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Process Fest: Day 2
Dec. 4th, 2013 08:37 amWhere do you start?
What's your first spark of inspiration? What makes you decide to work on a new project? What's your first step? Is it always the same or does your method change? How do you begin when you create?
My stories, generally, start one of two ways - a dream or daydream I had happens to make a wonderful story and then I go from there or I get a prompt and I go from there. The one that happens most of the time is the first one, because I have an overactive imagination that loves to throw stories at me when I'm sleeping.
So then I have to work out how to get it from being a dream to actually working on paper, which can be the easiest thing in the world to do or something that takes me hours, because I can't work out where to begin. A beginning is much harder when I've been prompted for some reason, probably because of the way I write. Once I wrote in order, mostly, but now I go from time period to time period, writing stories about people's pasts and futures, as well as AUs and crossovers, so it can be more difficult to work out where a story should fit in the timeline or which characters I should be writing about.
The first step is always to get some words down, otherwise I might end up forgetting what I was going to write. Fortunately this isn't something that happens very often because I have a good memory for stories I want to write (although my memory for other things is getting worse). Once I've got the words down and I know what the idea is then I aim to write 500 words, because then it's postable, but I might end up writing more than that, depending on how well the words are flowing. On a good day I can write between 6 and 10 thousand words - on a bad day I'll be lucky to manage a thousand.
What's your first spark of inspiration? What makes you decide to work on a new project? What's your first step? Is it always the same or does your method change? How do you begin when you create?
My stories, generally, start one of two ways - a dream or daydream I had happens to make a wonderful story and then I go from there or I get a prompt and I go from there. The one that happens most of the time is the first one, because I have an overactive imagination that loves to throw stories at me when I'm sleeping.
So then I have to work out how to get it from being a dream to actually working on paper, which can be the easiest thing in the world to do or something that takes me hours, because I can't work out where to begin. A beginning is much harder when I've been prompted for some reason, probably because of the way I write. Once I wrote in order, mostly, but now I go from time period to time period, writing stories about people's pasts and futures, as well as AUs and crossovers, so it can be more difficult to work out where a story should fit in the timeline or which characters I should be writing about.
The first step is always to get some words down, otherwise I might end up forgetting what I was going to write. Fortunately this isn't something that happens very often because I have a good memory for stories I want to write (although my memory for other things is getting worse). Once I've got the words down and I know what the idea is then I aim to write 500 words, because then it's postable, but I might end up writing more than that, depending on how well the words are flowing. On a good day I can write between 6 and 10 thousand words - on a bad day I'll be lucky to manage a thousand.
