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Q67: How do you get through the fire swamp?
A67: When I feel this way, especially if I feel like deleting an entire section or chapter, I get up and away. Go for a walk, if I can leave the house, or otherwise take a break from my writing. Then I do something useful like the dishes. If I have time to continue writing, I give myself a 15 minute window to write the scene I’ve been struggling with. Just bang it out and only look at that scene again in a week or so.
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Q66: What's the thing that you find super annoying about writing?
A66: Here are the top things that annoy me: 1. That my writing isn’t always able to capture what was/ is in my mind’s eye. 2. That the best ideas and wording often come to me when I’m driving and can’t pull over to write them down. When I do try to write them down, the words on the page never seem as good as how I imagined it in my head. 3. Being interrupted by life. 4. Pain in my hands after writing too much.
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Q65: What else counts as writing for you?
A65: Art, especially sketching story locations, research in particular maps and historical events during the period the story is set in. Or, in terms of my clexa wip, verifying canon events versus where my plots diverge from it.
However, I think it is important to mention that I have had to set boundaries for myself around how much time I spend on research, e.g., how much research do I actually need in order to write the story versus how much information am I taking in because I am curious.
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Q63: Are you more of a drabble/flash or a longfic/novel kind of writer?
A63: I am more of a drabble/ flash/ poem writer. BUT the ideas that came to me for my wips really deserve to be treated as a longfic/ novel. I guess that explains why I have difficulty sticking to a plot structure lol!
I’m skipping a series of @the-wip-project‘s prompts to land on this one:
Q60: How do you start your chapters? Do you start with dialogue? Why or why not?
A60: I’ve not really thought about this before but, on reviewing the two wips on currently focusing on, I rarely start chapters with dialogue. In the chapters I do, I use it to startle the reader as a character is being startled by whomever has just started talking to them.
Q56: What influenced you in a surprising way?
A56: This may sound odd but when I was in university and studying chemistry, full paragraphs or prose or full verses of poetry would pop into my brain. At the time, I interpreted this behaviour as my mind was tired of learning new things and, therefore, rebelled by outputting new things. Sort of an off gassing of creative thought.
A more recent influence is coding, in particular writing pseudo code to solve a problem. When I initially write down my wips’ notes, those notes have a strong resemblance to pseudo code.
of @the-wip-project‘s #100daysofwriting challenge.
Q52: Pick an idea and write a short "shopping list" of what will happen in the story.
A52: I did this but did not feel like sharing with you. Hope your ideas and shopping list are delicious!
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Q80: How do you feel about your old works? And bonus homework: say something nice about past-writer-you.
A80: Some are really good others not so great.
Bonus: Past writer me was prolific. Too bad I didn’t finish some of those stories!
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I’m actually very curious to read the other answers to this question.
Q51: Do you use tools for plotting and what are they?
A51: It’s not a tool, per se, but a method:
“Katytastic's 3 Act/ 9 Block/ 27 Chapter Outling Method!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe3eodLF_Uo
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Q50: What fic/story made you?
A50: it was not so much a fic/story that made me it was more of an experience. When I was a kid my family would take long road trips, e.g., eight hours, to the beach in the summer. Those trips were made pre cassette tapes. On those rides, I could read, fight with my siblings or stare out the window and make up stories. I started writing them down when I was a kid.
What made me think my stories were worthy of sharing or publishing when I was an adult was a wonderful girlfriend who encouraged me to send my stories out to anthologies.
of @the-wip-project‘s challenge.
Q49: How do you get yourself in the mood to write? Do you have a ritual?
A49: Trying to fall asleep... just kidding! That is often when ideas come to me, but I digress. To put myself in the mood I do have a ritual:
Decide what I want to write.
Clean for 15 minutes while listening to music from the era I’m writing in.
Write for 25 minutes.
Take a 5 minute break
Review, am I writing what I set out to write? If it is better and relevant, then continue otherwise go back to 3.
Write for 25 minutes.
Repeat as necessary until I’ve run out of time.
of @the-wip-project‘s challenge.
Q47: What kind is your favorite character to write?
A47: Happy cynic.
of @the-wip-project‘s challenge.
Q46: What does your editing/revision process look like?
A46: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. My former process was not working for me as I ended up with multiple drafts of the same scene. My current approach (and subject to change) is to write out the whole story then perform a series of editing pass throughs with specific intentions, e.g., plot structure, characters behave within character, believable science, doing rather than saying/explaining, appropriate tech/ fashion/ music per era, grammar and spelling, “awesome” eradication.
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Q45: Write five keywords that describe each of your WIPs
current original wip: grey, magnetic field, bioengineering, gluttony, charm
current clexa wip: horses, artificial intelligence, flashbacks, red, scorpion
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Q44: Share a cool phrase from a WIP.
A44: They wanted to eat me but not in the fun kind of way.
--
I realize that the purpose of the writing challenge was to write every day for a 100 days. Life, the universe and everything has rendered my schedule this summer very tight. But now I have time (guess who just got childcare?) and I like these questions.
of @the-wip-project‘s challenge.
Q43: How often to you switch WIPs and do you think that’s a good thing to do?
A43: I used to switch quite a bit. But this ended up in tons of notebooks of unfinished stories or redrafts of scenes I had already written down once as I could not find the first version of that scene. I’m the kind of person who reads one book at a time. Writing multiple wips at once can be good in terms of coming up with ideas. But if I’m avoiding writing a scene in one wip, writing for another wip becomes a form of procrastination for me.
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Q42: What’s an an old idea that you’ve discarded?
A42: Ooh so many! I was going to make the main character the owner of a company that was bought out. After the “merger” she realizes her *life’s work* is being used for corporate greed and subsequently gets booted out of the company. Not unrealistic but has been done before. I won’t be using it in my current wip.
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Q40: How do you start a new story?
A40: I start with the scene that the idea came to me with. I write out that scene as completely as possible. Afterwards, I re-read it and think of what is needed to make this scene make sense.
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Q39: What kind of traits make a character interesting?
A39: A character who is trying to be better ethically than how they had been brought up/ trained.
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Q38: What comes first, plot or characters?
A28: 100% characters. The plot is how they react and what changes them.
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Q37: Post your favorite line of dialogue that you’ve written recently.
A37:
“Do you remember, us? How hot we were for each other that we fucked all night?”
Who could forget? I sneaked a smile wile agreeing, “From sunset to dawn.”
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Q36: The relationships you write, what kind of power-dynamics do they tend to have?
A36: In a romantic pairing, one character is 100% smitten and the other is not. (Unfortunately, I experienced this quite a bit before I met someone who was equally into me as I am in them. I guess this trope is a bit of a loose tooth for me that I like to wiggle from time to time.) By the end of the story, though, this pairing is over.
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Q35: How do you describe sounds?
A35: There’s a lot of silence in my current wip. It’s a way to voice the loneliness the main character feels. Plus, most of the story takes place in winter in my home town where, at least during the era the story is set in, the accumulation of snow dampens all sounds.
You have given me something to think about, though. Will make sure that I don’t forget to describe sounds, or lack thereof, in my text.
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Q33: What kind of gestures are your characters often using?
A33: Dragging their hand through their hair to push it off their face, shrugs, eye rolls, putting their hands in their pockets to make fists during tense moments.
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Q22: What’s your favorite trope you’re not writing and why?
A22: Best friends to lovers. In my wip, the protagonist is pansexual whereas her bff is a gay man who comes out during the story. I want to show a healthy(ish) friendship between a man and a woman without sexual tension or romantic undertones.
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Q31: What’s a pet peeve you have, that you focus on to do differently in your own stories?
A31: A writing pet peeve that I see in other’s writing ... flipping back and forth between angst filled POVs. I do enjoy a well described scene with a smattering of angstful innner monologue but five paragraphs of back and forth inner thoughts that could be summarized in behaviours, distract me from the plot. I do my best to avoid this in my writing by replacing inner monologue with actions that will betray those thoughts.
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Q30: Did your main characters change as you wrote them? Was that the plan or did they surprise you?
A30: Yes, some of it was planned but there were details that did surprise me.
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Q29: What’s a common theme in your writing?
A29: Calm, quiet protagonist’s are a mess inside.
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Q28: Do you have an expression that you probably use too much in your writing?
A28: “Awesome”. It’s a term that became popular when I was a teenager, I overuse it to the point of the word losing it’s importance. I have an editing run for “use of awesome” specifically planned once I finish this draft.
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Q27: Use at least five adjectives to describe the environment in your WIP.
A27: dark, damp, cold, grey, and murky