ask the author

[fahye]

Last seen at schiarire's:

I want to do a creative/meta meme but there is nothing going around, and it's not like I have that much fic to be asked about*. But ask me writing questions anyway?

*I had to remove that part, it is a dirty dirty lie where I am concerned.

'Writing questions' can mean pretty much anything you want it to mean, my sweets. I have a lot of work to do tonight and I'm going to need something to do in my breaks.

Comments

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

HARDEST CHARACTER TO INHABIT

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Scrolling back through all my fics, there were a lot that my brain wanted to put, but then I kept remembering that they were actually disturbingly easy. Eg. writing 'Ask Me How' was horribly like pulling teeth, but it WASN'T because I find Dexter hard to inhabit; actually I find him easy. I find the Master easy. I find Kabuto easy. BASICALLY, I WRITE THE PEOPLE I FIND EASY.

So what I'm going to have to go with is Will Turner. Because that fic was not hard to write, but I never ever felt quite like I'd managed to pin the character down. I felt like I was taking refuge in nice prose because he kept slipping out of my headspace.

And I have the same problem with Naruto, actually. I've made my peace with Sasuke (after 'Anchored in Dust', we have declared a truce) and Sakura was always as easy as breathing, but I still fight to keep any kind of coherency in Naruto's POV voice. Which is why I haven't used it since 'The Listening Sky', except for the brief segment in 'Solfege'.

RP-wise, I find Kenneth the hardest to inhabit, but that's probably because I never played him enough to get to know him. Large parts of him are still a mystery to me.

[schiarire.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you find Naruto difficult to write. I can see that. I think one issue maybe is that main characters tend to be ... a bit empty? Not that Naruto is empty but, I don't know.

List three of your favorite interpersonal dynamics!

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Ooh.

1) Unspoken mutual trust! I love love LOVE dynamics that are about trusting the other person with your life, even if your surface interactions are all about mild conflict. This is what hooked me into Kara/Lee and Booth/Brennan, even though the latter is less conflict-driven on a daily basis, and it's what I'm enjoying about Arthur/Merlin. Let's say I like dynamics that are mostly bickering but with occasional serious moments of 'I trust this person completely'.

2) Created families. Bulletproof. This is what I love about fictions which concentrate on small ensembles or small sub-groups of an ensemble; the slow development of dependence and protectiveness and a family dynamic.

2a) Siblings protecting each other!

3) I have a thing about loyalty to a mentor figure, actually. I am mostly very ambivalent towards Harry Potter as a character, but I'm Dumbledore's man hit me pretty hard. I find student-mentor dynamics to be interesting.

[ariastar.livejournal.com]

HOW DO YOU TITLE THINGS. That is my question. Because I am horrible at titling things ever and sit in agonies over it, and I would be equally pleased with [a] a reasonable answer or [b] hair-tearing solidarity.

I am sure I have many other writing questions for you, but my brain is melting out my ears from the sheer volume of Lewis reading I had today, so I will have to ask them later.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha. There is no one answer to this. Sometimes I know the titles to things almost immediately, sometimes I have titles SITTING AROUND waiting for fics ('The Holes in the Ground' was one of these -- I found the poem and knew I wanted to build a fic around it, but I had to wait for the right idea to come along), sometimes they appear during the writing process ('Twelve Pater Nosters'), and sometimes I find myself on lyrics/poetry websites at 2am frantically skimming for something vaguely pretty.

My titles are usually obscure single words, or snippets from a quote or a poem or a song. Or a scientific concept. But I try to avoid that last because it is way too much fun :D

Hair-pulling happens, believe me. It took me FOREVER to find a title for the current Merlin AU, but I eventually found it by reading websites of quotes pertaining to travel. Themed quote sites are often really handy if you don't want to go totally obscure.

[ariastar.livejournal.com]

YES. Like, I have a Martha/Rose fic that I have not yet bothered writing but that I love purely on the basis that it's called The Care and Feeding of Your Atomic Bomb. Why? WHO KNOWS.

And then there is the Fraser/Ray/Ray, which only got a title yesterday and is apparently called Magnetic, but it's actually called that not because of a recurrent theme of Ray rambling about things being magnetic (...although that is a theme, entirely to my bewilderment) but because it's part of a line from Carl Sandburg's Chicago, and ... yes.

By which I mean: I am glad to hear we still have the brainshare, and also unless it is a sekrit I would love to hear the title of the Merlin AU.

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

Why do you write the endings so early?

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Basically, because I absolutely must know where I'm going before I write the journey. The plot might jump around a bit (if there is a plot, which is...sadly infrequent) but I always head into any story knowing exactly where I want my characters to end up both physically and in terms of any emotinal/relationship changes they may go through. And having the ending written means that I feel less like I'm flailing around without a compass when the middle section is being problematic, which it always does.

If the fic is more abstract, I might wait a bit and let the ending emerge as a way of tying up threads of reference or metaphor, but it always makes itself known pretty early in the writing process.

[girl-wonder.livejournal.com]

ohh, good answer, I like. :)

[areyoumymemmy.livejournal.com]

Do you ever think consciously about your own style of writing, or is it something that just sort of happened?

[fahye.livejournal.com]

Hmm. THIS IS HARD. There have been a few periods in my life where I have made a very deliberate, furious effort to improve my writing in a particular direction, usually because of being impressed by someone or something. Actually, one of these was a deliberate effort to improve my RP, which bled over into my prose remarkably.

These days I think about it at the beginning of any given story, because I have a few different 'settings'; very lyrical, very clinical, plot-and-dialogue-with-occasional-humorous-or-metaphorical-bits, and what I suppose is my general style (a more natural-feeling combination of everything). I probably don't alter my style to suit a character's voice as much as I should, sometimes, but usually me expressing things the way I want them to be expressed is more important than worrying about if a person would have that word in their vocabulary.

Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?

[lilith-lessfair.livejournal.com]

And, following that question, how do you write? I assume that endings come early, but do you tend to write everything out as quickly as possible and revise later or do you work in more of a piecemeal fashion, writing bits as they come to you? Or does it depend on the particular fic, particular 'verse, or particular character?

[fahye.livejournal.com]

I am definitely, definitely a piecemeal person. I am starting to make an effort when it comes to writing loosely start-to-finish, but it's never quite that simple. If any bit pops into my head and I like it, no matter where it occurs, I will write it. Any given WIP is a mess of disconnected fragments with frantic dot point reminders to myself, or half-sentences that I thought sounded pretty, filling up the white space in between. This process has very little to do with fandom or character; it's just me.

Occasionally I'll get lucky and I'll be able to write something quickly, in which case it tends to me more linear, but this is rare.

I also have a bad habit of editing as I go, especially when I am trying to put off writing new bits, such that by the time I finish a story it usually only needs a final slow read-through to check for typos or any plot holes I might have missed. I try to leave a sleep between finishing something and coming back for the final edit, but usually by the time I finish I am SO SICK of the thing that I just want it posted and out of my hair.

I actually have very little patience for exhaustive editing, and tend to trust my first instincts, especially because I spend a lot of time tweaking sentences before moving on if I don't like them to begin with. If I ever start writing long original fiction, my editor is going to DETEST me.

Oh, and I don't use betas. As a general rule. I show snippets to people whose opinions I trust, as I go, but unless I am desperately unsure about characterisation or I am too braindead to do my own checking for typos, I don't send the finished product to anyone before posting.

[lilith-lessfair.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm pulling this out from some of the other questions; when you start to write a fic, do you find that you are driven more by a theme relating to the 'verse in which you are writing or that you are driving more by the need to explore a particular character(s) and/or their relationships. I suppose, however, that those aren't mutually exclusive by any means.

[platypusnoises.livejournal.com]

This is so interesting. I keep refreshing it to read new q&a's.

How do you write? Personally, I rarely write everything chronologically. I get flashes of random scenes in my head and then try to link them together. I also tweak with words an awful lot. A sentence that I write might be perfectly adequate but there is always one word that I have to sit and think of synonyms for awhile before I come to the perfect iteration of that sentence. So, I guess I'm asking more about certain ticks you notice in your writing rather than your process, exactly.

[platypusnoises.livejournal.com]

whoops. guess i was beaten to it... overthought it, ha.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

That's okay! Is there anything else you want to ask about, either generally or specifically? I can talk about particular fics if you like.

[lilith-lessfair.livejournal.com]

Hardly. I think you posed the question in a much more interesting way and hit on something I hadn't thought to ask.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

I've addressed the 'how I write' above, but the thing about certain ticks is interesting. One of the big ones for me is the sound/rhythm of a line; I am always hearing the sentences I write aloud, more or less, and so I can usually tell if the rhythm is off.

For example, the closing line to the fic I'm writing now is annoying me because it's: She says, "We have a job offer for you."

Now, I don't like the rhythm of that as a closing line. I would prefer: She says, "We want to offer you a job." because the emphasis is on the last syllable, and that sounds better, more final. However, there's a slight shift of meaning between the two versions; in the first, the power belongs to the speaker, they have something, it's theirs. In the second, the listener has the power, because what the speaker has is a desire to offer something. Er. If that makes any sense to anyone not me, which I am dubious about.

I have no idea at this stage whether the meaning or the rhythm will win the war. Ideally I'll find a new way of putting it that is completely different.

So...yeah, both subtle meaning of words/arrangements of words, and their sounds, are very important to me, and I will get stuck when something isn't exactly as I want it to be.

[lilith-lessfair.livejournal.com]

Yes, it does make a good deal of sense; there is, if not a world, a good deal of difference in the meanings of those two lines and also in what the word choice suggests about the power relationships between the speaker and the person to whom the offer is directed. And, yeah, I've spent far too long tweaking sentences because they didn't have the right beat or sound; that tends to be how I figure out a character's voice, based on the sound and cadence.

[fireflower314.livejournal.com]

I can't think of any new questions, but I wanted to comment that I've read through everything and been fascinated by the answers- and also that it seems to me that if you compiled a lot of these questions together you'd have a pretty decent writing meme.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

DID YOU KNOW that Polaris and Aria took over for you as William de Worde and Otto? This was much nicer when I thought Aria had been William de Worde and that was totally spooky and synchronous, but still!

Punctuation tics? Do you ellipse more or dash more or abuse ampersands or what?

Talk to me about how Maya was an influence on your writing please! Because I'm dealing with her literary influence and how I can never talk about it to anyone even as we speak.

[fahye.livejournal.com]

See, even before I ever talked to either of them I was aware, vaguely, of the fact that they were people who took over in the RP...but by the time I came to actually get to know them, that seemed SO long ago that it never really entered my mind. I did know. But it was buried pretty deep.

I ellipse a lot less than I used to, I use dashes and semicolons and colons a lot MORE than I used to and I think I'm a bit addicted. I love brackets (sorry, parentheses) but try not to overuse them. I will only use ampersands if I'm writing poetry ot very, very stylised prose.

I don't know if she has actually been a huge influence on my writing per se, but she showed me that it was possible to be screamingly funny AND to flesh out characters fully and have deep themes/dark plots/etc. in the same story. I will never be as funny as her but damn, I wish I could be.

[nextian.livejournal.com]

I love () so much but I tend to edit most of them out -- but then I always miss one. It was pretty much a commonplace in my writing workshops to get "Emma, you can't just have one set of parentheses" and then I would cry.

Hahah, on her goodbye post I sent her this long, sad, maudlin comment that was basically like "You invented subtext in my head," because: YES what you said.