiel/volug?
        or is it nailah/volug?
        or is it nailah/volug masquerading as rafiel/volug -> probably this one

Hey, there's step three in my story-writing algorithm, kinda—at this point, I already knew my ideas were pretty scattered, and I was hoping that by picking a conflict/focal point/whatever, I would have a better idea of what scenes I should be trying to write. (Incidentally, I actually struggled with this a bit throughout the piece—I knew Volug's affection for Nailah was going to be important, but I was afraid that reading one-sided romance into their relationship was going to seem excessive or dumb or something, so I soft-pedaled that tension in favor of other, more random concerns. Post-betaing, focusing more on the Volug/Nailah thing made my story more focused and better and such.)

being around rafiel makes volug… anxious, since he's brittle and stuff

who's the upstart back in hatari?¹
        …damnit need a cool name
                todo: seriously write that name generator²
                it's just obnoxious at this point

1. Cool idea I was toying with: when Nailah announced she was leaving Hatari to cross a desert of *death*, who the hell did she leave in charge? And did anyone honestly think she was going to come back alive? I had some scenes related to this in my earlier drafts, but I had to cut more and more as I went along, since it wasn't the main focus of the fic, until it was cut entirely. (At some point, I'd like to write a story where Nailah comes back and has to reclaim her kingdom—it'll be like how Frodo et al kicked Saruman out of the shire at the end of LotR; it'll be great I promise!)

2. If you ever wonder "hey why doesn't Lua actually seem to finish any of the shit she talks about," this is why; I can't even get two pages into proto-drafting without thinking about programming (and similarly I can't get a hundred lines into a program without thinking about writing, sobbu)

maybe volug gets upset when it seems like they're planning to stay in tellius longer than he thought?

(aside: my hobby: making a huge fuss over obscure bit characters)

oooooor maybe volug comes to some better understanding of rafiel

oooooor maybe nailah realizes she's being a bit unfair to volug
        though that would require introspection
        and nailah's not good at that.
        hrm.

* * *

"He is such an odd heron." "I haven't even seen him fly."

"Volug," __.

* * *

It wasn't for him to go snuffling about in the queen's business.

"We're crossing the desert."

"Which one?"

"That one," she said, gesturing vaguely west ___.

"The Desert of Death?" "____."

rehan, regan, amarn, hassan, aatmik, nahuel, aanga, arya, jada, sahar

* * *

"The Queen says you come from another nation." ___. "What is it like, there?"

Volug was confused. How could anyone let themselves be enslaved? How could anyone allow another to be enslaved?

"What good are you?" "To them, I mean. ___."

* * *

META
1. An irksome thing. (Rafiel's magic teleportation go)
2. An interesting thing. (Nailah's comment about fated betrayal)
3. Extrapolating (Volug's personality, relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/605/)

* * *

In Hatari there is a saying: ___ dread ___.
        ___those who fear defeat are sure to be defeated___
        ___fear is the root of unwisdom___
        ___always do what you are afraid to do___
        ___fear breeds fear___
        ___some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away__

dread is sister to cowardice

Those afraid to run are as cowardly as those afraid to fight.

* * *

Volug thinks it won't be there: the water, the shelter.

"Volug," "what happened there? Where did your courage go?"

And there's yet another direction I didn't go in. I thought about making the story about Volug increasingly doubting Nailah's wisdom and competence, and doubting Rafiel's powers. He'd get more and more nag-y about how they need to turn back, and Nailah would start to get concerned about how "cowardly" Volug was acting, culminating in some dramatic scene where Volug loses his nerve in a big, dramatic way, and Nailah asks him "where did your courage go?" ...cool idea for a direction, even if I didn't end up going that way!

Oh, and: I don't write things very in order. At all. For example, here's the outline for "White Like Bone" when I was partway done with it:

Queen Nailah certainties	95% done
He'd been with Nailah then	95% done
being near rafiel made him anxious	not very done
Asmund	80% done
nailah/rafiel cuddling	40% done
slavers attack!	40% done
rafiel/volug convo 1	50% done
"will you take him to the birds"	70% done
rafiel/volug convo 2	not very done

I generally have both my story and an outline open when I'm writing; I refer to this outline constantly to figure out where I'm headed, if there needs to be more scenes added, scenes cut, etc etc. Once I get a decent way along writing, I usually start adding those "% done" totals by every scene, so I can keep track of what needs to get worked on.

Delicately, Madly

"Delicately, Madly" is too recent a work for me to comment intelligibly upon. But here's a couple points anyway:

• My biggest fear was writing a story whose whole point was "poor reyson, laguz slavery sucks, sad sad sad." And in an early iteration, it was definitely leaning in that direction—if you don't mind ignoring some canon, it doesn't take much creativity to imagine creepy/bad shit that could happen to Reyson at the hands of Oliver and all his creepy noble buddies. But that's not a story: there's no real conflict, and nothing much changes, beyond Reyson breaking under a lot of very depressing pressure. So I took the time to sit down and think about what I wanted the central tension to be (algorithm step three!), and I noticed a lot of the language I was using hinted at the tenuous relationship Reyson has with his own body, and to a lesser extent, Reyson's relationship with Tibarn and the hawks. That's a story—Reyson's relationship with his body can be developed, changed, and brought to a climax in a way that resembles a plot arc, in a way that "sad sad sadness" can't be. So, if I managed to transcend "laguz slavery is bad mkay," then I count the story at least something of a success.


• This story took a while to write—it started in June, and I hacked on it on-and-off until I finished the thing in a frenzied week at the beginning of September. And, without going into too many details, suffice to say that I was dealing with a lot of personal issues and pressures during the period I was writing this story—and the most intense periods of writing corresponded with the most intense pressure in my life. I'll be curious to look back in a few months and see if that weird, extraneous emotional component affected the writing in any noticeable way. (Probably not, truth be told—I tend to take a pretty cerebral approach to my writing, if that wasn't already obvious—but it did make the process of writing that story feel tangibly different.)